Category:Written sources

Annals

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a set of annals initially compiled at the court of Alfred the Great in the late ninth century. This 'common stock' was continued and expanded at various times and places, up to 1154.

Anglo-Norman historians

The early twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury (c. 1095 – c. 1143) composed two significant works – the ‘Deeds of the Kings of the English’ and the ‘Deeds of the Bishops of the English’, as well as several saints’ lives. William was educated at Malmesbury Abbey in Wiltshire, where Æthelstan was buried; in addition to an evidently well-stocked library, William appears to have had access to otherwise lost material concerning Æthelstan, who was buried at Malmesbury.

Land ownership

Charters

Domesday Book

Two late tenth / early eleventh-century texts relating to landed obligations can be found through the Early English Laws project website [1]. Gerefa ("the Reeve") is a manual for an estate manager, while the Rectitudines Singularum Personarum ("On the Rights of Various People") set out the rights and responsibilities of various types of landholder. Exactly where these tracts were composed is debated (both Worcester and Bath have been proposed). The texts were translated into Latin c.1100 and survive in a single twelfth-century manuscript.