page_title: Anglo-Saxon charters
section_title: Wills
hierarchical_section_title: Anglo-Saxon charters / Charter forms / Wills
caption_attribution_description: English: Page from the will of Alfred the Great. The top part, above the 'I', describes the Witan's support of his case against his nephews. The will proper starts below the 'I'.
context_page_description: Anglo-Saxon charters are documents from the early medieval period in England, which typically made a grant of land, or recorded a privilege. The earliest surviving charters were drawn up in the 670s: the oldest surviving charters granted land to the Church, but from the eighth century, surviving charters were increasingly used to grant land to lay people.
  The term charter covers a range of written legal documentation including diplomas, writs and wills. A diploma was a royal charter that granted rights over land or other privileges by the king, whereas a writ was an instruction by the king which may have contained evidence of rights or privileges. Diplomas were usually written on parchment in Latin, but often contained sections in the vernacular, describing the bounds of estates, which often correspond closely to modern parish boundaries. The writ was authenticated by a seal and gradually replaced the diploma as evidence of land tenure during the late Anglo-Saxon and early Norman periods. Land held by virtue of a charter was known as bookland.
context_section_description: Anglo-Saxon wills were intended to make gifts of property (including land) after the writer's death, but they were not wills in the modern sense.
  Wills are rarer than writs. The first dedicated study, Anglo-Saxon Wills by Dorothy Whitelock was able to identify 39 documents. The number grew to 55 with publication of another 16 among the Anglo-Saxon Charters by Agnes Jane Robertson in 1939. Since 1939, contributions to the list were few and far between; in her 2011 Wills and Will-making in Anglo-Saxon England Linda Tollerton published the most up-to-date corpus, with 68 examples in total. The surviving documents are very unevenly distributed both in time and space: from the 9th century, for example, only 9 wills are known, and 6 of them are in  Canterbury. Not a single will from any period is known from further North than Burton upon Trent in Staffordshire. Furthermore, only 22 wills can be found in manuscripts written before 1066; originals are even rarer, as some, like those of Alfred the Great or Wulfric Spot, are known to be pre-Conquest copies, while still other may in fact be mere extracts or ancient forgeries.
  Only two wills of kings have been preserved, those of Alfred and Eadred, both in later copies. Anglo-Saxon women whose wills survive include Wynflæd (mother of Ælfgifu of Shaftesbury and grandmother of Kings Eadwig and Edgar), King Edmund I's second wife Æthelflæd and her sister Ælfflæd.
caption: Opening page of Alfred the Great's will drawn up circa 885 (11th-century copy)
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