The charters from the archive of St Augustine's Abbey, many very early indeed, provide crucial evidence about the history of the Anglo-Saxon church in Kent and the development of the documentary in process. A high proportion of the thirty-nine pre-Conquest charters which are edited in this volume, together with fourteen from another early foundation at Minster-in-Thanet, date from the seventh and eighth centuries.
The editor's Introduction sets the documents in their historical and diplomatic contexts and analyses the extent and nature of the contamination by later medieval scholars of the abbey. A detailed commentary is also provided on each text and important topics such as lost charter, the sequence of abbots, Kentish Kings and so on are discussed in seperate appendices.
This is the largest and most important collection to be published in the Anglo-Saxon Charters series.

This is the first critical edition of the Anglo-Saxon archive of the Benedictine monastery at Peterborough, established by Bishop AEthelwold around AD 970 on the site of an earlier house known as Medeshamstede. The archive comprises 31 documents ranging in date from the 7th to the 11th centuries.
Alongside genuine royal diplomas, leases and an Old English will, are a series of spectacular forgeries that were created after the Norman Conquest as the monastic community strove to enhance its status and protect its endowment. A collection of hugely important memoranda, "the Medeshamstede memoranda," preserve intriguing details of transactions that took place in the later 7th century, and a series of brief records illuminate the processes by which AEthelwold built up the endowment of the refounded abbey in the 970s and 980s.
This volume contains authoritative editions of these 31 texts, plus a further 4 related documents. There is a full commentary on every text, with translation of all Old English documents and passages, and detailed discussion of boundary clauses. The Introduction provides a detailed elucidation of the history of the monastery in its two incarnations. This includes a ground-breaking new evaluation of the sources for the history of Medeshamstede, which overturns the conventional understanding of the status of this house and its supposed early 'colonies', and also much new material on the fate of this area of the East Midlands during the period in the 9th and early 10th centuries when it came under Danish rule.
This volume will be of great value to those studying Anglo-Saxon and ecclesiastical history, to local historians and to specialists in other fields, such as medieval Latin, Old English and place-name studies.

Malmesbury Abbey was one of the few English minsters which had a continuous existence from the seventh to the sixteenth century, and the Malmesbury archive is a particularly important witness to the history of Wessex and the West Saxon church in the pre-Viking period. More than half of the surviving charters purport to date from the seventh and eighth centuries, many of them directly associated with Malmesbury's most celebrated abbot, the scholar and poet Aldhelm. This volume is the first scholarly edition of Malmesbury's pre-Conquest charters.
The Malmesbury archive poses a particularly difficult editorial challenge, since the manuscripts are generally late and the abbey's scribes were prone to forgery and the 'improvement' of their muniments. Although the abbey had its own celebrated post-Conquest historian in William of Malmesbury, regrettably little detailed information has survived about the early history of the monastery. Nevertheless, analysis of the charters has made it possible to build up a fairly coherent picture of Malmesbury's development in the first four centuries of its existence. This volume provides an important background to William of Malmesbury's De gestis pontificorum Anglorum, and includes significant new material for the study of William's use of historical documents.
Charters of Malmesbury Abbey is comprised of editions of thirty-five charters and also a small group of separate boundary surveys, with expert detailed commentaries on their historical and topographical importance. The charters are prefaced by a lengthy introduction which presents a new synthesis of the history of the abbey and an extensive bibliography.

The latest volume of Anglo-Saxon charters covers the pre-Conquest archive of Shaftesbury Abbey in Dorset, founded by King Alfred and destined to be of great importance in the medieval period. The majority of the thirty surviving documents date form the tenth century, with the last a charter of Cnut from 1019. The present edition addresses the extensive corruption introduced into the surviving texts by repeated earlier copying, particularly in the vernacular boundary clauses. This is a very important collection providing almost the only evidence for the history of Shaftesbury in the Anglo-Saxon period.