Anglo-Saxon Wills - Paperback

by Dorothy Whitelock (Editor), Dorothy Whitelock (Translator)

This 1930 volume contains the original texts, with translations and commentaries, of the great majority of surviving Anglo-Saxon wills drawn up in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The documents are of special interest for the light they cast on the families and connections of those who made the wills, and on the ways in which the testators managed the disposition of their lands and other possessions. The reissue of Professor Whitelock's book is complemented by reissues of Florence Harmer's Select English Historical Documents of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (1914), and of Agnes Jane Robertson's Anglo-Saxon Charters (1939, 2nd edition 1956). Between them, the three volumes represent the surviving corpus of Anglo-Saxon documents in the vernacular, to set beside the corpus of royal diplomas (in Latin), and the corpus of Anglo-Saxon legislation, and to serve at the same time as evidence of the uses of written English in the Anglo-Saxon period.