Professor Peter Sawyer's Anglo-Saxon Charters: an Annotated List and Bibliography

The publication of 'Sawyer' transformed the study of the surviving corpus of charters as a major part of our evidence for knowledge and understanding of Anglo-Saxon England. In 1991 the British Academy-Royal Historical Society Joint Committee on Anglo-Saxon Charters, formed in the mid-1960s to organize the production of a new multi-volume edition of the charters, recognized that there was also a need for a revised edition of Sawyer's catalogue. The project was duly set in motion, and now takes the form of the electronic database, devised and maintained by a research team in Cambridge, known as the 'Revised Sawyer'.

The 'Revised Sawyer' aims, like its predecessor, to provide a systematic, accurate and complete coverage of all documents falling within its scope (royal diplomas, royal writs, 'private' [non-royal] charters, vernacular documents, etc.), genuine and forged, with references to all manuscripts in which a given text has been preserved, to all published editions and translations, and to places in books or articles where any aspect of a charter is discussed (e.g. palaeography, authenticity, place-names, boundary clauses, language, formulation (diplomatic), literary interest, historical interest, witnesses, later use).

The 'Electronic Sawyer' is an online manifestation of the 'Revised Sawyer', originally devised and maintained by a team at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London. It made its first appearance online in 2007, in its 'beta' stage of development. It was launched, after further development, in the autumn of 2010; the process of its development then stalled. It was later transferred to Cambridge University LIbrary where it then remained for some ten years. It is now under active development again under the direction of Dr David Woodman assisted by Dr Anthony Harris.

The overall structure of the catalogue, showing how the separate entries are arranged and classified, can be seen by clicking on

The format of the separate entries in the 'Revised Sawyer', and so in the 'Electronic Sawyer', is developed from Professor Sawyer's original catalogue published in 1968. An entry for a standard royal diploma comprises the following elements:

• S 000
• [Title:]
• Archive:
• MSS:
• Printed:
• Comments:

In many cases, entries are followed by a button labelled 'Text', and by another button labelled 'Old Text'. The former gives the text of a charter if contained in one of the published volumes of the new edition (published by the British Academy). The latter gives an older (perhaps less accurate) text, generally derived from 'Kemble' or 'Birch'. In some cases, a button labelled 'Translation' gives a translation of the text into modern English, if one is available.

In 2007 the bibliography in the Revised Sawyer database contained about 20 items published before 1700; about 40 items published in the 18th century; about 160 items published in the 19th century; about 475 items published in the period 1900–69; about 600 items published in the period 1970–99; and about 50 items published in 2000–7. Many of the 'new' items in the bibliography contain only one or two references to particular charters; but some others (including several published after c c