MS. Wood empt. 5

Documents relating to Richard, earl of Cornwall and king of the Romans

Printed in Neues Archiv, xiii. 219-222

With music, and a copy of an inquest held by William de Clifford on the customs and services of the town of Malmesbury

A short commentary on 1 Samuel

Chapters XII-XLVI and LXIIII of the cartulary, printed in Brewer and Martin, i. 277-278, from PRO, E 164/24. See also the notes in vol. ii, p. xxix

Opens with a list of knights owing service to the abbey, which may have been an addition in the exemplar

The majority of the charters, which are arranged in an approximately chronological order, are royal grants cast directly in favour of the abbey. They thus create the impression of an uninterrupted process of endowment, beginning in the last quarter of the seventh century and extending throughout the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries, and culminating with Edward the Confessor’s general confirmation of lands (dated 1065). The series does, however, also include a related group of texts of more varied import, representing the abbey’s dealings with Ealdorman Ordlaf in the early tenth century, and one charter, in the name of King Æthelred, cast straightforwardly in favour of a layman (Kemble: The Anglo-Saxon Charters Website)

The cartulary concludes with a Latin document purporting to be a bull of Pope Sergius I for Aldhelm and Malmesbury abbey. (For the suggestion that the Latin is a translation of an Old English text, itself adapted from an authentic papal bull in Latin, see Heather Edwards, 'Two Documents', Historical Research 139 [1986], pp. 9-15)

Followed by:

Alcuin's answers to the interrogations of Sigewulf on Genesis

A late 14th-century table of contents

Commonplaces from the Church Fathers, in the hand which has inserted marginalia throughout