Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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We find out the real reason...
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Page Twenty-Three of Forgeries
Church documents. In doing this the monks unintentionally created what modern historians have taken to be England’s oldest non-archaeological artefact.
Historians have been equally bamboozled by the third particularity of the Gospels of St Augustine, the Anglo-Saxon writing in it. They do not even ask themselves why there is Anglo-Saxon writing in it.
After all, most legal documents, even in Anglo-Saxon times, were written in Latin and continued to be so for many centuries after the Anglo-Saxon period.
The historians’ blunder is serious because why certain documents were written in Anglo-Saxon and when they were written affects not just the authenticity of this or that gospel book, not just the authenticity of this or that land charter, it affects the authenticity of English history.
According to de Hamel and everybody else, the earliest book containing English writing is the Gospels of St Augustine. They are not claiming the writing in it is the earliest example we have of written English. These same scholars believe the Anglo-Saxon sections in it, the charters, are relatively late, ninth- or tenth-century.
But whenever these charters were written, none of the scholars have mused why they are in Anglo-Saxon and not in Latin. Let us muse for them. The explanation is simple enough and arises from an inherent shortcoming of the Latin language.
It is all very well using Latin for important stuff such as state papers, diplomatic correspondence, national histories, monumental inscriptions, the Bible, because everything they contain is important and hence familiar. Latin deals admirably with such material irrespective of what language any of it was couched in originally.
The people and places being recorded are so recognisable that, however they are expressed in Latin, everybody knows exactly who or what is being referred to. But what about this, the purportedly earliest dated land charter in England:
| A charter of Aethelraed I AD 868, granting the north-west quarter to Cuthwulf, bishop of Rochester, ‘here are the boundaries as far as the Mead Way from Doddinghyrnan west along the Street out to the wall, and so by northern way out to Liabingescot (Liaba’s house) … to where the wall turns east, and so east within the wall to the Great Gate over against Doddinghurnan, then straight south from the gate … to Doddinghurnan’ |
It is not so straightforward. True, by employing various arbitrary transliterations, a Latin-trained scribe could invent credible Latin versions for all these people and places but unfortunately, when that land charter is required for its sole purpose – to demonstrate unequivocally who owns what, who authorised it and who witnessed it – that scribe will not be around to specify who or what he was referring to.
It would be open to anybody to argue the charter in fact referred to quite different people, in quite different places. Not the best title deed one could hope for. Much better to write it in the everyday language of the people and places, then there can be no dispute. The Medway
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