Anglo-Saxon Charters

I now know a bit more about open-field agriculture, and how ridge and furrow works. I strongly recommend the Rackham History of the Countryside; it's the sort of work it's a relief to read, because so sensible. I won't name some of the stuff I've been reading on this topic which has been annoyingly silly because actually it's most of it. I am getting confused about what a lynchet is; I keep coming across different definitions, several of them mutually exclusive. Nonetheless I have decided to add a short section on the Landscape of Wiltshire to my introduction. I hadn't realised that Wilton's lands were right on the border of Planned and Ancient Countryside, and that many of the terms in my boundary clauses imply open-field agriculture even though only one of my charters refers to it explicitly.

So I'm feeling a bit more on top of that aspect of things. But it turns out that I have to provide a glossary of the unusual Latin words in my charters, with the Greek roots when they have Greek roots, which will be often. Bother. I know almost no Greek; Shakespeare probably knew more. I suppose I can just get it out of Liddell and Scott or something. So far I have mostly worked out what the wierd words mean by finding them in the works of Isidore, where he explains them and gives Latin equivalents. For example, I sorted out cleronomis from this bit of De ecclesiasticis officiis: Nam "cleros" sors interpretatur; unde et hereditas grece "cleronomia" appellatur, et heris "cleronomos". I think this leads to one of those interesting 'how do you edit an idiot' type questions so beloved of textual critics -- if I'm getting a word from Isidore, and so are the Anglo-Saxons (they loved Isidore) then is there much point my quoting it in some pure Classical Greek form in the Glossary? Some of these practices are predicated on a long-dead model of scholarship where all medievalists were actually more at home in the Classical languages which had been beaten into them at prep school, and which they learnt to love as a substitute for the mother who so cruelly exiled them. M. R. James, I feel your pain, but things have moved on.