The fascinating chaff of imposture

Stevenson once famously remarked "It cannot be said that the Anglo-Saxon charters have been edited", and there followed a world of pain. The story is given here, and apparently Maitland added that without this editing process Anglo-Saxon history would never be properly understood, and that within a century he expected there would be "a critical edition of the Anglo-Saxon charters in which the philologist and the palaeographer, the annalist and the formulist will have winnowed the grain of truth from the chaff of imposture". But he was speaking in 1897, and so far only thirteen volumes of a projected thirty or so have appeared. The three volumes for Christ Church Canterbury are close to appearing, and then I suppose mine should be the 17th. But it's because I am trying to be the philologist, palaeographer, annalist and formulist which Maitland required all at once that I've been a bit grumpy veering on mental recently. He forgot landscape historian and tracer of literary sources. Plus, things have moved on a bit, and which of us would wish to discard the fascinating chaff of imposture? To be honest, although I'm reasonably at home in the skin of the palaeographer, and can more or less cope with being an annalist, formulist and sourcer, the idea of me as a philologist, trying to work out if a boundary clause has pukka tenth-century forms or is a post-Conquest insertion, is sadly just amusing. There's a question which comes up in the ASNC Part II Chancery paper from time to time that goes "Charters only speak when they are spoken to, and they will not speak to strangers [Discuss]". I don't think I ever set it but I certainly taught it, so I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised to be finding this such very hard work now. And if I'm going to be brutally honest I do get some pride from being someone who can sort of speak to charters.

Just because I don't see why I shouldn't get to spread the pain around a bit, here is a list of the sort of random things I have had to do with just one charter, an Eadwig one I finished very recently, the beastly Sawyer 666, number 17 in my edition, other than the obvious production of a text with apparatus:
1) find parallels for a verbal invocation written as a rubric in a later cartulary (it also happens in the twelfth-century Bath cartulary, a Corpus MS, but I don't know what this means)
2) point out that it doesn't have a dating clause; try to find parallels for charters without a dating clause; fail
3) suggest that the error cingls for cinges in the boundary clause hints at an exemplar in Anglo-Saxon Square minuscule of a date appropriate to the reign of Eadwig e.g. that the l was a misreading for a tall open-headed e in ligature with the following s (what DND used to call a wasp-waisted e) [bet one of the philologists then tells me that cingls is a perfectly acceptable form for something -- they'll say it's an anagogical dative ending in -ls, or something]
4) point out that its formulation draws on Isidore of Seville's expression of the concept that God created two things from nothing, angels and unformed matter
5) make all the arguments from comparanda about why the charter must be from January 956, to do with the highly-attenuated proem, the dispositive section, the anathema, and the witness-list. I've definitely set and taught questions along the lines of why do so many charters survive from 956? No one got what I now see is the real answer, viz., specifically to piss me off.
6) ask why this charter was issued in 956 since there's a perfectly good one from 948 in the archive for the same land; get bogged down in Eadwig's attitude to land tenure; fail to express in a way that's going to convince anyone my increasing suspicion that this was more about control of making charters and the process of government than about seizing land from legal owners
7) argue that calling the beneficiary 'vassalus' is not anachronistic, although it is rare, drawing other examples from the record; identify the beneficiary Wiferth as someone about whom we know nothing at all, listing all the people he might have been but probably wasn't
8) examine the use of the anachronistic phrase 'dux testis' in the witness-list; argue from parallels that this comes from a simple misreading of a typical tenth-century witness-list layout, rather than anything more sinister
9) identify the estate in Domesday book (it was still Wilton's then but by the thirteenth century they had lost it to Richard the Lionheart's wetnurse)
10) try to identify the boundary markers on maps using OS grid refs and historical forms of Wiltshire place-names, trying not to get carried away like past commentators into asserting things we can't possibly know. Actually the boundary clause of this one is reasonably straightforward. It follows the nineteenth-century ecclesiastical parish bounds (or rather, vice versa).
So I'm quite pleased with what I've got -- I've not caught everything that this particular charter threw at me, but the dux testis and vassalus stuff in particular pleases me because I think I've sorted it out. But it's just one of 34 charters, each of which provides its own odd little demands of knowledge about Anglo-Saxon life, and this is by no means a relatively hard one. I had a nice e-mail today from someone else who did a volume in this series, which appeared last year. She cheered me up by saying that the whole thing made her suffer terribly, which makes me feel a bit less stupid. But she also said that she did her first drafts, i.e. what I'm doing now, in the 90s. The thought of this all hanging on to me for that long makes me feel ill.