Æthelstan A () is the name given by historians to an unknown scribe who drafted charters (or diplomas), by which the king made grants of land, for King Æthelstan of England between 928 and 935. They are an important source for historians as they provide far more information than other charters of the period, showing the date and place of the grant, and having an unusually long list of witnesses, including Welsh kings and occasionally kings of Scotland and Strathclyde.
The Æthelstan A charters commence shortly after King Æthelstan conquered Northumbria in 927, making him the first king to rule the whole of England. The diplomas give the king titles such as "King of the English" and "King of the Whole of Britain", and this is seen by historians as part of a rhetoric which reflected his master's claim for a new status, higher than previous West Saxon kings.
The diplomas are written in elaborate Latin known as the hermeneutic style, which became dominant in Anglo-Latin literature from the mid-tenth century and a hallmark of the English Benedictine Reform. Scholars vary widely in their views of his style, which has been described as "pretentious" and "almost impenetrable", but also as "poetic" and "as enduringly fascinating as it is complex".
Æthelstan A ceased to draft charters after 935, and his successors returned to a simpler style, suggesting that he was working on his own rather than being a member of a royal scriptorium.
Background
After the death of Bede in 735, Latin prose in England declined. It reached its lowest level in the ninth century, when few books and charters were produced, and they were of poor quality. King Æthelstan's grandfather, Alfred the Great (871–899), embarked on an extensive programme to improve learning, and by the 890s the standard of Latin in charters was improving. Few charters survive from the reigns of Alfred and his son, Edward the Elder (899–924), and none from 909 to 925. Until then, charters had generally been plain legal documents, and King Æthelstan's early diplomas were similar.
Until about 900, diplomas appear to have been drawn up in varying traditions and circumstances, but in later Anglo-Saxon times (c. 900–1066) charters can be more clearly defined. According to Simon Keynes: In this period, a diploma can be characterised as a formal and symbolic record, in Latin, of an occasion when the king, acting in a royal assembly, and with the consent of the ecclesiastical and secular orders, created an estate of "bookland" at a specified place, and conveyed it on the privileged terms defined by the "book", or diploma, to a named beneficiary. This act of establishing a particular estate as bookland, so that it could be held henceforth on these privileged terms, could be performed only by the king, in a royal assembly; but the diploma itself served hereafter as the title-deed for the land in question. It established that the land was to be held, with its appurtenances, free from the imposition of worldly burdens, with the exception of military service, bridge-work and fortress-work, and with the power to give it to anyone of its owner's choosing.
Identity of Æthelstan A
In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries there was a debate among historians as to whether late Anglo-Saxon charters were produced by a royal chancery or by monasteries on behalf of beneficiaries. In the 1910s, W. H. Stevenson argued that charters in different areas of England were drawn up by the same hand, which would be unlikely if they were drawn up locally, supporting the case that the writers were royal clerks. The German scholar Richard Drögereit followed this up in 1935 by examining original charters between 931 and 963, and identified three scribes from their handwriting, whom he called Æthelstan A, Æthelstan C and Edmund C. Other charters which only existed in copies he allocated to these and other scribes on the basis of their style. In 2002 Keynes listed twenty "Æthelstan A" charters, of which two are original and the rest copies.