This volume, which publishes papers given at the 2006 MANCASS conference, gives readers a good view of the recent state of play on several significant aspects of royal powers in Anglo-Saxon England. The chronological range is wide, though most articles concentrate on the tenth century; topics covered here are royal charters, law codes, archives, hospitality dues and burials, but regrettably, not coinage, cultural and ecclesiastical patronage or royal palaces and other accommodation. Ann Williams’s introduction to the volume is a useful overview of Anglo-Saxon kingship, not only outlining each chapter but also fitting the whole into a wider historiographical context. Next comes a long article of more than 120 pages, with a further forty pages of appendices, in which Simon Keynes argues for a close link between the production of royal diplomas and royal meetings, beginning with ecclesiastical councils from the seventh century and then, from the ninth century (but better evidenced from the start of the tenth century), royal assemblies. What Keynes has attempted here is a detailed analysis of those royal charters that survive from across this period as single sheets and, on the basis of this, to try to work out the circumstances of their production. By this means he makes a convincing case for the production of most, though not all, royal charters during the course of royal assemblies, rather than their having been sketched out during the councils and completed later. His appendices supply a list of royal meeting-places recorded between 900 and 1066 and diplomatic commentary on all royal diplomas surviving as single sheets for 925 to 975. The article advances our understanding of royal charter production in the tenth and eleventh centuries. In the process, it opens up new questions about court personnel and their activities in later Anglo-Saxon England in the intervening periods between meetings.

The remaining six articles in the volume are all much shorter, but also provoke reflection. Alex Rumble returns to the question of whether Anglo-Saxon kings kept archives, and, steering between C R Hart’s view of a large-scale royal register of land-ownership and Michael Clanchy’s idea that royal archive-keeping was pretty much non-existent before Domesday, he notes from Anglo-Saxon charter evidence that kings did keep archives of family property and that single parts of tripartite chirographs might be kept in the royal relic collection or treasury (Rumble treats the two concepts as separate, but the analogy of church treasuries suggests that they were identical). Carole Hough investigates evidence for property forfeited to kings, and, having surveyed the extensive evidence for forfeiture in law codes, then hypothesises that place names containing a ‘king’ element may reflect a royal desire to keep tabs on forfeited land. Andrew Rabin traces developments in how the legal subject, especially the witness, was defined in Anglo-Saxon laws, winding up with Wulfstan the Homilist’s legislation against perjury. Barbara Yorke traces royal burial practices from the sixth century through to 1066, noting similarities between the use of rival sites in pre-Christian and Christian burials (for instance Snape and Sutton Hoo in seventh-century East Anglia and Wimborne, Sherborne and the Winchester minsters for Wessex kings in the ninth and tenth centuries), and pointing out the political and ritual uses of royal burial sites. Ryan Lavelle analyses the implications of Ine 70.1 for the organisation of royal hospitality dues, and notes that the 365 estates of ten hides each that would have been required to feed Ine’s household throughout the year might be represented by the increase in Wessex territories during his reign from 6,000 to 10,000 hides. Finally Alaric Trousdale examines evidence for the delegation of royal authority in law codes, beginning with bishops and winding up with the establishment of hundred courts. There are some errors here in the handling of Latin sources, with, for example, ‘Vidimus etiam ibi episcopos in conciliis suis secularia judicare’ (‘we have also seen bishops there judging secular matters in their councils’) interpreted as a specific ban on bishops ‘attending secular councils’. Overall, however, this is a volume that cannot be ignored by anyone interested in the development of Anglo-Saxon political structures, and its contributions all repay re-reading.