Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Map
- Introduction
- 1 The Book of Llandaf and the Early Welsh Charter
- 2 The Origin of the Llandaf Claims
- 3 The Charters in the Book of Llandaf: Forgeries or Recensions?
- 4 The Authenticity of the Witness Lists
- 5 The Integrity of the Charters
- 6 The Chronology of the Charters
- 7 The Status of the donors and Recipients of the Charters
- 8 The Fake Diplomatic of the Book of Llandaf
- 9 The Book of Llandaf: First Edition or Seventh Enlarged Revision?
- 10 A new Approach to the Compilation of the Book of Llandaf
- 11 The Evidence of the Doublets
- 12 The Book of Llandaf as an Indicator of Social and Economic Change
- 13 The Royal Genealogical Framework
- 14 The Episcopal Framework
- Appendix I Concordance and Chart Showing the Paginal and Chronological Order of the Charters
- Appendix II Maps of Grants to Bishops
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Celtic History
8 - The Fake Diplomatic of the Book of Llandaf
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 April 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Map
- Introduction
- 1 The Book of Llandaf and the Early Welsh Charter
- 2 The Origin of the Llandaf Claims
- 3 The Charters in the Book of Llandaf: Forgeries or Recensions?
- 4 The Authenticity of the Witness Lists
- 5 The Integrity of the Charters
- 6 The Chronology of the Charters
- 7 The Status of the donors and Recipients of the Charters
- 8 The Fake Diplomatic of the Book of Llandaf
- 9 The Book of Llandaf: First Edition or Seventh Enlarged Revision?
- 10 A new Approach to the Compilation of the Book of Llandaf
- 11 The Evidence of the Doublets
- 12 The Book of Llandaf as an Indicator of Social and Economic Change
- 13 The Royal Genealogical Framework
- 14 The Episcopal Framework
- Appendix I Concordance and Chart Showing the Paginal and Chronological Order of the Charters
- Appendix II Maps of Grants to Bishops
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Celtic History
Summary
Many questions about the validity of the wording of the charters must lead historians into a study of their diplomatic, and that study must in turn lead them back to the question of how LL was compiled, for it is clear that many of the charters’ formulae were added during compilation, as seen by E. D. Jones, noting ‘the uniformity displayed over what we are asked to believe was a period of five centuries’. Similarly Brooke saw ‘a unity about these documents of a very exceptional kind, even for large collections of forgeries’ and concluded that:
The charters are a classic statement of the principles of fake diplomatic. Centuries pass; dynasties come and go. But the charters of the bishops of Llandaff vary little in their form, which is a curious amalgam of local custom and the practice of the chanceries of Europe in the late eleventh or early twelfth century. … The words vary, but only like the variations on a musical theme. … A single ingenious mind presides over the whole enterprise.
Wendy Davies, in her paper ‘St Mary’s, Worcester and the Liber Landavensis’, demonstrated that some of the characteristic LL verbiage is parallelled in Hemming's Cartulary, which was compiled at Worcester ca 1095, and, without explicitly supporting Brooke's idea of a single presiding mind, noted the significant circumstance that Bishop Urban is said to have been a priest of Worcester. John Reuben Davies, however, has since shown that the relevant formulae are found widely among Anglo-Saxon cartularies. Without rejecting Urban and Worcester as a possibility, he is ‘inclined to suggest that the Anglo-Saxon features of the Llandaf charters are likely to have been formed by the “artistic” mind of, perhaps, a Caradog of Llancarfan, working from a general knowledge of Anglo-Saxon diplomatic’.
An invaluable tool for investigating the diplomatic of LL is Appendix I of Wendy Davies's The Llandaff Charters in which she lists the occurrences of all the major formulae in the charters. There are two drawbacks in the arrangement, however, which could not have been eliminated without the expense of a lot of space. One is that her Appendix I only shows one how the formulae are distributed through LL paginally (i.e. in the order of the manuscript), not how they are distributed chronologically (i.e. in the order of the Sequences), which is equally important in deciding whether they are editorial or original.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Book of Llandaf as a Historical Source , pp. 71 - 77Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019