Adapting the roman alphabet for writing Old English: evidence from coin epigraphy and single-sheet charters

Adapting the roman alphabet for writingOld English: evidence from coin

epigraphy and single-sheet chartersPhilip A . Shaw

Single-sheet charters and coin epigraphy provide valuable evidence for thedevelopment of representations of the Old English dental fricative in theseventh and eighth centuries. This evidence indicates differing Kentish andMercian practices up to the 780s, when scribes in both areas rapidly adopt<ð> to represent this sound. In Kent, occasional experimentation with thischaracter from perhaps as early as the reign of Eadbald (616–40 AD) maysuggest a lengthy period of gradual adoption prior to the rapid increase.Mercian practice instead shows an abrupt adoption, which is perhaps theresult of reform according to external (perhaps Kentish) models.

The development of an orthographic system for the representation ofOld English using the roman alphabet is an under-explored subject.While standard reference works such as Campbell’s Old English Grammaroffer some brief discussion of early spelling variants, they make littleattempt to characterize or explain the processes involved in the adoptionand adaptation of the roman alphabet to the representation of OldEnglish sounds.1 A useful recent treatment of the development of repre-sentations for the Old English phonemes /w/ (usually represented byas in ‘wolf ’) and /q/ (represented by <ð> and <þ> as in æðel ‘noble’)attempts to fill in part of the picture using evidence from charters, coins

* In writing this piece I have benefited from useful discussions of various aspects of the topic withAlaric Hall, Siân Prosser and Sanne van der Schee. I am grateful to Helen Foxhall Forbes andJo Story for reading and commenting on drafts of this paper, and to the reviewers for EarlyMedieval Europe, whose detailed comments were extremely helpful in revising it. Any remainingerrors are my own. Nicholas Brooks and Susan Kelly very kindly provided me with referencesto their edition of the Christ Church, Canterbury charters while it was in proof, for which I amvery grateful. I also wish to express my gratitude to the British Library and the archives ofCanterbury Cathedral for allowing me access to some of the single-sheet charters discussed andthe University of Leicester for the study leave that allowed me to complete this essay.

1 A. Campbell, Old English Grammar (Oxford, 1959), §§ 23–70.

Early Medieval Europe 2013 21 (2) 115–139© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

and the Épinal Glossary, focusing on notions of progress towards lessambiguous orthographic practices as an explanatory model.2The creationand adoption of less ambiguous spellings is clearly part of the picture, butby no means the whole picture. This piece argues that careful comparisonof coin epigraphy and early manuscript sources such as single-sheetcharters reveals significant developments – which are not all explicable interms of orthographic disambiguation – in Mercian orthographic prac-tices in the later eighth century. In developing this argument, we willnecessarily refer to Mercian and Kentish orthographic practices, but thisis neither intended to suggest that these practices were exclusivelyemployed across Mercia or Kent, nor that such practices were universalwithin these kingdoms: we have to do here with those who wrote charters(mainly royal diplomas), and those who provided the models for coininscriptions. These may not be fully representative of writing practices ofthe period, but they nevertheless provide useful indications of how someimportant developments in Old English orthography may have takenplace.

A closer examination of this evidence for Mercian spelling practicessuggests that there is a hitherto unnoticed pattern (probably reflectingphonological variation) in representations of /q/ by some Mercian scribesup to the 760s. In the 780s, however, spelling of this phoneme in Mercianroyal diplomas appears to undergo a rather rapid alteration to a strongpreference for <ð>. This alteration may be foreshadowed by the occa-sional use of <ð> in earlier Kentish sources, but not by earlier spellings inMercian sources. The implications of this are significant: Kentish practicein the earlier part of the eighth century may see a slow initial adoption of<ð> as a variant, while Mercian practice shows no signs of such adoption.The apparent rapid adoption in Mercia in the 780s in fact partiallyreflects production of Mercian royal diplomas by their Kentish benefi-ciaries, suggesting that at this point the use of <ð> increased rapidly inKent. This pattern of development might be seen as the gradual initialadoption of a new form, followed by rapid acceptance and then thegradual loss of competing older forms: a pattern known as an s-curve thatis often seen in diffusion of linguistic (and other) features through apopulation.3 In other words, the pattern of the available evidence in Kentmay be consistent with an organic change in practice diffusing throughthe population of literate individuals involved in the production ofcharters. The consistent use of <ð> from the 780s onwards is not,

2 A. Seiler, ‘The Scripting of Old English: An Analysis of Anglo-Saxon Spellings for w and þ’,Sprachwissenschaft 33 (2008), pp. 139–72.

3 J. Aitchison, Language Change: Progress or Decay?, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 83–8.

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however, entirely confined to Mercian royal diplomas with Kentish ben-eficiaries: charters from the archives of Selsey and Worcester also showconsistent use of <ð>, indicating that the rapid growth in use of <ð> inKent also coincided with adoption of <ð> elsewhere. The development of<ð> in Kent seems to be what we should expect with the ordinary spreadof a new form through a population, whereas its development in Merciancontexts (as far as can be gauged with the limited and problematicavailable evidence) is sudden, suggesting that it was adopted in Merciathrough some sort of language policy in the 770s or 780s. This compli-cates considerably the picture of initial use of roman alphabet graphs evenwhere they do not map neatly onto Old English sounds, followed bygradual development of less ambiguous spelling norms. The orthogra-phization of Old English was neither a simple nor a unitary process, butrather involved various developments over an extended period. In thispaper, we will focus on the eighth century, when the development ofroman alphabet orthographies for writing Old English had already beenunder way for some considerable time, but it will be useful to begin bysketching out some of the issues involved from the earliest periods of OldEnglish onwards.

Processes of orthographization

Working out a way of writing a language for which no writing systemexists is, self-evidently, a complicated business – and one that has beencarried out for all languages that possess an orthographic system. Norneed the business become any simpler when – as in the case of OldEnglish – it comes to developing a new writing system for a languagethat already possesses a writing system, though the problems involvedmay differ. These processes of orthographization are eminently worthstudying for the light they shed on the social, political, educational andreligious circumstances surrounding them, as well as the evidence theyprovide for the historical development of a language and its traditionsof textual production. In undertaking such studies, we may well findsimilarities between the use and adaptation of script systems in differentlanguages, particularly in the case of widely used script systems, such asthe roman alphabet. At the same time, we need to be sensitive to thespecificities of the process in different languages and circumstances. Inthe case of Old English, an obvious complication is the fact that beforethe adoption of the roman alphabet for representing the language, OldEnglish already possessed a writing system, the runic futhark. Moreover,as David Parsons has shown, the futhark was itself reformed (a processthat probably involved cross-fertilization with the roman alphabet) in

Adapting the roman alphabet for writing Old English 117


early Anglo-Saxon England to produce the system that we term thefuthorc.4 There was clearly interaction between runic and roman lit-eracy, and we might therefore expect the runic system (both as futharkand as futhorc) to have impacted on the ways in which a roman alpha-bet orthography was developed. There were, moreover, probably anumber of available models for usage of the roman alphabet, includingLatin from the Continent,5 Ireland and Britain, perhaps Old Irishroman orthography, and pre-existing uses of roman characters to rep-resent Germanic names. This piece does not concern itself with theseissues – which we might term the prehistory of Old English romanorthography – but rather with tracing some Old English orthographicdevelopments of the late seventh and eighth centuries, as revealed par-ticularly in early single-sheet charters and coin epigraphy. The pre-history raises numerous important issues, an attempt to address someof which will appear in a subsequent paper. Here we will concern our-selves with how orthographic practice developed at a period that canperhaps be seen as crucial for the origins of the extensive written use ofthe vernacular that arose in ninth-century England.

The orthographic system that emerges in the literary productions ofthe ninth century is essentially that which remains in use, with someminor developments over time, through into late Old English. It employsthe roman alphabet, but also some characters borrowed from the runicsystem (thorn <þ> and wynn ), as well as the modified roman char-acter <ð>. This system does not, however, emerge fully formed in theearliest records of Old English. The character <ð>, for instance, does notappear to have been employed at first, and the runic borrowings are alsonot seen in the earliest securely datable records. This is suggestive. Anindividual setting out to employ the roman alphabet to represent OldEnglish names or words would undoubtedly encounter some problemswith mismatches between the phonemic systems of Old English andLatin (or Old Irish, if this individual knew that language).6 The extent towhich those problems troubled our putative orthographizer may well

4 D.N. Parsons, Recasting the Runes: The Reform of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc (Uppsala, 1999).5 There is also the possibility of influence from Chilperic I’s reformed version of the roman

alphabet, which included four additional letters, at least one of which resembles one of the runicgraphs employed by the Anglo-Saxons as part of their roman alphabet writing practices. SeeGregorii Episcopi Turonensis Libri Historiarum X, ed. B. Krusch and W. Levison, 2nd edn, MGHSRM 1.1 (Hanover, 1951), p. 254 (book V, ch. 44) for Chilperic’s reform, and, for more on thegraphs he created, see N.P. Brooks, ‘The Laws of King Æthelberht: Preservation, Content andComposition’, in B. O’Brien (ed.), Textus Roffensis in Context: Law, Language and Libraries inEarly Medieval England (Turnhout, forthcoming).

6 Seiler, ‘The Scripting of Old English’, pp. 146–8 notes some such mismatches based oncomparison of Old English phonology with Donatus’s account of the roman alphabet in his ArsMaior, but does not fully take into account the differences between Donatus’s treatment ofLatin pronunciation and the forms likely to have been in use in the seventh century.

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have depended upon his or her communicative needs. Representing OldEnglish names in an otherwise Latin text might well prompt little anxietyover the lack of precise representations of some Old English sounds in theroman alphabet. If the whole text was in Old English, by contrast, or evenif phrases in Old English were to be included within a Latin text, the casesin which the roman alphabet did not provide adequate or unambiguousways of representing Old English sounds may well have been much moreobtrusive and troubling. In what follows, one case in which the romanalphabet does not map neatly onto Old English sounds is examined, witha view to understanding how the representation of a problematic sounddeveloped in Mercia and southern England in the course of the eighthcentury. As we shall see, this was an important period of orthographicevolution that saw the beginnings of the development of some of thespellings that became the norm across Anglo-Saxon England.

The Old English dental fricative

In late Old English, the dental fricative /q/ (as in þeof ‘thief ’, broðor‘brother’ and bæð ‘bath’) is usually represented by the runic letter <þ>(‘thorn’) and the modified roman letter <ð> (‘eth’). In general the twographs show no signs of being used to indicate different sounds, butacross the whole body of Old English textual production there is a generaltendency to employ <þ> initially and <ð> in medial or final positionwithin the word.7 As we shall see, Kentish charters of the late seventh andfirst half of the eighth century tend to prefer <d> as a spelling for thissound in medial and final position,8 with <th> used initially – a patternthat prefigures the later pattern of use of thorn and eth. Early Merciancharters, on the other hand, often employ <d> and <t> in medial and

7 King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, ed. H. Sweet, EETS, OS 45 and 50(London, 1871–2), p. 501 claims that ‘the more accurate of the later MSS. generally write þinitially and ð medially’. What might be meant by ‘more accurate’ here is not entirely clear (orunproblematic), but the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, ed. A. di P. Healey (Toronto, 2004)<http://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/oec/> [accessed July 2010], can readily furnish us with figures forthe entire corpus of Old English: initial <ð> 107819; medial <ð> 103276; final <ð> 103060;initial <þ> 321075; medial <þ> 47395; final <þ> 18763. The Corpus represents texts, rather thanindividual manuscripts, and probably includes some texts taken from editions which werenormalized to one or other of <ð> and <þ>. Even allowing for this, however, it seems thatSweet’s generalization is true of the corpus of Old English as a whole: 74.86% of the initial usesof the two graphs are <þ> rather than <ð>, while 68.54% of the medial uses are <ð> rather than<þ> and 84.60% of the final uses are <ð> rather than <þ>.

8 In this the present author’s results agree with those of L. Oliver, ‘Irish Influence on EarlyAnglo-Saxon Orthographic Practice’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 14 (1994), pp.115–31 and L. Oliver, ‘Irish Influence on Orthographic Practice in Early Kent’, North-WesternEuropean Language Evolution 33 (1998), pp. 93–113. The arguments for Irish influence presentedtherein do not, however, seem compelling.



final position (according to a phonological pattern discussed below), andsometimes <th>. The pattern of use of <th> initially and <d> in medialor final position in the word in some early manuscript sources has beenremarked before.9 The early Mercian charter evidence, however, appearsto reflect a somewhat different usage, raising questions about the ways inwhich Mercian and Kentish orthographic practices contributed to thedevelopment of later Old English spelling practices. The numismaticevidence, when cross-referenced with the manuscript evidence, helps toprovide a more detailed picture of the processes involved in the develop-ment of spellings for the dental fricative. The discussion that followsfocuses, therefore, on the evidence of coin epigraphy (consisting, in thisperiod, of the names of moneyers and rulers) and of pre-ninth-centurycharters preserved as single sheets. The orthography of Æthelberht ofKent’s law code is not considered here, as it survives only in a twelfth-century copy in the Textus Roffensis (Strood, Medway Archive and LocalStudies Centre, MS Drc/R1, fols 1r–3v; Rochester, s. xii1), which showsnumerous and manifest signs of orthographic updating.

The corpus of single-sheet charters has been assembled with referenceto Keynes’s invaluable handlist, and by examination of a number offacsimiles, as well as digital images of some charters provided in thehandlist.10 A list of the charters involved is provided in Table 1 (seeAppendix; note that charters are included even if they do not containinstances of the dental fricative). The dating information given for eachof the charters follows the notes in Keynes’s list, and, unless otherwisesignalled, gives the latest suggested date for the extant copy in each case:this does not necessarily signal agreement with this dating, but isintended to indicate the range of possible dates that have been putforward. The purpose of this analysis is to examine the overall patternspresented by the corpus, rather than attempting to address the problemsof dating individual charters. The problem of the lack of clear diagnosticfeatures of authenticity in Anglo-Saxon single-sheet charters has been

9 Campbell, Old English Grammar, § 57.10 S. Keynes, A Classified List of Anglo-Saxon Charters on Single Sheets <http://www.kemble.

asnc.cam.ac.uk/node/61> [accessed July 2011]; Facsimiles of Ancient Charters in the BritishMuseum, ed. E.A. Bond, 4 vols (London, 1873–8); Facsimiles of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts:Photozincographed by Command of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, ed. W. Basevi Sanders, 3 vols(Southampton, 1878–84); Chartae Latinae Antiquiores: Facsimile-Edition of the Latin ChartersPrior to the Ninth Century: Part III British Museum London, ed. A. Bruckner and R. Marichal(Olten, 1963); Chartae Latinae Antiquiores: Facsimile-Edition of the Latin Charters Prior to theNinth Century: Part IV Great Britain (without British Museum London), ed. A. Bruckner and R.Marichal (Olten, 1967); P. Wormald, Bede and the Conversion of England: The Charter Evidence,Jarrow Lecture 1984 (Jarrow, 1984); Facsimiles of Anglo-Saxon Charters, ed. S. Keynes, Anglo-Saxon Charters, supplementary volume 1 (Oxford, 1991).

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much discussed.11 In the absence of such features, a charter that is palaeo-graphically compatible with its purported date may be a copy rather thanthe original – and such ‘contemporary’ copies could in fact be producedsome decades after the date of the original, given the level of precision ofpalaeographical dating. Other features, such as evidence of use of a scribalmemorandum in the process of production, may confirm that a charteris an original.12 This does not, however, mean that charters where no suchfeatures exist are not also originals: we simply cannot tell. Given that weare concerned here with overall patterns of usage, no attempt has beenmade to distinguish between those charters whose originality is nearlycertain, and those for which it is merely probable (with the possibilitythat they are copies made within years or decades of the original).13 In afew cases it is no longer possible to confirm the accuracy of the transcrip-tions in the editions of Bond and Basevi Sanders, and I therefore signalcases where I am relying on the transcriptions in these volumes by placingthe figures in square brackets.14 Much of the evidence from the chartersconsists of personal names, but place names, ethnonyms and river namesalso occur.15

11 See the discussions in P. Chaplais, ‘Some Early Anglo-Saxon Diplomas on Single Sheets:Originals or Copies?’, in F. Ranger (ed.), Prisca Munimenta: Studies in Archival and Adminis-trative History Presented to Dr A. E. J. Hollaender (London, 1973), pp. 63–87, at pp. 63–5;Wormald, Bede and the Conversion, pp. 2–7; the introduction to Chartae Latinae Antiquiores:Part IV, ed. Bruckner and Marichal; and K.A. Lowe, ‘On the Plausibility of Old EnglishDialectology: The Ninth-Century Kentish Charter Material’, Folia Linguistica Historica 22(2001), pp. 67–102, at pp. 71–3.

12 On scribal memoranda, see M.P. Parsons, ‘Some Scribal Memoranda for Anglo-Saxon Chartersof the 8th and 9th Centuries’, Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Instituts für Geschichtsforschung.Ergänzungsbände 4 (1939), pp. 13–32.

13 Chaplais, ‘Some Early Anglo-Saxon Diplomas’, p. 65 argues that ‘if it is correct to assume that. . . an immediate need for copies is unlikely to have arisen very frequently, it follows that therisk of error in presuming all contemporary single sheets to be originals is very slight’. Such apresumption seems a reasonable basis for an analysis of this sort.

14 Facsimiles of Anglo-Saxon Charters, ed. Keynes, p. 1 regards the transcriptions in Facsimiles ofAncient Charters, ed. Bond as more reliable than those in Facsimiles of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts,ed. Basevi Sanders.

15 It will be observed that this corpus differs in construction from that employed in Oliver, ‘IrishInfluence on Early Anglo-Saxon Orthographic Practice’ and Oliver, ‘Irish Influence on Ortho-graphic Practice in Early Kent’. Oliver makes use not only of single-sheet charters, but also ofthose later copies that are identified in Wormald, Bede and the Conversion as ‘broadly trust-worthy later copies’ (Oliver, ‘Irish Influence on Early Anglo-Saxon Orthographic Practice’, p.116). The dangers of this approach are readily apparent from the tables in Oliver, ‘Irish Influenceon Early Anglo-Saxon Orthographic Practice’, pp. 117–18, which demonstrate that the additionof these later copies to Oliver’s corpus introduces <þ> even into her category of charters ‘till725’. It is difficult to account for this other than as the result of orthographic updating of theselater copies in the process of copying. While this might not impinge upon their reliability aswitnesses of land grants that took place in the eighth century, it clearly renders them problem-atic as evidence for orthographic practice during this period. It seems safer, therefore, to leavethis evidence out of this account, although a re-examination of this evidence in the light of theresults obtained from single-sheet charters might well prove useful. On the other hand, Oliverhas perhaps been too conservative in restricting her corpus to the names of witnesses. The



Evidence from single-sheet charters

Table 2 (see Appendix) presents the data in chronological order of theoriginal (or claimed) date of each document. The round- and straight-backed variants of eth (<ð> and <Ë>) are listed separately in these tablesas an aid to readers interested in variation between these forms. Thevariation is not, however, material for the argument that follows, andboth allographs are therefore discussed as forms of eth <ð>. Royal diplo-mas form the vast majority of these documents and it is likely that thesewere often drawn up by their beneficiaries or, in the case of secularbeneficiaries, by episcopal scriptoria.16 It is interesting, therefore, to notethat the spellings employed seem in some cases to pattern according tokingdom rather than archive. The <t> spellings of the dental fricative, forinstance, appear almost exclusively in Mercian royal diplomas (S 89, S 90,S 96 and the face of S 106).17 Moreover, the distribution of these spellingsis not random: in S 89 and S 106, <t> spellings occur immediatelyfollowing back vowels (S 89: sutangli, suutanglorum; S 106: cuutfert). Thefinal <t> in the form cuutfert can also be interpreted as appearing in aback phonetic environment, as breaking presupposes a back /r/ phonemein Old English (perhaps similar to the /r/ phoneme in some varieties ofModern German). After front vowels, by contrast, S 89 uses <d>, <th>and, on one occasion, the rather odd spelling <td> (as in uuilfridus,aethilric and aetdilbalt), while S 106 uses <d> (as in stidberhtae). Thesituation is slightly more complicated in S 90 and S 96, as the former isa forgery and the latter a later copy.18 In S 90 the early ninth-centuryforger (who may have been Archbishop Wulfred of Canterbury) fre-quently employs the spelling <ð>, which is consistent with the date ofcomposition. However, two instances of <t> do appear, again, bothfollowing back vowels (cutberh[tus], cutberhti). If, as Brooks very plausi-bly argues, ‘the forger made use of the witness-lists of charters of variousdates, supplemented perhaps by episcopal lists or by a record of the 747synod of Clofesho’, we should not be surprised to come across spellings of

corpus employed in this paper makes use of personal names within the text of charters as wellas in witness lists, and also includes ethnonyms, place names and river names where it is clearwhat sounds are represented by the spellings of these names. Unless otherwise signalled, thefigures given represent counts across all of these categories of evidence.

16 Charters of St Augustine’s Abbey Canterbury and Minster-in-Thanet, ed. S.E. Kelly, Anglo-SaxonCharters 4 (Oxford, 1995), p. lxxxiv and p. xciii. For analysis of the situation prevailing in theninth century, see N. Brooks, The Early History of the Church of Canterbury: Christ Church from597 to 1066 (Leicester, 1984), pp. 168–70 and pp. 327–30.

17 For the text of S 90 and the face of S 106, see Charters of Christ Church, Canterbury: Part 1, ed.N.P. Brooks and S.E. Kelly, Anglo-Saxon Charters 17 (Oxford, 2013), pp. 339–41 and pp. 363–4(nos. 12 and 16a).

18 On the forging of S 90, see Brooks, The Church of Canterbury, pp. 191–3 and pp. 317–19.

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the name of Cuthbert, archbishop of Canterbury (740–60), in which anolder spelling is preserved.19 S 96 also shows signs of modernization,although in this case the modernization is to <th>, with the form cuut-ferthi preserving a <t> spelling in one back environment (following thelong back vowel /u:/, as in mus ‘mouse’), but not in another (following/r/).

It would appear, then, that Mercian scribes in the 730s to 760s recog-nized a difference between the realizations of /q/ in front and backphonetic environments, and reflected this in employing different spell-ings for the phoneme in these two distinct contexts. This very probablyalso accounts for the three spellings of the name element bald in S 89 asbalt: rather than indicating devoicing of final [d] (i.e. pronunciation as inthe final sound of got as opposed to god in Present Day English ReceivedPronunciation), these forms probably reflect a development of the earlierform ending in the dental fricative that occurs in some early Old Englishtexts (for instance, balthhardi in S 24 and bealðheard in S 1184).20 As with/r/, the presumption must be that Old English /l/ created a back phoneticenvironment, since it induces breaking of front vowels. There is onepossible case of <t> for the dental fricative in a later document, Offa’sconfirmation of S 1184, from the 780s or 790s, in the form yrtlinga burgfor the place name Irthlingborough. However, as Ekwall points out, thisform may reflect the common development of the dental fricative to /t/when followed by /l/.21 It need not, therefore, reflect the same practice asseen in the orthography of the earlier Mercian royal diplomas.

The peculiarly Mercian quality of the <t> spelling for the dentalfricative in back phonetic environments is confirmed from a surprisingsource. S 65 appears to represent an exception, as it is an Essex charterwith two instances of <t> spellings for the dental fricative.22 Theseinstances occur in the names peohthat (Peohthað ) and (Wulfhað ),where, again, <t> represents the dental fricative following a back vowel.The form peohthat appears in the witness list (while pæogthath is the formemployed in the main text) and appears as a witness to theconfirmation. The variation between the forms pæogthath and peohthatseems to reflect the production of the main text of the original charterand its witness list in two separate stages. A useful comparison is affordedby S 293, a ninth-century charter with an attached memorandum from

19 Brooks, The Church of Canterbury, p. 318.20 Campbell, Old English Grammar, § 414. See also the discussion of the coinage of Eadbald of

Kent below. For the text of S 24, see Charters of Christ Church, ed. Brooks and Kelly, pp. 332–3(no. 11).

21 E. Ekwall, ‘Names of Trades in English Place-Names’, in J.G. Edwards, V.H. Galbraith and E.F.Jacob (eds), Historical Essays in Honour of James Tait (Manchester, 1933), pp. 79–89, at p. 80.

22 For the text of S 65, see Charters of Christ Church, ed. Brooks and Kelly, pp. 320–1 (no. 9).



which the witness list on the charter itself was compiled: Parsons recon-structs the production of this charter as involving the production of themain text by a Canterbury scribe, with the lists of names on the memo-randum for the witness list being added by two other scribes, one of themapparently associated with the West Saxon court, since his or her listconsists of the king and (mainly) laymen.23 While attached memorandado not survive among the seventh- and eighth-century diplomas, differ-ences in writing between the main text and witness list do sometimesindicate that the witness list was added at a later date, either directly tothe charter itself or via a memorandum.24 We have, then, a procedure inwhich the beneficiary or someone acting for them drafted the charter; thewitness list was then compiled as part of the process of making the grant,sometimes in the form of a separate memorandum; and if a memoran-dum was employed, the witness list was later copied onto the charteritself.25 A procedure of this sort would be entirely consistent with the tworepresentations of Peohthath’s name in S 65: in the main text, we see thespelling pæogthath produced by a local scribe (the beneficiary is Waldhere,bishop of London), while in the witness list we find the spelling peohthat,reflecting the spelling practices of a Mercian scribe (the grant was attestedby Coenred of Mercia). Whether there was a separate memorandum inthis case, or the witness list was simply added to the charter directly whenthe grant was made, is uncertain: since we are dealing with a later copy,we cannot determine whether or not the witness list on the charter waswritten by the same scribe as the main text. However, as Rumble notes,in the case of S 293, the individual who transferred the witness list fromthe memorandum to the charter made significant alterations to thespellings of some names in the list.26 The considerable differencesbetween the two forms of Peohthath’s name suggest that this did notoccur in the case of S 65, which may indicate that the witness list was inthis case written directly on the charter by a Mercian scribe at the pointwhen the grant was made, rather than returning a memorandum to becopied onto the charter at the beneficiary’s end. We cannot, however, rule

23 Parsons, ‘Some Scribal Memoranda’, p. 18.24 See, for instance, Wormald, Bede and the Conversion, p. 5 (plate I) and p. 9 (plate III) on S 8 and

S 1171, respectively. Note also the later examples listed in Parsons, ‘Some Scribal Memoranda’,p. 19.

25 Parsons, ‘Some Scribal Memoranda’, pp. 21–2 argues that in the case of S 163, anotherninth-century charter with an attached memorandum, the text and witness list on the charteritself were written at the same time, indicating that the charter was written after the point atwhich the grant was made and the scribal memorandum of witnesses composed. Keynes, AClassified List, no. 33, on the other hand, raises the possibility that ‘the witness-list was addedafter folding’, which would, if correct, suggest that this charter was also composed in thesequence main text – memorandum of witnesses – witness list.

26 A.R. Rumble, ‘The Status of Written Sources in English Onomastics’, Nomina 8 (1984),pp. 41–56, at p. 46.

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out the possibility of faithful copying of a memorandum as another wayof explaining the differing realizations of Peohthath’s name.

We have evidence, then, for Mercian orthographic practice up to the760s as using <d> and <th> spellings for the dental fricative in frontphonetic environments, but <t> in back environments. This feature isreflected in charters from a variety of archives: Worcester; Christ Church,Canterbury; and somewhere in the general vicinity of Malmesbury.27 Theland conveyed in these charters lies in Worcestershire (S 89), Wiltshire (S96) and Middlesex (S 65, S 106). This suggests that these diplomas do notsimply provide evidence for the linguistic forms of the beneficiary orthose who wrote on a beneficiary’s behalf: the witness lists will tend toreflect the language of a scribe attendant on the ruler who issued thediploma, while the main text may be more likely to provide evidence forthe forms at the beneficiary’s end. Where a separate memorandumwas employed for the witness list, however, there is a greater probabilitythat the beneficiary’s linguistic forms will appear in the witness list aswell, as they may have adjusted the names in copying them from thememorandum.

There are, then, differences to be observed between Kentish andMercian orthographic practice, but we need to bear in mind that chartersdo not simply reflect orthographic practice at the grantor’s end of thetransaction. We observe that <th> and <d> are both used in the earlierMercian charters for the dental fricative in non-initial position, in frontphonetic environments. In back phonetic environments, <t> is usedinstead. The Kentish evidence, as far as it goes, seems at first to use <d>for the non-initial dental fricative, but we cannot be sure of how it wasrepresented in initial position. The apparent absence of <th> in the veryearliest of the Kentish royal diplomas in Table 2 probably simply reflectsthe absence of the dental fricative in initial position in these charters, forthere are only three instances of initial dental fricative in the data tabu-lated in Table 2, and all three are spelt <th>: the name of the witnesstheabul in S 19 and S 21 and the river theodningc in S 114.28 We cannot,therefore, argue from the absence of <th> in S 1171 and S 8 for the lack

27 Kelly argues that S 96 is unlikely to have been a grant in favour of Malmesbury, on the groundsthat the beneficiary, an Abbot Eanberht, was probably the abbot of another house (Charters ofMalmesbury Abbey, ed. S.E. Kelly, Anglo-Saxon Charters 11 (Oxford, 2005), p. 296 (no. 49)).The charter records a grant of Æthelbald of Mercia, but is also attested by Cynewulf of Wessex,and the mixture of Mercian and West Saxon witnesses attesting the charter suggests that it wasproduced at a meeting of both kings, presumably ‘on their common border’ (Charters ofMalmesbury, ed. Kelly, pp. 294 and 298). This suggests that Eanberht’s house was in the generalregion around the West Saxon/Mercian border, which is a sufficiently close localization forlinguistic purposes.

28 For the text of S 19 and S 21, see Charters of Christ Church, ed. Brooks and Kelly, pp. 286–7 andpp. 294–5 (nos. 5 and 6).



of use of this digraph; it simply happens that names beginning with thedental fricative, being relatively infrequent, do not appear in these docu-ments.29 On the other hand, the extension of <th> to non-initial usesevidenced in the later Kentish royal diplomas in Table 2 is more likely tobe significant, as we have a fairly large number of instances of the dentalfricative in non-initial position in these data. What little evidence there is,therefore, appears consistent with, but not absolutely demonstrative of,early Kentish use of <th> initially and <d> medially and finally. In laterKentish charters, in contrast, there are signs of extension of <th> intonon-initial position. The reasons for this are unclear. Oliver’s suggestionsthat increasing Mercian influence after 725 ad caused the disappearanceof a distinctively Kentish <d> spelling for the dental fricative are plainlynot credible, as this spelling was alive and well in Mercian royal diplomaswell after 725 ad, as Table 2 shows.30 On the other hand, Mercian influ-ence causing the extension of <th> to non-initial position (as distinctfrom the eradication of <d>) is clearly a possibility, although not one thatseems terribly convincing. Indeed, the arguments that follow suggest thatorthographic influence could have travelled in the opposite direction,into Mercia (quite possibly from Kent) from around the 770s on. Thesearguments centre around the use of <ð>, a modification of roman <d> bya diacritic mark that occurs occasionally in the Kentish material fromquite early on.

The occasional use of <ð> even in early eighth-century Kentish char-ters is not straightforward to interpret. S 21 is a later eighth-century copyof S 19, and the single use of eth in S 21 replaces an instance of <d> in S19. This case is therefore readily interpreted as an instance of orthographicupdating. In S 24, however, it is harder to be sure. Since this is anotherlater copy, the use of eth could be the result of updating, but, if so, it isperhaps a little odd that seven instances of <th> were left unchanged. Itis difficult to arrive at a definite conclusion in this case, but, as we shallsee, the evidence from coin inscriptions suggests that it is plausible thatKent had a long tradition of occasional use of eth prior to this.

If there was indeed some use of eth as a minor variant in the earlyKentish royal diplomas, this contrasts sharply with the Mercian charters.Here, the evidence for <ð> before the 780s is to be found only in an earlyninth-century forgery (S 90), where it seems highly probable that <ð> isin some cases the result of scribal updating of the materials on which theforger drew and perhaps in others reflects the forger’s use of later docu-ments. The first Mercian document in which <ð> can safely be identified

29 For the text of S 8, see Charters of Christ Church, ed. Brooks and Kelly, pp. 263–4 (no. 2).30 Oliver, ‘Irish Influence on Early Anglo-Saxon Orthographic Practice’, pp. 117–18; Oliver, ‘Irish

Influence on Orthographic Practice in Early Kent’, pp. 96–7.

126 Philip A. Shaw


as the original usage is S 123, dating to 785 ad.31 In this earliest use, <ð>is used almost exclusively (with a single instance of <th>), and the samepattern obtains for the rest of the century. S 106 shows use of <d> and <t>as late as 767, yet within twenty years of the production of this document,<ð> has apparently become the norm in Mercian diplomas. This is astrikingly abrupt transition. In the Kentish documents there is the pos-sibility of occasional use of <ð> alongside other spellings, perhaps reflect-ing the gradual development of a new spelling. In the Mercian evidence,by contrast, the spelling appears to replace its predecessors remarkablycompletely within a very short space of time.

The explanation for this may be in part that the Mercian diplomas inwhich this pattern appears are mainly from Kentish archives (S 123, S 128,S 155).32 These charters could, therefore, reflect Kentish orthographicpractice, showing that eth had largely replaced the earlier practice in Kentby this time. On the other hand, S 139 is a Worcester charter, so wecannot simply argue that we only have evidence here of the orthographicpractices of the Kentish beneficiaries rather than the Mercian grantors.The evidence of the use of eth as the normal representation of the dentalfricative from the 780s onwards seems to reflect a practice of individualsworking in both Mercia and Kent.

The strong preference for <ð> in Mercian royal diplomas from the780s onwards may, therefore, reflect an increase in the use of this graphin both Mercian and Kentish orthographic practices. In Kent, we mightexpect this increase if, as suggested above, <ð> had been in occasional usefor some time in Kentish practice. Such a pattern would be consistentwith the gradual initial adoption of this graph. Studies of diffusion oflinguistic changes in populations have often shown patterns of gradualinitial adoption of a new feature, followed by a fast increase in adoption,and, finally, a gradual completion of the process of adoption: an s-curve.33

The Kentish data may be consistent with an s-curve: gradual initialadoption followed by a fast increase evident in the Mercian charters withKentish beneficiaries from the 780s on. The Mercian data, on the otherhand, suggest no initial period of gradual adoption.

Normal diffusion of a linguistic change through a population oftentends to produce an s-curve, and it is possible that the Kentish develop-ment of <ð> conforms to such a pattern. In Mercia, however, we appear

31 For the text of S 123, see Charters of Christ Church, ed. Brooks and Kelly, pp. 399–401 (no. 22).32 For the text of S 128 and S 155, see Charters of Christ Church, ed. Brooks and Kelly, pp. 410–11

and pp. 435–8 (nos. 24 and 29).33 For some historical developments in Early Modern English that appear to describe s-curves (and

some that do not), see T. Nevalainen and H. Raumolin-Brunberg, Historical Sociolinguistics:Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 2003), pp. 53–79. For some s-curvedevelopments in English over longer timescales, see Aitchison, Language Change, pp. 98–100.



to be dealing with a change that happens very quickly and without aninitial period of gradual adoption. This sort of sudden and thoroughgo-ing orthographic change is unlikely to arise organically. A more plausibleexplanation is that Mercian practice sometime in the 770s or 780s wasreformed following practice elsewhere. The exact character of such areform is, of course, difficult to establish: it may well be a matter of housestyle in a relatively small number of ecclesiastical centres. The externalinfluence need not necessarily have been from Kent, as we lack theevidence to establish what orthographic models might have been avail-able from other quarters. However, a Kentish influence would not beimplausible: linguistic history, unlike narrative history, is not alwayswritten by the victors, and the extension of Mercian power in Kent mightwell have created an environment conducive to the adoption of Kentishorthographic models.

Evidence from coin inscriptions

This development of <ð> in the charter evidence can usefully be com-pared with the ways in which the dental fricative is represented in coinepigraphy. In her recent treatment of this material, Seiler provides a tableof representations of the dental fricative in coin inscriptions whichrecords no instances of <ð> before 750 ad, and just fourteen instances inthe period 750–800 ad.34 The latter figure is a good deal too low, as thisperiod includes the very substantial coinage of Offa, many of whosemoneyers have names containing the dental fricative: Seiler’s figures arebased on Grueber, Keary and Poole’s catalogue of Anglo-Saxon coins inthe British Museum, thus missing a considerable amount of relevantmaterial.35 It will therefore be helpful to return to the coinage of Offabelow in the light of more recent catalogues of the material. Before doingso, however, we should also consider whether <ð> is really lacking incoins before 750 ad: this apparently unproblematic claim is, I wouldargue, in need of re-evaluation.

The coinage attributed to Eadbald of Kent (616–40 ad) bearsthe inscription avdvaKld– reges, or, more probably, avdvabld– reges(see Fig. 1).36 Archibald identifies the character <d–> as <d> with an

34 Seiler, ‘The Scripting of Old English’, p. 164 (Table 6).35 H.A. Grueber, C.F. Keary and R.S. Poole, A Catalogue of English Coins in the British Museum:

Anglo-Saxon Series, 2 vols (London, 1887–93).36 P. Shaw, ‘Orthographic Standardization and Seventh- and Eighth-Century Coin Inscrip-

tions’, in T. Abramson (ed.), Two Decades of Discovery (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 97–112, atp. 98.

128 Philip A. Shaw


abbreviation for the Latin genitive ending -i.37 While we cannot rule outthis identification, it seems possible that this character should in fact beidentified as the earliest extant use of eth (<ð>) in Old English. The OldEnglish name element bald is an etymological derivative of a word thatmust in Proto-Germanic have had a dental fricative rather than a stop inits stem, as is shown by related Gothic terms such as balþaba and balþei,which imply a Gothic cognate *balþ-s.38 A realization of this nameelement with a final dental fricative is sometimes reflected in some earlyOld English spellings, although in later Old English it is written with a<d>, showing that the fricative had become a stop.39 Such representationsof bald with a final dental fricative are particularly common in Kentishsources (although we might note that some early Mercian spellings of theelement as <balt> have been identified above as probably reflecting aMercian development of the dental fricative in back phonetic environ-ments). There can be little doubt, therefore, that Eadbald and thosearound him pronounced his name with a final dental fricative. In thelight of this, we might argue that the <d–> on the coinage of Eadbald ofKent is in fact the earliest use of <ð> on record, or perhaps, given itspeculiar form, that it constitutes a ‘proto-eth’, an early experiment withthe use of a diacritic to distinguish <d> used for the dental fricative from<d> used for the stop.

This does not entirely rule out the possibility that we have to do herewith an abbreviation mark, but there are good reasons why the dental

37 M. Archibald, review of D.M. Metcalf, Thrymsas and Sceattas in the Ashmolean Museum,Oxford, 3 vols (London, 1993–4), British Numismatic Journal 67 (1998 [for 1997]), pp. 150–3, atp. 152.

38 F. Holthausen, Gotisches etymologisches Wörterbuch: Mit Einschluß der Eigennamen und dergotischen Lehnwörter im Romanischen (Heidelberg, 1934), s.v. balþaba and balþei.

39 Campbell, Old English Grammar, § 414.

Fig. 1 Gold shilling/tremissis of Eadbald of Kent from the Crondall hoard (Oxford,Ashmolean Museum, HCR7587; minted 616 x 640 ad, probably at London; originalsize 13 mm, here shown around two and a half times actual size). Reproduced bykind permission of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford



fricative in this particular name element should prompt orthographicexperimentation. While the later seventh-century single-sheet charterssuggest that <d> was in all likelihood capable of being employed torepresent the dental fricative during Eadbald’s reign, the use of <d> forthis sound probably arises in the first instance because it can representthis sound in Latin. In classical Latin <d> always represents a stop, but asignificant development of Vulgar Latin in its movement towards theRomance languages was the lenition of classical Latin /d/ in intervocalicposition, producing a sound similar to the English dental fricative: thusLatin invadere produces Spanish invadir, in which the <d> often repre-sents a sound similar to [ð], whereas the instances of <d> in Spanishdonde, from Latin de unde (in which neither <d> appears betweenvowels), are realised as stops.40 Oliver ascribes the use of <d> for thedental fricative in Kent to the influence of Old Irish, in which a similarlenition of /d/ takes place.41 This is a possible, but not a necessary, line ofdevelopment of <d> for the dental fricative, as Romance lenition couldsatisfactorily account for the data. The fact that <d> only represents thedental fricative in Latin (and, for that matter, in Old Irish) betweenvowels means that it would be a satisfactory representation of manyinstances of this sound in Anglo-Saxon names, where it is relatively rareinitially, and often occurs intervocalically (as in æðel- or haðo-). The fairlyfrequent cases of the dental fricative in final position in Anglo-Saxonnames (as in -frið and -noð) would also, when Latinized by the additionof Latin inflexional endings (e.g. -fridus and -nodus), constitute intervo-calic cases. For many Old English personal names, therefore, the use of<d> for the dental fricative would be unproblematic for speakers who hadlearnt to pronounce Latin <d> as a dental fricative in intervocalic posi-tion. The name element bald, however, represents an exception: in thecase of this name element, the consonant /l/ preceding the final dentalfricative means that, even with the addition of a Latin inflexional ending,the dental fricative in this name element would never be intervocalic, andwould therefore present problems of representation. We should not,therefore, be surprised to see a name containing this element exhibitingan unusual, experimental letter form as a representation of its dentalfricative. It seems to me, therefore, that the balance of probability leans atleast a little towards regarding this character as a proto-eth, rather than<d> with an abbreviation mark. There may, then, have been a lengthygradual adoption of <ð> in Kent extending as far back as Eadbald’s reign,

40 Diccionario de la Lengua Española, 22nd edn (Madrid, 2001) <http://lema.rae.es/drae/>[accessed August 2011], s.v. invadir and donde.

41 Oliver, ‘Irish Influence on Orthographic Practice in Early Kent’, p. 102.

130 Philip A. Shaw


with the beginnings of experimentation with using a diacritic mark onthe roman graph <d> as a representation of the dental fricative datingfrom this period.

The development of <ð> in the later eighth century as the commonestway of representing the dental fricative, both in Kentish and Mercianpractices, can usefully be related to the spellings of moneyers’ names onthe coinage of Offa. The catalogue compiled by Chick, and continued upto May 2010 by Naismith, provides the best corpus of Offa’s coinage, andfrom this corpus we can assemble a body of moneyers’ names whichcontain the dental fricative.42 To this we can also add Offa’s queenCynethryth, as well as ecclesiastics and subject kings whose names appearon the coinage. The data thus obtained are presented in Table 3 (seeAppendix). The figures in this table do not indicate the number ofindividual coins bearing a given spelling, since coins are reproducedmechanically from dies, and an individual coin does not, therefore,represent a decision to use a particular orthographic form. The tableinstead gives figures for the number of different dies with a particularspelling that can be inferred from the extant coins. Each die was cut byhand, and thus the spelling in a die represents a single decision to use aparticular form, which is analogous to the decision scribes take on eachoccasion when they use a form.

The preponderance of <ð> in these data appears to fit with the rapidadoption of <ð> in the 780s, providing a measure of linguistic corrobo-ration of Naismith’s dating of the ‘substantive Light coinage’ of Offa toc.784/5 onwards.43 None of the moneyers listed in Table 3 are known tohave minted coins earlier than this phase of Offa’s coinage, so we cannotdetermine whether or not they would have employed other graphsbesides <ð> if they had minted at an earlier stage. At any rate, thepreponderance of <ð> in the coinage, as in the single-sheet charters fromthe 780s onwards, might be interpreted as evidence for the interconnect-edness of orthographic practice across those responsible for the writing ofcharters and the composition of coin inscriptions.

The coin inscriptions do not, however, show exactly the same ortho-graphic patterns as the charter evidence. The single known coin ofEaldnoth employs <d> for the dental fricative, but without more finds ofcoins of this moneyer, the significance of this is hard to judge. The factthat the Canterbury moneyers Ethelnoth and Ethelmod use <þ> is inter-esting in relation to the charter evidence discussed above: this did not

42 D. Chick, The Coinage of Offa and his Contemporaries, ed. M. Blackburn and R. Naismith(London, 2010); R. Naismith, ‘The Coinage of Offa Revisited’, British Numismatic Journal 80(2010), pp. 76–106.

43 Naismith, ‘The Coinage of Offa Revisited’, pp. 92–5.



include the use of <þ>, and we would have to look forward into the ninthcentury to find examples of this graph in use in single-sheet charters (forinstance, in the form aelfþryþ for Queen Ælfthryth in S 177).44 Thissuggests that the epigraphic context of the coinage may have provided anenvironment more conducive to experimentation with runic charactersthan the manuscript context, even outside East Anglia (where completelyrunic coin inscriptions such as those of Eadnoth occur).45 While the useof <ð> on the coinage suggests strong connections with the orthographicpractices of manuscript writing, the presence of <þ> may also indicatethat these connections operated in both directions: the coinage mayprovide an important avenue for the influence of epigraphic conventionsupon manuscript orthography, as much as vice versa.

The use of <d> for the dental fricative on the coins of ArchbishopÆthelheard is, at first glance, rather surprising. Since Æthelheard wasconsecrated in 793 ad,46 there can be no question of these coins havingbeen produced before the growth in use of <ð> at the expense of usagessuch as <d> for the dental fricative. However, as Table 2 shows, <d> wasin use in Mercia for the dental fricative in front phonetic environments(as in the name Æthelheard) up to the later 760s at least. It is clearly quitefeasible that a man who became an archbishop in 793 ad should have hadhis schooling in or before the 760s. Although we know little of Æthel-heard before he became Archbishop of Canterbury, he had been an abbotin Lindsey, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that his schoolingtaught him the orthographic practices for representing vernacular namesthat we have observed in Mercian writing up to the 760s.47 We shouldtherefore expect Æthelheard to have grown up spelling his own namewith <d> for the dental fricative. The fact that his coinage bears a <d>spelling, in stark contrast to the established orthographic practice acrossalmost the whole of the Mercian coinage of this period, seems to testifyto the insistence of a powerful man that on a visible sign of his power andinfluence, his name should be spelt in the good old way.48 Of course,Æthelheard’s name appears in forms with <ð> in some Mercian royaldiplomas during his archiepiscopate: for instance, in S 139 his name

44 See Keynes, A Classified List, no. 40.45 Seiler, ‘The Scripting of Old English’, p. 164.46 A. Williams, ‘Æthelheard (d. 805)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2006)

<http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8910> [accessed July 2011].47 Williams, ‘Æthelheard (d. 805)’.48 P. Bibire, ‘Moneyers’ Names on Ninth-Century Southumbrian Coins: Philological Approaches

to Some Historical Questions’, in M.A.S. Blackburn and D.N. Dumville (eds), Kings, Currencyand Alliances: History and Coinage of Southern England in the Ninth Century (Woodbridge,1998), pp. 155–66, at pp. 159–66 identifies a ninth-century pattern of greater central control ofrulers’ names than of moneyers’ names on Southumbrian coinages. The coins of Æthelheardsuggest that at least in this case a late eighth-century potentate exercised similar orthographiccontrol.

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appears in the form æðelheardi, and in S 155 in the forms aeðilheardo andaeðilheard. These spellings are unremarkable, reflecting the normal use of<ð> that we would expect to see employed by scribes writing at this date.Apparently Æthelheard was in general unable, unwilling or unconcernedto micro-manage the spelling choices of scribes producing charters. It is,however, interesting to note that Æthelheard’s name is spelt using <d> inthe witness list of the single-sheet charter London, British Library,Cotton Augustus ii. 55 (S 1259), in which Æthelheard himself is respon-sible for the transaction recorded. In this case, perhaps Æthelheard wasmore able to control the representation of his name (although the formof his name in the main text should perhaps be read as aeðilheardus:compare the representation of <ð> in the name heahfirð on the dorse).When we consider that most other charters attested by Æthelheard mayhave been compiled by scribes at grantor and grantee ends of the trans-action (one or both of which may have been out of Æthelheard’s directcontrol), whereas coins were presumably produced under Æthelheard’swatchful eye in Canterbury, it is easy to see that the coinage offered notjust a more public, but also a much more easily controlled canvas for theexpression of Æthelheard’s old-fashioned spelling preferences.

The evidence for continuing development of Old English spellingpractices in the late eighth century demonstrates the large timescale andcomplex and various processes involved in the creation of the relativelystable Old English vernacular orthography that we see in the Old Englishproductions of the ninth to eleventh centuries. Already in the eighthcentury, we see movement away from a simple attempt to match OldEnglish sounds with roman letters to whose Latin sound values theyapproximated. As we have seen, moreover, the coinage of Eadbald ofKent may even provide evidence for one such development beginningwithin a generation of Augustine’s arrival. Wherever we wish to place thebeginnings of experimentation with a modified <d> or <D> as a repre-sentation of the dental fricative, however, it is important to note that therapid growth of <ð> in the later eighth century takes place against abackground of fairly competent Latinity. The divergence of the twoorthographic traditions is suggestive of strong education in both Latinand Old English orthographic practices during this period, and the rapidadoption of <ð> in Mercian practice also points in this direction. Thedecline in Latinity that has been identified in single-sheet charter evi-dence of the 830s to 880s,49 however, shows some signs of promptingconvergence of vernacular and Latin orthographic practices, with Latin

49 M. Lapidge, ‘The Study of Latin Texts in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, in M. Lapidge, Anglo-Latin Literature 600–899 (London, 1996), pp. 409–54, at pp. 435–6, and N. Brooks, The EarlyHistory of the Church of Canterbury: Christ Church from 597 to 1066 (Leicester, 1984), pp. 170–4.



spellings reflecting scribes’ knowledge of Old English orthographic prac-tice. Spellings such as subgectione in S 1204, monahis in S 344 and silfamin S 287 are explicable in terms of sound values with which <g>, <h> and<f> were used in Old English orthography.50 Lapidge raises the possibilitythat oddities of spelling in these charters may reflect the ways in whichscribes pronounced Latin, while Brooks suggests influence from ‘vernacu-lar speech and pronunciation’, including dialect features.51 These factorsmay indeed account for some oddities in the orthography of these char-ters; but the use of <g> to represent the sound [j] (as in Old English gear‘year’) in Latin subiectione, for instance, reflects a perfectly ordinarypronunciation of the Latin word. In cases such as this, we have to doneither with the influence of vernacular pronunciation nor with changesin Latin pronunciation, but simply with a greater familiarity with OldEnglish orthographic norms than those of Latin. In other words, formssuch as these suggest that our ninth-century incompetents in Latin werenevertheless literate in Old English, and, in their production of Latintexts, inadvertently provide evidence for Old English spelling practices ofthis period. This is not the place for a full exploration of this material asevidence for Old English orthography, but this represents a useful direc-tion for future research.

Conclusions

The foregoing discussion demonstrates that Anglo-Saxon coin epigraphyhas a good deal of potential as evidence for the ways in which romanalphabet orthographies for representing Old English developed. In thecase of Eadbald’s coinage, we may have evidence for the beginnings of theuse of <d> with a diacritic marking – a form we might term proto-eth –well before the earliest manuscript evidence for this graph. While wecannot be certain of this identification, it would fit with the potentialevidence for the gradual initial adoption of <ð> that we see in the earliestKentish single-sheet charters. At the same time, the consideration ofcharters alongside coin epigraphy allows us to identify not only a suddenand remarkably thoroughgoing adoption of <ð> in Mercian contexts,suggestive of some sort of reform of spelling conventions, but also thecontinuing preference of at least one older individual for the earlier use of<d> to represent the dental fricative.

These findings have important wider implications for our understand-ing of the development of orthographic practices in early Anglo-Saxon

50 For these forms, see Lapidge, ‘The Study of Latin’, pp. 452–3.51 Lapidge, ‘The Study of Latin’, p. 436. Brooks, The Early History, pp. 170–1.

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England. This adds a new dimension to the picture of progress towardsless ambiguous spellings outlined by Seiler, suggesting that, while we lackthe evidence for a detailed sociolinguistic treatment of such develop-ments, we should nevertheless be sensitive to the fact that factors such asage, educational background, and possibly even language policies affectthe orthographic behaviour of individuals.52 We should not be surprisedto find that resistance to orthographic change also formed part of thepicture, just as it sometimes has in more recent attempts at orthographicimprovement elsewhere in the world.53 This resistance is perhaps all themore to be expected in cases where changes are imposed, rather thandiffusing through a population over an extended period – and it isintriguing to discover that the Mercian use of <ð> appears to spring intoexistence in a very short space of time, rather than spreading gradually, asit may have done in Kent. The evidence may be too sparse to admit ofabsolute certainty, but what evidence we have seems most readily expli-cable as the result of some sort of reform of Mercian orthographicpractice in relation to the dental fricative in the 770s or 780s. While wecertainly cannot rule out influences from other parts of Southumbria, itmight make sense that Mercian control in Kent afforded an opportunityfor the adoption of Kentish practice.

The evidence for individual spelling preferences, and for composi-tional processes in charters that involve scribes from different areas in asingle production, also complicates the picture. The latter suggests thatwe cannot simply expect royal diplomas to reflect either the linguisticforms of their beneficiaries or of the kingdom whose ruler issued them.54

Instead, we may well see a mixture of forms from both ends of thetransaction – and in some cases we may even be fortunate enough to beable to disentangle these, as in the discussion of S 65 above. The fact thatthe coinage reflects an individual spelling preference in at least one casemay indicate something of the interest that Archbishop Æthelheard (orsomeone very close to him) took in the form of the coins that bore hisname. On the other hand, the appearance of <þ> in the coinage wellbefore it appears in single-sheet charters may point in the other direction,

52 Seiler, ‘The Scripting of Old English’.53 See, for instance, D.R. Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of

Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, NH, 2004), pp. 125–34 on resistance to reform ofKikuyu orthography. I am grateful to Alaric Hall for pointing out this discussion to me. For ageneral discussion of the phenomenon, see M. Sebba, Spelling and Society: The Culture andPolitics of Orthography Around the World (Cambridge, 2007), p. 75.

54 This undermines the insistence of T.E. Toon, The Politics of Early Old English Sound Change(New York, 1983), p. 201 on the Mercian-ness of texts that are ‘non-Northumbrian, non-WestSaxon, and non-Kentish, and written when Mercian kings were in control’. See also Lowe, ‘Onthe Plausibility of Old English Dialectology’ for a cogent critique of Toon’s use of charterevidence.



towards bottom-up introduction of this character via individualsinvolved in epigraphic rather than manuscript textual production. Takentogether with the overall preference for <ð> in the coinage of Offa, thissuggests that orthographic influence moved quite readily in both direc-tions between epigraphic and manuscript producers, and that we maywell be dealing with a relatively small writing population, quite possiblywith a degree of overlap in the personnel responsible for manuscriptproduction and the provision of models for cutting coin dies.

There remains much to discover about the development of OldEnglish roman alphabet orthographies. Work on the prehistory of suchorthographies is clearly in order, as is further work on other developmentsin orthographic practice across the seventh to ninth centuries. This alsooffers us the opportunity to shift our focus away from much-discussedphonological features as indicators of dialect,55 recognizing the richpotential that a better understanding of orthographic variation has forour appreciation of the ways in which a wider range of sociolinguisticvariables operated among the literate in early Anglo-Saxon England.

University of Leicester

55 See, for instance, Toon, The Politics of Early Old English and J. Hines, ‘The Writing of Englishin Kent: Contexts and Influences from the Sixth to the Ninth Century’, North-Western Euro-pean Language Evolution 50/51 (2007), pp. 63–92.

136 Philip A. Shaw


Appendix

Table 1 Corpus of pre-ninth-century single-sheet charters

Sawyer no.Keynesno. B&K no. Date of Original

Date ofExtant Copy Facsimiles

8 1 2 679 s. viiimed BMFacs., vol. 1, no. 1; ChLA. 3, no. 18219 5 5 697 or 712 contemporary OSFacs., vol. 3, no. 1; ChLA. 3, no. 22020 3 7 699 s. ix BAFacs., no. 121 6 6 700 or 715 s. viii2 BMFacs., vol. 1, no. 4; ChLA. 3, no. 18923 8 10 732 contemporary BMFacs., vol. 1, no. 6; ChLA. 3, no. 19024 11 11 741 (? for 750) s. viiiex BMFacs., vol. 1, no. 8; ChLA. 3, no. 19231 14 14 748 x 762 s. viii/ix OSFacs., vol. 3, no. 3; ChLA. 3, no. 22135 18 778 contemporary BMFacs., vol. 2, no. 4; ChLA. 3, no. 1951

56 13 759 contemporary BMFacs., vol. 2, no. 2; ChLA. 3, no. 17959 16 770 s. ixin OSFacs., vol. 2, ‘Worcester’; ChLA. 4,

no. 27465 7 9 704 s. viiiex BMFacs., vol. 1, no. 3; ChLA. 3, no. 18889 9 736 contemporary BMFacs., vol. 1, no. 7; ChLA. 3, no. 18390 10 12 742 s. ix1 OSFacs., vol. 1, no. 196 12 757 c. 800 BMFacs., vol. 4, no. 3; ChLA. 3, no. 193106 (face) 15 16(a) 767 contemporary BMFacs., vol. 1, no. 9; ChLA. 3, no. 186114 19 779 contemporary BMFacs., vol. 1, no. 10; ChLA. 3, no. 184123 21 22 785 contemporary OSFacs., vol. 3, no. 5; ChLA. 3, no. 222128 22 24 788 contemporary OSFacs., vol. 1, no. 2; ChLA. 4, no. 235139 23 793 x 796 contemporary BMFacs., vol. 2, no. 5; ChLA. 3, no. 180155 24 29 799 contemporary OSFacs., vol. 3, no. 7; ChLA. 3, no. 223264 17 778 up to s. xin BMFacs., vol. 2, no. 3; ChLA. 3, no. 1941171 2 676 x 693 contemporary (up to

donum on line 17,thereafter s. viii2)2

BMFacs., vol. 1, no. 2; ChLA. 3, no. 187;Wormald, plate 3

1184 20 780 (confirmation787 x 796)

contemporary(contemporary)

BAFacs., no. 2; ChLA. 4, no. 236

No Sawyer no.:see BCS,no. 115

4 704 x 705 s. viiiex BMFacs., vol. 1, no. 5; ChLA. 3, no. 185

B&K = Charters of Christ Church, Canterbury: Part 1, ed. N.P. Brooks and S.E. Kelly, Anglo-Saxon Charters 17 (Oxford, 2013)BAFacs. = Facsimiles of Anglo-Saxon Charters, ed. S. Keynes, Anglo-Saxon Charters, supplementary volume 1 (Oxford, 1991)BMFacs. = Facsimiles of Ancient Charters in the British Museum, ed. E.A. Bond, 4 vols (London, 1873–8)ChLA. 3 = Chartae Latinae Antiquiores: Facsimile-Edition of the Latin Charters Prior to the Ninth Century: Part III British MuseumLondon, ed. A. Bruckner and R. Marichal (Olten, 1963)ChLA. 4 = Chartae Latinae Antiquiores: Facsimile-Edition of the Latin Charters Prior to the Ninth Century: Part IV Great Britain(without British Museum London), ed. A. Bruckner and R. Marichal (Olten, 1967)Keynes = S. Keynes, A Classified List of Anglo-Saxon Charters on Single Sheets <http://www.kemble.asnc.cam.ac.uk/node/61>[accessed July 2011]OSFacs. = Facsimiles of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: Photozincographed by Command of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, ed. W. BaseviSanders, 3 vols (Southampton, 1878–84)Wormald = P. Wormald, Bede and the Conversion of England: The Charter Evidence, Jarrow Lecture 1984 (Jarrow, 1984)1 Keynes, A Classified List, no. 18 notes that ‘a note (in Latin and English) specifying appurtenant meadow was added by a secondhand, s. ix (or later)’. This addition has not been included in the figures given below as it seems likely that this addition representsthe original of this note, and therefore falls well outside the chronological parameters of this investigation.2 See Wormald, Bede and the Conversion, plate 3 on dating.



Tabl

e2

Spel

lings

ofth

ede

ntal

fric

ativ

ein

pre-

nint

h-ce

ntur

ych

arte

rs

Dateof

Original

Dateof

Extant

Copy

ðË

dt

thOther

Forms

Archive

Kingdom

Givenat

Sno.

676

x693

cont

empo

rary

(s.v

iii2 )

1(3)1

Bar

king

Ess

ex1171

679

s.vi

iimed

3<t

h>=

/þh/

x2C

hris

tC

hurc

h,C

ante

rbur

y(e

xR

ecul

ver)

Ken

tR

ecul

ver

8

697

or712

cont

empo

rary

452

1C

hris

tC

hurc

h,C

ante

rbur

y(e

xLy

min

ge)

Ken

t19

699

s.ix

31

Chr

ist

Chu

rch,

Can

terb

ury

Ken

t20

700

or715

s.vi

ii21

32

Chr

ist

Chu

rch,

Can

terb

ury

(ex

Lym

inge

)K

ent

21

704

s.vi

iiex3

21

Chr

ist

Chu

rch,

Can

terb

ury

Ess

ex65

704

x705

s.vi

iiex2

Chr

ist

Chu

rch,

Can

terb

ury

Lond

on(b

isho

pric

)n/

a(B

CS,

no.115

)732

cont

empo

rary

2C

hris

tC

hurc

h,C

ante

rbur

y(e

xLy

min

ge)

Ken

tC

ante

rbur

y23

736

cont

empo

rary

153

4<t

d>x1

Wor

cest

erM

erci

a89

741

(?fo

r750

)s.

viiiex

17

Chr

ist

Chu

rch,

Can

terb

ury

(ex

Lym

inge

)K

ent

Lym

inge

24

742

s.ix1

141

2C

hris

tC

hurc

h,C

ante

rbur

yM

erci

aC

lofe

shoh

90

748

x762

s.vi

ii/ix

2C

hris

tC

hurc

h,C

ante

rbur

y(e

xR

ecul

ver)

Ken

t31

757

c.800

16

[1]

<th>

=/þ

h/x1

?M

alm

esbu

ryM

erci

a96

767

cont

empo

rary

22

Chr

ist

Chu

rch,

Can

terb

ury

Mer

cia

106

(fac

e)770

s.ix

in3

21

Wor

cest

erH

wic

ce59

778

upto

s.xin

4[1

]?

Bed

wyn

Wes

sex

264

779

cont

empo

rary

2Ev

esha

mM

erci

aH

artle

ford

/G

umle

y114

780

cont

empo

rary

32

1Se

lsey

Sout

hSa

xons

Sels

ey1184

785

cont

empo

rary

101

Chr

ist

Chu

rch,

Can

terb

ury

(ex

Lym

inge

)M

erci

aC

hels

ea123

787

x796

cont

empo

rary

41

Sels

eyM

erci

aIr

thlin

g-bo

roug

h1184

788

cont

empo

rary

21

Chr

ist

Chu

rch,

Can

terb

ury

Mer

cia

Che

lsea

128

793

x796

cont

empo

rary

51

Wor

cest

erM

erci

aC

lofe

shoh

139

799

cont

empo

rary

91

Chr

ist

Chu

rch,

Can

terb

ury

Mer

cia

Tam

wor

th155

1T

hena

me

guda

may

also

cont

ain

the

dent

alfr

icat

ive,

asit

coul

dbe

am

onot

hem

atic

nam

efo

rmed

from

the

elem

ent

guð

that

isfa

irly

com

mon

indi

them

atic

nam

es(s

eena

mes

ingu

th-

inth

ePr

osop

ogra

phy

ofA

nglo

-Sax

onEn

glan

d<h

ttp:

//w

ww

.pas

e.ac

.uk>

[acc

esse

dJu

ly2011

]).

2O

liver

iden

tifie

sone

ofth

ese

inst

ance

sof<

d>as

anex

ampl

eof

<ð>,

butt

hisi

sam

isre

adin

g:th

em

anus

crip

trea

ding

iscl

earl

y<d

>(s

eeO

liver

,‘Ir

ish

Influ

ence

onE

arly

Ang

lo-S

axon

Ort

hogr

aphi

cPr

acti

ce’,

p.131

(n.22)

and

Oliv

er,

‘Iris

hIn

fluen

ceon

Ort

hogr

aphi

cPr

acti

cein

Ear

lyK

ent’,

p.107)

.3

Thi

sfig

ure

incl

udes

thre

ein

stan

ces

inth

ede

uter

othe

me

-bal

t,di

scus

sed

abov

e,p.123.

138 Philip A. Shaw


Table 3 Representations of the dental fricative in the names of moneyers of Offaand other names on Offa’s coinage. The figures indicate the number of differentdies evidenced for the given spelling of each name, and each die is counted onlyonce, even where it contains two instances of the dental fricative, as in all casesthe spelling of both instances is identical

Name ð d þ Mint1

Æthelweald 33 possibly LondonEaldnoth 1 uncertain: Canterbury or LondonWinoth 23 very probably LondonEthelnoth 19 (+ 1 garbled form) very probably CanterburyEadnoth 3 (in fully runic context) very probably East AngliaOethelred 4 probably East AngliaCuthberht 2 possibly LondonWulfhath 2 probably LondonEthelmod 7 very probably CanterburyÆthelheard

(archbishop)21 Canterbury

Cynethryth(queen)

32 very probably Canterbury(moneyer = Eoba)

Æthelberht II ofEast Anglia

1 very probably East Anglia(moneyer = Lul)

1 With the exception of that for Archbishop Æthelheard, these mint attributions and their categorizationfollow Naismith, ‘The Coinage of Offa Revisited’, p. 82 (Table 1).



Documents

Adapting the roman alphabet for writing Old English: evidence from coin epigraphy and single-sheet charters