The Gumley Charter of 749

The charter may be found as B178 (S92, MS 2). W. H. Stevenson considers this text suspicious because of the use of same proem and anathema in a suspicious Abingdon charter (B891; S583) copied in house's twelfth-century cartulary; however, the logic of the situation would dictate that the Abingdon charter was copied from the Gumley charter, which was avaliable to William of Malmesbury (who quoted it without the anathema in his Gesta regum ) and therefore was probably also available to the Abingdon chronicler. The oddities of the contents of the charter, discussed in Chapter 1, also suggest its genuineness, as they were so troubling to twelfth-century writers that they tended to correct them by their own standards – no forger would create such a document. The text of the main body of the charter is as follows: There are fourteen subscriptions, including Æthelbald, two bishops (Huita, ‘humble Bishop of the Mercian Church’, i.e., of Lichfield, and Bishop Torthelm of Leicester) and eleven laymen.