About ASChart

Funded as a pilot project for six months by the BA, the aim of ASChart is provide historians with new ways of interrogating Anglo-Saxon charters.

Charters dating to before 900 have been ‘marked up’ using the electronic tagging system known as XML. This permits certain types of information to be identified, recognised, and compared between charters. It is hoped that additional funding will be found to allow the rest of the corpus to be entered, and a number of other types of information to be marked up.

In this phase of the project the following charter elements have been marked up:

  • Names
  • Invocations
  • Proems
  • Dating clauses (organised by type)
  • Dispositive words
  • Curses
  • Places of Promulgation

In the future the following indexes on the following formulas will also be generated:

  • Locations
  • Attestation types
  • Immunities
  • Reserved rights
  • Territorial descriptors
  • Statements of powers
  • Immunity clauses
  • Royal styles (currently available online in PASE)
  • Episcopal styles (currently available online in PASE)
  • Biblical quotations / allusions
  • Other stock phrases

Eventually, this will permit users to create their own searches based on different combinations of the above elements.