The Cambridge Old English Reader

There are some sixty vernacular documents of varying length which may loosely be described as Anglo-Saxon ‘wills’. They were made by kings and ecclesiastics as well as laymen and laywomen. The beneficiaries may be family and friends when personal effects are involved, but in the case of land, it is the church or monastery which usually benefits. Because such institutions needed to maintain a record of dispositions, to guard against possible litigation over their property, many wills survive only as copies in ‘cartularies’ – volumes of charters kept by the churches. The ‘Codex Wintoniensis’ (now London, British Library, Additional 15350) is the cartulary of St Swithun's, Winchester, written in the first half of the twelfth century. Among the items there is the will of Ælfgifu.

This woman has not been positively identified, but she was probably of royal descent and it has been conjectured that she was married to (but then divorced from) King Eadwig (957–9). Her will can be dated between 966 and 975 for two main reasons. First, she makes a bequest to Romsey Abbey in Hampshire, and this is likely to have been after the old foundation was re-established by King Edgar in 967. Second, the Liber Eliensis – ‘Book of Ely’, a twelfth-century compilation treating the history of Ely Abbey in Cambridgeshire – tells us that Edgar gave to Ely the estate at Meassewyrthe, which Ælfgifu, as she says (lines 13–15), left to him at her death; in other words, she must have died before Edgar.

Although Anglo-Saxon wills are the predecessors of the modern ‘last will and testament’, they are not documents which formally effect the transfer of bequests; they are more like written memoranda of the declared intention to make such transfer. Their oral character (attested by the use of cwydes in line 2) reflects their origin in Germanic legal practice.

The extant copy of Ælfgifu's will is full of unusual spellings, though it is not clear how many are original and how many due to the idiosyncrasies of its late copyist. The most prevalent is æ for e, whether medial or terminal, long or short (Ælfgyfæ, 1, Godæs, 2, þǣ, 3 and 26, pæniga, 28, and so on), and in fact, if this is ignored, the language is fairly conventional late WS.