About my transcriptions of Worcester's early cartularies

I transcribed the texts of the St. Wulfstan Cartulary and Liber Wigornensis on this web site from microfilms of the various Worcester cartulary manuscripts, BL MSS Cotton TIberius A. xiii, Cotton Nero E. i, part 2, and Additional MS 46204; in the summer of 2006, I was able to check my transcriptions with the manuscripts themselves. In the process of preparing these transcriptions, I also consulted other early manuscript witnesses and early-modern transcriptions of pre-Conquest and Conquest-era Worcester records, including London, BL Additional Charters 19788, 19789, 19790, 19792,19795; BL MS Cotton Augustus ii, nos. 3, 6, 9, 30; BL MS Cotton Vitellius C. ix, fos. 58 - 62, 129 - 131v; BL MS Harley 4660; London, Lambeth Palace Library MS 585, pp. 536 - 40; Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Dugdale 39, fos. 113r - 120v; Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson 445; Worcester Cathedral Library D & C, Register 1, and Worcester Cathedral Library Additional MS (the 'Uhtred Charter').
My goal is to present the texts of these records in a readable fashion that retains as many of the apparent orthographic features found in the manuscripts as possible. I have silently expanded abbreviations and eliminated line divisions, but otherwise have limited proposed emendations to regularizing word spacing and division. I had initially intended my transcriptions to reproduce the word divisions and spacing observable in the manuscripts; securing the British Library's permission to append manuscript images to my transcriptions rendered this consideration moot. The punctuation in the transcriptions reflects the pointing visible on the microfilm images.

Capitalization presented a number of problems: Worcester scribes used varieties of minuscule script in both LW and the St. Wulfstan cartulary, but both capital and majuscule letter forms were also used sporadically. I have represented occurrences of capital and majuscule letter forms in the manuscripts with capital letters in the transcriptions, except where the letter form appears to be a component of a frequently employed abbreviation or ligatured compression (such as the capital "Q:" for an enclitic "-que" and the ligatured "nS" and "NT" used in the St. Wulfstan cartulary). I have transcribed occurrences of "e-caudata" as "ae" (or "oe", in one case), while use of the "ash" graph or ligatured "ae" in the manuscripts is represented by a ligatured "ae" in the transcriptions.

My transcriptions of both Liber Wigornensis and the St. Wulfstan Cartulary fragments incorporate a few reconstructed readings. The Tiberius manuscript containing LW and 'Hemming's Cartulary' was damaged in the Cotton Library fire of 1731; parts of several folios are unreadable on microfilm and difficult to read in the manuscript itself. Where text is missing due to the loss of sections of the manuscript, I set the reconstructed text in capital letters enclosed by square brackets; where damage such as staining obscured the text on the microfilm image, I silently reconstructed the passage based on Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson 445, a seventeenth-century transcript of Cotton Tiberius A. xiii that also was the basis of Hearne's 1723 edition of Cotton MS Tiberius A. xiii. The transcriptions of the five fragmentary texts in the St. Wulfstan Cartulary are based on the versions of the corresponding texts from LW as recorded in Rawlinson 445: the portions of these texts which are visible on the BL MS Additional 46204 fragments are underlined in the transcriptions.