Two lost documents of King Athelstan

Abstract

TheLiber Vitaeof Durham is a well known and frequently studied document. Now preserved in the British Library, London, under the press-mark Cotton Domitian vii, it consists of a list of benefactors to St Cuthbert's community, or, at least, of those for whom the prayers of the community were solicited. The names were written in alternate lines of gold and silver in the early part of the ninth century, and very little was added for two centuries or more. Then, between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, many other names were written in, and the book was even occasionally used as a kind of register for documents. An important exception to this generalization consists of the nameaeðelstan rexadded at the top of 12r in a mid-tenth-century hand which attempts to imitate some of the features of the original script. King Atheistan (924–39) was remembered as a great benefactor to St Cuthbert's and it is fitting that he should have been thus commemorated.

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