Peter Sawyer’s Anglo-Saxon Charters: an Annotated List and Bibliography was first published in 1968. It provided a comprehensive, systematic and accurate guide to the entire corpus of charters, and immediately transformed the study of the subject.
Charters were previously known by their numbers in the great nineteenth-century editions by Kemble (KCD) and Birch (BCS); now they are invariably known by their number in ‘Sawyer’, e.g. S 876.
The revision and updating of Sawyer’s catalogue began in the early 1990s. It was undertaken by Dr Susan Kelly, under the auspices of the BA-RHS Joint Committee on Anglo-Saxon Charters, based in Cambridge and with funding from the Leverhulme Trust and the Isaac Newton Trust. The ‘Revised Sawyer’ was put up on the forerunner of the ‘Kemble’ website in January 1999.
In 2003 Dr Rebecca Rushforth began work on the completion of the revision and updating of the ‘Revised Sawyer’, and on the development of its online manifestation, known as the ‘Electronic Sawyer’. The project was based in the Department of ASNC, University of Cambridge, and was funded by the AHRC.
The ‘Electronic Sawyer’ is based on a webserver at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College, London. It first became available online in 2007; it was upgraded and re-launched in 2010, and remains in a state of development.
A useful feature of the ‘Electronic Sawyer’ is the provision of texts taken from the volumes edited as part of the BA/RHS series and published by the British Academy; more will be added when circumstances allow. The first set of texts was made ready for online publication by Dr David Pelteret; some of them were provided by Dr Pelteret with English translations. This material was made available here [link to old version of the Kemble website, to be taken offline in 2011], with further explanation, pending incorporation of the texts (and translations) into the ‘Electronic Sawyer’ itself.