Æthelflæd and the Lacunae in Cotton Charter VIII.27 (S221)

The charter known as S221 survives in a single-sheet original, held in the British Library under the shelfmark Cotton Charter VIII.27. Issued in 901 for the church community of Much Wenlock, it records several grants and exchanges of land. In his now-ubiquitous handbook that supplies the charter its identifying number, Peter Sawyer describes it as being issued by ‘Æthelred and Æthelflæd, rulers of Mercia’. This makes it one of the few charters that can be (or is usually) directly connected to the reign of Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians (d.918) in the early tenth century.