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English (and European) Royal Charters: from Reading to reading Nicholas Vincent University of East Anglia What follows was first delivered as a lecture ‘off the cuff’ in November 2018, in circumstances rather different from those in which, writing this in January 2021, I now set down an extended text. In the intervening two and a bit years, Brexit has come, and gone. The Covid virus has come, but shows no immediate sign of going. When I lectured in 2018, although the edition of The Letters and Charters of King Henry II was in press, the publishers were still working to produce proofs. These were eventually released in December 2019, ensuring that I spent the entire period of Covid lockdown, from March to December 2020 correcting and re-correcting 4,200 proof pages. The first 3,200 of these were published, in six stout volumes, at the end of December 2020.1 A seventh volume, of indexes, should appear in the spring of 2021, leaving an eighth volume, the ‘Introduction’, for completion and publication later this year. All told, these eight volumes assemble an edition of 4,640 items, derived from 286 distinct archival repositories: the largest such assembly of materials ever gathered for a twelfth-century king not just of England but of any other realm, European or otherwise. In a lecture delivered at the University of Reading, as a part of a symposium intended to honour one of Reading’s more distinguished former professors, I shall begin with the debt that I and the edition owe to Professor Sir James (henceforth ‘Jim’) Holt.2 It was Jim, working from Reading in the early 1970s, who struck the spark from which this great bonfire of the vanities was lit.
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