Ælfwold II (Bishop of Crediton)

Ælfwold (or Ælfweald or Aelfwold) was a medieval Bishop of Crediton.

Life

Ælfwold was a Benedictine monk at Glastonbury Abbey^[1] before he was elected to Crediton between 986 and 987. He died between sometime before a time frame between 1011 and 1015.^[2]

Will

Ælfwold's will is still extant, and the hand drawing up the will matches the hand that drew up a charter of 997 from King Æthelred II to Ælfwold.^[3]

In his will, Ælfwold freed all the slaves that had worked on his estates, suggesting the existence of slavery in Anglo-Saxon England, was tempered by the need to free such slaves on death.^[4]

Citations

References

• Chaplais, Pierre (1985). Mayr-Harting, Henry and R. I. Moore, ed. The Royal Anglo-Saxon 'Chancery' of the Tenth Century Revisited. Studies in Medieval History Presented to R. H. C. Davis. London: Hambledon Press. pp. 41–51. ISBN 0-907628-68-0. 
• Fryde, E. B.; Greenway, D. E.; Porter, S.; Roy, I. (1996). Handbook of British Chronology (Third Edition, revised ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-56350-X. 
• Knowles, David (1976). The Monastic Order in England: A History of its Development from the Times of St. Dunstan to the Fourth Lateran Council, 940-1216 (Second Edition, reprint ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-05479-6. 

External links

• Ælfwald 53 at Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England