While the Staffordshire Hoard is dazzling people across the Midlands another Anglo Saxon treasure is proving just as precious, as Chris Upton finds out.

You’ll have noticed, for sure, that the Staffordshire Hoard is currently making a triumphal tour of the Midlands.

Like some marauding Saxon fyrd (their name for small army) it has conquered Birmingham and Stoke, and lately moved on to Stafford, Lichfield and Tamworth.

A second exhibition, just as interesting, is pursuing the Saxon gold around the region, helping to fill in the puzzling jigsaw of history we call the Dark Ages.

Two things defined the man of status in the Anglo-Saxon age. One was gold (preferably large quantities of the stuff) and the other was land.

Both could be, and were, handed out by a grateful king to his faithful thegns as an act of formal (and calculated) generosity. No doubt gold felt mighty good in the hand, but land offered greater continuity of possession, and was not as easily mislaid.

From the moment such gifts of land were set down on parchment, the Dark Ages become a good deal lighter.

It’s not simply that the document implies a shift into an age of literacy; the survival of such charters can shine a light onto the people who wrote and signed it in ways that archaeology never can.

So important did written evidence of landownership become that the estate itself was known as “bookland”.

And holding onto a charter was the only sure way of ensuring that the land remained yours. That is why so many of these documents have been passed down to us, along with (I might add) a fair few forgeries too.

Around 1,500 Anglo-Saxon charters have been preserved in all, of which only 200 survive as individual documents.

Staffordshire Record Office has more than its fair share of these, including one of the most important of all, the Will of Wulfric Spot, dating back to 1004.

To coincide the arrival of the Staffordshire Hoard, many of these charters were on display in the record office.

They are, sadly, too precious to go on tour with the Hoard, but the exhibition which accompanied them is making the journey.

Typically each charter describes lands granted by a king to an individual, or an individual to a church or abbey.

Best known are the charters which outline the estates with which Wulfric endowed the abbey of Burton-on-Trent, or those which Wulfrun gave to the minster in Wolverhampton in 985.

As it happens Wulfrun may well have been the mother of Wulfric, though this is not certain.