From original manuscripts David Howlett edits, translates and analyses twenty-four Latin charters – English, Welsh, Cornish, Irish, Scottish and Hebridean – from the seventh century to the fifteenth, as monuments of thought and composition parallel to the literary and epigraphic traditions of these islands. This revolutionary analysis presents characters of local variety but underlying unity, in which complex self-authenticating mathematical structures produce works of art of astonishing and apprehensible beauty.