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Contact
General Queries
The ‘Electronic Sawyer’ forms part of the 'Kemble' website, maintained by the British Academy-Royal Historical Society Joint Committee on Anglo-Saxon Charters.
- The ‘Kemble’ website is https://dk.robinson.cam.ac.uk/ .
Any comments or questions can be directed to the research team by emailing .
Much of the academic research which lies behind the Revised Sawyer and the Electronic Sawyer has been conducted in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, at the University of Cambridge.
- The ASNC website is https://www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/ .
Technical Details
The 'Electronic Sawyer' was originally devised and developed at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London.
It is now developed at the University of Cambridge by Dr Anthony Harris (Emmanuel College, Cambridge) under the Direction of Dr David Woodman (Robinson College, Cambridge).
The director of the project, for and on behalf of the British Academy, is Professor Julia Crick (Kings College, London).
The original Electronic Sawyer website was based on a 2025 version of Resp: CCH Powered by
(xMod 2.0), the XML publishing framework of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London. In that system the charter database, originally maintained in FileMaker, was exported as XML and passed through an Apache Cocoon pipeline running under Tomcat: Cocoon joined the separate datasets (charters, manuscripts, archives, kings, bibliography) into intermediate XML sets, and XSLT stylesheets then transformed the TEI content, menus and views into the HTML pages, with Apache Solr providing the search. That whole stack was later packaged as a Docker container which served the HTML and carried the scripts needed to maintain the site.
The present site keeps the same XML database as its source of truth but replaces the Cocoon and Solr stack with a lightweight open-source pipeline. A set of Python scripts reads the XML, produces intermediate JSON, and renders every page in advance as static HTML using Jinja templates, so the original URLs continue to work. A small Flask application, run under Gunicorn and served through Apache with HTTPS, delivers those pages and provides the dynamic charter, manuscript and bibliography searches, which are answered by a Meilisearch full-text index. A build script regenerates the pages and the search index whenever the XML changes and swaps the new version into place without downtime, and an administrative area allows the research team to review and apply corrections to the underlying data. The site is kindly hosted by Robinson College, Cambridge. Our grateful thanks to Dave Johnstone there and the entire Robinson IT team for their unwavering support while this re-development has progressed.
For technical queries please contact:
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