  Deeds, or charters, dealing with property rights, provide a continuous
documentation which can be used by historians to study the evolution of social,
economic and political changes. This study is concerned with charters (written
in Latin) dating from the tenth through early fourteenth centuries in England.
Of these, at least one million were left undated, largely due to administrative
changes introduced by William the Conqueror in 1066. Correctly dating such
charters is of vital importance in the study of English medieval history. This
paper is concerned with computer-automated statistical methods for dating such
document collections, with the goal of reducing the considerable efforts
required to date them manually and of improving the accuracy of assigned dates.
Proposed methods are based on such data as the variation over time of word and
phrase usage, and on measures of distance between documents. The extensive (and
dated) Documents of Early England Data Set (DEEDS) maintained at the University
of Toronto was used for this purpose.
