The first hundred years of Paisley Abbey’s patrons: the Stewart family and their tenants to 1241 (Paper) (original) (raw)
Related papers
2012
Anglo-Saxon Northumbria is renowned for producing scholars of the eminence of Bede and Alcuin and saints of the stature of Cuthbert and Oswald. But despite its enormous cultural and political impact on the course of early English history, only a relatively small amount of documentary material has survived, scattered through five different archives. This book constitutes the first edition of all Anglo-Saxon charters surviving in archives north of the River Humber, a body of material previously neglected. It provides edited texts, together with detailed analysis and commentary, for twenty-one documents which have been preserved in the ecclesiastical archives of York, Beverley, Ripon and Durham, and also a unique survival from Lowther Castle. These commentaries also provide translations and elucidations of each Old English boundary clause and assessments regarding each document's authenticity. The charters themselves are preceded by comprehensive historical introductions which not only provide up-to-date historical accounts of each religious house, but also give an overview of the evolution of each ecclesiastical archive (Lowther Castle is treated slightly differently). In bringing all of this material together for the first time, this book encourages comparisons between the types of charter used in different parts of Northumbria, which in turn allows a better understanding of the complex political and ecclesiastical situation throughout the kingdom.
The donor and the duty of warrandice: giving and granting in Scottish charters
2010
The language of 'granting' and 'confirming' has for several generations been standard usage in Anglophone charterscholarship. 1 Students of medieval diplomatic or land law have conventionally grouped those charters which deal with the conveyance and tenure of land into two categories, especially when describing them in calendars and editions. One commonly says that property has been 'granted', or that the tenure of property has been 'confirmed'; there have consequently arisen two general classes of transaction, namely the Grant and the Confirmation, with the latter class subdivided into various types. 2 Such terminology of granting and confirming is to be found, as much as anywhere else, in the modern Scottish scholarly tradition; a scholarly tradition indeed which has G. W. S. Barrow at its head. 3 Before Barrow, little work had been done in the field of Scottish charter studies since 1905, when a Glasgow-born lawyer and antiquary, Sir Archibald Campbell Lawrie (1837-1914), had produced Early Scottish Charters prior to A.D. 1153. 4 Barrow re-1 Especial gratitude is due to Professor Richard Sharpe for allowing me to see and quote from an unpublished paper, 'Giving and Granting in Documents from Anglo-Norman England', whose arguments in respect of the fundamentally similar Anglo-Norman material underlie the first part of this chapter. I am also indebted to Professor Dauvit Broun, who acted as catalyst, especially in respect of ideas about the relation of dare to the obligation of warrandice. I also thank Dr Alice Taylor and Mr Andrew Smith for advice on certain points, and Dr Stephen Marritt for information on the Ryedales.
This article analyses three different versions of a charter from the Anglo-Saxon archive of the church of Worcester which was fi rst issued in 767 to record a grant of land in the area of Aston Fields, near Stoke Prior, Worcestershire. Special attention is paid to the second surviving version of the document, which is the most problematic of the three and the only one preserved on a single sheet. A relatively recent hypothesis on the origins of this single sheet is reviewed, and an alternative interpretation that draws on the tenurial history of the area is presented. Through a specifi c case-study aiming at understanding the different reasons which in each case may have led the church of Worcester to modify the document's original contents, it is possible to cast further light on that community's use of the past throughout the Anglo-Saxon and early Norman periods.
Select Document: a charter of Hugh II de Lacy, earl of Ulster, to Hugh Hose - 2 March, 1207
2013
This paper examines a hitherto unpublished charter of the earl of Ulster, Hugh de Lacy, to one of his affiliates, Hugh Hose. Documents of this type were first and foremost records of conveyance, and a prerequisite task is to reconstruct the location and extent of the earl’s grant. This is made all the more difficult by certain ambiguities in the Irish place-names, no doubt rendered phonetically by Hugh’s Anglo-Norman clerk, and further compromised by its sole transmission in a seventeenth-century transcript. The written record had other practical uses. The true value of Hugh’s earldom was bound up in the exclusivity of the comital title, and de Lacy’s charter had an important supplementary function as an emblem of rank and prestige, advertising the earl’s comital status to an audience of his peers. Stylistic choices and the construction of formulae imply clear direction by the grantor, with the imitation of royal protocol, in particular, serving to underline Hugh’s elevation to the first stratum of nobility. If promotion to comital rank transformed the language used to frame de Lacy’s charters, it also brought a different kind of person within the orbit of Hugh’s patronage. Until 1205, those favoured in de Lacy’s acta were, like him, ambitious cadets with limited political clout: the sons or brothers of important men. With the title of 'comes' came an expectation and ability to attract higher-profile tenants. Hugh Hose is an example of the new class of vassal being courted by the earl. A significant landholder in his own right, and one of the coterie surrounding successive lords of Meath, Hose was both lord of Deece, in the de Lacy lordship of Meath, and of Penkridge, in Staffordshire. An appraisal of the beneficiary’s status and landholdings highlights some intriguing links to the charter’s witnesses, and illustrates well how Hugh de Lacy took full advantage of family connections on both sides of the Irish Sea in order to attract supporters appropriate to his newly acquired dignity.
The City of London's Charter of 1444 Henry VI
MOREOVER, as we have learned that the Lord Edward, sometime King of England, the third after the conquest, our ancestor, with the assent of the prelates, earls, barons, and commons of his kingdom of England, being in his parliament held at Westminster in the first year of his reign, at the petition of the then citizens of the said city, granted the same citizens by his letters patent, for him and his heirs, the town of Southwark, with the appurtenances, for them their heirs and successors, citizens of the same city, to have and to hold of our same ancestor and his heirs for ever, paying to him each year at the exchequer of him and his heirs, at the customary terms, the farm therefor due and accustomed, as in the aforesaid letters patent is more fully contained;
Women and the adoption of charters in Scotland north of Forth, c. 1150–1286
This article traces the adoption of charters by women in Scotia, the core region of the kingdom of the Scots north of the Firth of Forth, in the twelfth century, and the developments in charter diplomatic employed primarily by monastic beneficiaries over the course of the following century. Initially, charters were produced in the name of countesses making donations of churches and lands to religious houses, and monastic scribes developed idiosyncratic methods of 'strengthening' these gifts through the confirmation of a husband or male relative. In the thirteenth century, charters in the name of women became more plentiful, especially in the case of widows, and more standard formulas emphasising the 'lawful power of widowhood' were employed widely. Charters also increasingly recorded donations and other acts by married women across the social scale, either on their own or jointly with their husbands. Moreover, gifts by men of lands which came to them de jure uxoris included standard diplomatic phraseology recording the consent of the wife. This article examines these trends broadly as well as through several case studies. The appendix lists 160 documents relating to women during this period.