Introduction

Introduction

These documents transcribed here are copies of entries in medieval seigneurial court rolls, made for tenants as title deeds to their property, held of the lords whose courts were concerned. Historians have discussed the origins, significance, and background of such copies, especially copies of manorial court rolls, relating to customary holdings, in later medieval England, and the roots of copyhold tenure, without seriously investigating the survival and characteristics of early copies. The documents here were identified through a personal project, begun in 2010 but undertaken mainly between 2018 and 2020, to fill that lacuna. The search was extended to Wales, where copies were also found dating from before 1400, and Ireland, where none earlier than 1400 was identified. Ireland is therefore excluded from the list. Scottish land law is and was very different from English, and no such copies were to be expected from that kingdom.

The original plan was to construct a simple list of surviving copies with their archival references. Nevertheless three characteristics soon became clear: first that copies of all types of seigneurial court, not just manor courts, were relevant, and that copies before 1400 were not restricted to customary holdings; secondly that the copies were very diverse in form and content; and thirdly that full transcripts were needed to understand them.

The results were twofold: an analytical article to be published in Archives lvi(1) (British Records Association, 2021), and an artificial assemblage of copies, which were needed to understand detailed references in the article, and which it seemed worth making available to researchers in full. A repetition of the findings of the Archives article here would be redundant, and the reader is referred to it. It includes a fuller discussion of the historiographical background, and an analysis of the types of copy and their form, and content, noting the kinds of archive collection in which they survive and therefore the selection bias affecting survival. It investigates their emergence and geographical and chronological distribution.

The article failed to note a peculiarity of the surviving copies: the rarity of mentions of standard holdings – yardlands (virgates) and half-yardlands, or oxgangs (bovates), or fractions of them. Only three copies mention yardlands, and only five name oxgangs. All these are from places on the fringes, not the core, of the ‘central province’ where nucleated villages and large open fields tended to predominate: in northern Worcestershire and Warwickshre, western Hampshire, the Derbyshire Peak, and the West Riding of Yorkshire. Surviving copies for two of the ‘central province’ regions – Wiltshire and west Berkshire – do not mention yardlands. This rarity may be related to the absence of early copies for much of the south and east midlands, as noted in Archives lvi: either the lack of midlands copies explains the lack of note of standard holdings, or perhaps, more intriguingly, before 1400 copies were seldom granted to tenants of standard holdings, explaining the lack of early midlands copies. A third possibility is that in those regions it was some decades after 1400 before standard villein holdings started to become part of composite tenant estates, partly or mainly freehold, in whose archives surviving copies are mainly found today, and that it was not worth preserving earlier copies issued before the acquisition of the holding.

As this is an artificial collection, consisting of all those surviving copies predating 1400 that could be found in England and Wales, through accessible national and local catalogues, and it is hoped that publication will lead to more examples being unearthed, an attempt at a critical edition did not seem appropriate. Thus, with a few important and brief exceptions, there is in the list no discussion of why particular copies survive where they are found, what light related documents in those archives shed on the individual copies or groups of copies, and no identification or discussion of the parties and property involved.

For the same reason, a chronological arrangement, as in a calendar, seemed as useful as one attempting to group the copies by the original archival source.

Archival Context

All those collections of national, county and local record offices, and university libraries with archival collections, that are listed in detail in their online digital catalogues; and some collections covered only by paper catalogues where those could be examined on-site, or where the archivist supplied information. Many archives had catalogued no copies digitally, but 39 included them. The terms searched for are indicated in the Archives article. The repository, archival reference, and archival fonds of each item are covered in the headings of the transcript.

A note at the end of each entry indicates if the original court roll from which the copy was extracted is known to survive, and if it has been examined to collate the copy. (Most do not survive, and most of those which do have been examined; lockdown restrictions prevented a complete investigation.)

Some items were identified thanks to a national appeal to archivists. Where possible all originals were inspected, transcribed on site and photographed, except where the collection was closed or photography restricted, or during the 2020 national and regional lockdowns, when photographs supplied by the archives were used.

Acknowledgements

Many people and staff or institutions who helped, notably with photographs, palaeography, and critical comments on drafts, are all acknowledged in Archives lvi (1), so a repeated acknowledgement here would be redundant. Costs of travel and photography were met by the editor, but Dr Nat Alcock, searching himself, met some for Warwickshire repositories and some of those for the National Archives, Kew.

Since acceptance of the article for publication in Archives, Dr Alcock, Dr Adam Chapman, and Christopher Whittick have helped over particular issues with the transcripts being prepared for BHO. Thanks are also due to Jonathan Blaney, editor of BHO, for his patient and brisk help.

Transcriptions and Editorial Conventions

Some documents included copies of more than one court-roll entry. Where the entries treated the same parties, holdings, and types of tenure, they were treated as one item, but where those differed from one entry to another they were treated as separate items. The result includes 176 copies, spanning 167 documents.

Abbreviations and contractions in the original text have been expanded, any doubtful examples being footnoted; capitalisation of the original has been largely retained, though ff has been rendered F; final j in numbers has been retained; superscripts in the original have been transcribed on the line (e.g. xxvto). Explanatory notes have been kept to a minimum. Ordinary line breaks in the original are indicated with a slash /. Deliberate line gaps in the original have been flagged as line break. Headings, marginal words and outdents or indents have been flagged in italics. The word cat in comments refers to the catalogue of the archive where the document was found. Copies whose repository is marked with an asterisk (*) have been seen only in photographic form.

The translations err on the side of the literal. Forenames have been Englished and modernised, unless very unusual (e.g. ‘Idonia’, not ‘Idoine’ or ‘Idony’), but since surnames in the 14th century were becoming stable, it seemed inappropriate to change e.g. ‘del Hethe’ to ‘of the Heath’ or ‘le Moygne’ to ‘the Monk’, and the original forms have been retained except when the surname is very well known (e.g. Willoughby de Eresby). The dating of kings’ reigns to ‘after the conquest’ or ‘from the conquest’ has been retained, thus ‘Edward the third after the conquest’, not ‘Edward III after the conquest’ or simply ‘Edward III’. Names of towns, parishes and hamlets have usually been modernised, where they can be identified, but minor names generally have not, even when a modern form would be obvious (e.g. Wodeweyfeld, not Wood Way Field), except when the modern form is known to be still in use (for example Mountjoy in Battle). Saints’ titles have normally been capitalised, e.g. George the Martyr, Lucy the Virgin. Numerals in regnal years and sums of money have been converted to Arabic form, but the distinction in the text between ordinals, cardinals in figures, and numbers spelled out in text has been retained in translation.