| Description | The Chartae Antiquae collection consists of almost 7,000 items, dating from the 8th to the 20th centuries. The majority of the collection consists of single sheet-documents, of paper or parchment, often with pendant seals, but it also includes rolls, booklets and volumes. There is even a wooden tally stick from the 1260s (DCc/ChAnt/G/138A/5).
The Chartae Antiquae in their present state are a collection, rather than a natural accumulation of records. At the collection's heart is a large part of the medieval cathedral priory's archive: the charters and associated documents which would have provided evidence of the priory's liberties, privileges and lands. This part of the collection corresponds to the material copied into DCc/Register/E and later expanded in DCc/Register/A-D. Most of the registered documents can be identified by their late 13th century or early 15th century references, which have been included in the catalogue. Associated with this material are many title deeds relating to the cathedral priory's estates before it acquired them, so the collection also contains a large group of private charters. Subsequent estate documents include leases dating from the late 14th century onwards.
The collection also includes many documents relating to the cathedral priory's campaign to establish its right to exercise the archbishop's jurisdiction when the see of Canterbury was vacant and the exercise of this jurisdiction after that right was established at the end of the 13th century. This part of the collection is closely connected with material in Sede Vacante Scrapbooks (DCc/SVSB/I-IV) and Sede Vacante registers. As a result of this sede vacante jurisdiction, the collection also contains some court and visitation records and a small number of wills. There is also material concerning the dean and chapter's sede vacante jurisdiction, much of it relating to the vacancy following the deprivation of Thomas Cranmer in 1553.
There is also a large group of records relating to Canterbury College, Oxford, from its foundation by Archbishop Simon Islip in the mid 1360s until the early 16th century.
The collection also includes a group of records, mainly catalogued under DCc/ChAnt/M, relating to the missions of Sir William Sturmy, John Kington and William Brampton to the Hanseatic towns in 1405 and 1407. The most likely explanation for the presence of these documents is that John Kington became a monk at the cathedral priory in 1410 and brought them with him.
There is a large amount of stray material from the archives of other religious corporations, including Ely Cathedral, Exeter Cathedral, Hereford Cathedral, Lichfield Cathedral, Llandaff Cathedral, Norwich Cathedral, Wells Cathedral and the Dean and Canons of Windsor, among the charters. During the Commonwealth, the dean and chapter's archive and the archives of other religious bodies were taken to London. The records became mixed together and when they were returned after the Restoration, Canterbury had acquired many documents from other places.
Archival history and arrangement
The Chartae Antiquae collection was first brought together in something like its present form by Samuel Norris (d 1753), the Cathedral Auditor, who was paid 50 guineas for indexing the charters in 1737. The Cathedral Archives contains the rough draft of this index (DCc/LA/5/80) and the final version, in two volumes (DCc/LA/5/79/i-ii). Norris allocated a reference to each charter, consisting of a letter of the alphabet plus a number, and gave a brief description of each document in Latin next to its reference code. The indexes are arranged by letter of the alphabet, but are not in a strict order, either by place or by reference number, and the alphabetical part of the code does not necessarily bear any relationship to the content of the document: for example, some of the Chartham charters are referenced with the letter Y. Norris's index is not straightforward to use, but it has been useful for identifying damaged documents which were still intact when he worked on them. Hasted's History of Kent identifies the charters by their Norris references.
Alderman Cyprian Rondeau Bunce (1752-1807) sorted and catalogued the Chartae Antiquae in 1805-1806 as part of his work on the dean and chapter's archive. (There a description of Bunce at work on the charters, a transcript of which has been pasted into the front of the volume 1 of his schedule. It is partly quoted in Ramsay's account of the Archives and Library in the Cathedral History, p391.) Bunce added a number of documents to the material indexed by Norris. His main interest was in the dean and chapter's estate records and this is reflected in the organisation of his catalogue. He arranged the charters by a combination of places and subject headings, grouped by letter of the alphabet, but not arranged in a strict alphabetical sequence. This means, for example, that the letter W includes charters for Westwell and Walworth, but also documents relating to the cathedral priory's water supply, classified under Waterworks. The schedule was indexed by place and selective subject headings. Originally it was a single volume, but in the early 20th century it was interleaved and rebound in three volumes, to allow additional descriptions to be added (Woodruff and Danks, p396). There is a separate index volume to the schedule and the cathedral's registers, also containing an index to about 450 seals.
Bunce gave each charter an alphanumeric reference code, similar to the system used by Norris, and endorsed it with the date and a brief description. His catalogue entries are slightly expanded versions of these endorsements. Bunce's arrangement and referencing system have been retained because the charters have been cited by his references for so long, but a modern archivist would not organize the records as he did. He made no attempt to recreate any original order and the brevity of his descriptions and lack of a detailed index to his schedule have sometimes disguised the content of the collection.
Joseph Brigstocke Sheppard (1828-1895) worked on the charters and their seals in the 1870s and produced a report on them for the Historical Manuscripts Commission, published in 1876. He wrote pencil numbers on many of the charters, suggesting that he intended to reorganize them, although he never did. He did, however, produce a revised version of Bunce's catalogue (DCc/LA/5/71), including a number of documents which he added to the series, many of which had been seen by Bunce but disregarded by him. Sheppard rearranged the charters into three series: a title deed sequence, arranged by place and stored in drawers in the Treasury; documents with seals, stored in wooden seal cabinets in the Library; and a group of documents which he considered to be of particular historical interest or importance, also stored in the seal cabinets in the Library (DCc/LA/4/11, pp7-8). He also produced a catalogue of the seals, which is described in the introduction to the catalogue of loose seals (DCc/Seal).
The present catalogue
J P Gilson of the British Museum Library recommended the re-arrangement of the charters and the creation of a new, detailed, catalogue as long ago as 1905. (There are several copies of Gilson's report, including DCc/LA/5/4 and DCc/LA/6/8. He also recommended interleaving Bunce's catalogue as an interim measure and stamping the documents with the Library stamp.) During the 20th century alterations and additions were made to Bunce's catalogue by Canon Charles Eveleigh Woodruff (1855-1948), William Parry Blore (1875-1948) and Dr William Urry (1913-1981).
Content of the new catalogue
The catalogue entries include:
• detailed summaries of the contents of each document, giving the names of the parties, descriptions of the property and the transaction, full witness lists and a note of any endorsements;
• the date of the document. Where documents are undated, a conjectural date has been assigned and the reasons for assigning the date are stated in the catalogue description;
• the language of the document;
• a description of the seals, including the names of the person or organization owning or using the seal, the device, the legend and a physical description, comprising shape, size, colour, attachment method, condition and quality of impression (There is more information about the conventions used for describing seals in the introduction to the catalogue of loose seals (DCc/Seal).)
• any references by which the document has previously been known;
• cross-references to related documents;
• a note of any relevant published material
Conventions used in the new catalogue
Names of archbishops, bishops, priors of the cathedral priory and cathedral clergy have been standardized by reference to the relevant volumes of the Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae. Monks of the cathedral priory are identified as in Joan Greatrex's Biographical Register of the English Cathedral Priories of the Province of Canterbury c1066-1540 (Oxford, 1994), although her standardization of by-names and surnames has not been adopted.
First names have been standardized in accordance with E G Withycombe's The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names (3rd edition, 1977), supplemented for female names by the website Feminine Given Names in A Dictionary of English Surnames (http://www.s-gabriel.org/names/talan/reaney/).
Because medieval names are so fluid and the same person could be known by two or more by-names, it was decided to index personal names rather than people, and not to attempt to identify all references to a particular individual, by whatever name he or she was known, and group them together. Until 1400, names have been indexed with the Christian name first and thereafter names have been inverted, unless the person concerned is known to have been alive before that date.
Parish names have been standardized according to the usage in F A Youngs, Guide to the Local Administrative Units of Southern England. J K Wallenberg's Kentish Place-Names (Uppsala, 1931) and the Place-Names of Kent (Uppsala, 1934) have been used for minor Kentish place-names. E Ekwall's The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names (4th edition, Oxford, 1960) and the Essex and Sussex volumes in the English Place-Name Society series have also been consulted.
Related record series
The charters are only one of many closely related series of medieval records at Canterbury Cathedral Archives. Those to which they are most closely linked include:
• the priory's registers, particularly DCc/Register/A-E
• Bedels' Rolls (DCc/BR)
• Sede Vacant Scrapbooks (DCc/SVSB/I/-IV)
• Ecclesiastical Suit Rolls (DCc/ESRoll)
• Manorial court rolls (DCc/CR)
• the Christ Church Letters (DCc/ChChLet)
• records of the priory's domestic economy (DCc/DE)
A number of charters were acquired and removed from the collection by the antiquary Sir Edward Dering (1598-1644). Some of these are now in the Hatton Wood Manuscripts at Keele University Library. Dering marked charters with his distinctive mark, a cross within a circle, on the dorse. Most notable amongst the removed charters is the Canterbury Magna Carta, now in the British Library. The Godwine Charter (DCc/ChAnt/S/458) was also removed by Dering.
Bibliography
J B Sheppard's report on the charters in the Appendix to the Fifth Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (London, 1876), pp427-461, gives an overview of the non-estate material among the charters. Nigel Ramsay's chapter on the Archives and Library in A History of Canterbury Cathedral (first published 1995, corrected reprint, 2002), pp341-407, describes the custodial history of the charters in the context of the Cathedral's archival collections. This supersedes the chapter on the Library in C Eveleigh Woodruff and William Danks, Memorials of Canterbury Cathedral (London, 1912), pp377-404. The Cathedral History also contains a valuable Appendix (Appendix 2, pp566-570), listing the cathedral's estates.
The volumes of English Episcopal Acta and the publications of the Canterbury and York Society have also been used extensively.
A note on storage of the charters
When Sheppard worked on the charters in the 1870s, the title deeds were in bundles held together by brass clasps (DCc/LA/4/11, p7). The majority of the charters were stored folded until the early 20th century, when they were flattened and stamped with the stamp of the Cathedral Library (Woodruff and Danks, p396). Their storage was reorganised again in the mid 1970s, when most of them were placed in manila folders, with protective melanex strips covering the seals. The storage of the charters is currently (November 2004) under review.
In 1840 twenty-three of the earliest charters were mounted on sheets of card and bound into a large red leather volume at the British Museum under the direction of J M Kemble in connection with his Codex Diplomaticus. This original Red Book, with the bill for the work, still survives, although the charters were later transferred to a 20th century Red Book and are at present stored loose in a large box. Their storage is also currently under review. |
| Related Material | NORRIS, Samuel, 'Index Generalis Omnium Chartarum, maximam partem, perantiquarum,in Ecc1esia Cathedrali et Metropolitica Christi, Cantuariae, repertarum, ordinealphabetico dispositarum ...' 2 vols. (1737). [Norris arranged the Chartae Antiquae in an alphabetical sequence, from A.10 to Z.232, that was imitated by Bunce (although his shelf-marks are different).][MSS. Cats. 78, 79]
BUNCE, C.R., 'Schedule...', vols. 1 and 4 (1804, 1806). [Bunce rearranged the Chartae Antiquae and his catalogue of them remains the principal listing; ithas been annotated by C.E. Woodruff, W.P. Blore, W.G. Urry and others. The initial letter of each item refers to the name of the place or dignity withwhich it is principally concerned: for instance, Chartham and Christ Church, Canterbury, and Composition Deeds will be found under the letter C. See vol.4 for index. As their endorsements indicate, many of the charters were registered in the medieval period: see this guide s.v. Registers for details of cartularies and registers preserved in the Cathedral Archives]
SHEPPARD, J.B., 'Report of an Examination of the Historical MSS. Belonging to the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury' in Fifth Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (London, 1876), Part I, Appendix, pp.427-62.[Notes on many of the Chartae Antiquae, under various subject headings. Sheppard's ms. partial re-listing of Chartae Antiquae is in MSS. Cat. 71 (once called Cat.VII): it has a little material that is not in Bunces's Schedule, principally a listing of Chartae Antiquae Z. 1 to 207 (although 71 of these documents were subsequently placed by Sheppard in Sede Vacante Scrapbook vol. II) "7
BLORE, W.P., 'List of the Chartae Antiquae, showing their position' (1936).[Location statement.][MSS. Cat. 62]
Saxon Charters
ROBERTSON, J.C., Annotated list of the Saxon Charters in the volume entitled 'Diplomata Vetustissima...', Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries, 2nd series, vol. vi, for 1873-6 (1876), pp.165-7. Cf. J.B. Sheppard, 'Saxon Charters', in Fifth Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts,Part I (London, 1876), pp.466-i /.List of the twenty-two (Robertson) or twenty-three (Sheppard) charters in the 'Book of Saxon Charters' or 'Red Book' that was arranged under the superintendence of J.M. Kemble, after 1806 (these charters being extracted from the class of Chartae Antiquae), and (by Sheppard)of five other pre-Conquest charters. Twenty-five of these charters were edited by W. Basevi Sanders, Facsimiles of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts. Photozincographed... by Lieut. - General J. Cameron... (and A.C. Cooke), 2 parts (Southampton: Ordnance Survey Office, 1878-81), Part I.
The Anglo-Saxon charters have been published in N P Brooks and S E Kelly (eds), Charters of Christ Church, Canterbury (British Academy, Oxford, 2013). |