The "Desire of Deeds": On Cherishing Medieval English Charters Carol Symes

pre-publication text of a chapter to appear in The Learned and Lived Law: Essays in Honor of Charles Donahue, ed. Nikitas Hatzimihail, Elizabeth Papp Kamali, and Saskia Lettmaier (Leiden: Brill, 2014) The “Desire of Deeds”: On Cherishing Medieval English Charters Carol Symes Abstract: The Harvard Law Library is home to an impressive collection of medieval manuscripts relating to the development of the English Common Law and its everyday applications, including a trove of medieval deeds and charters dating from the twelfth to eighteenth centuries. In this essay, the former curator of that collection analyzes the ways that these living legal artifacts serve as material repositories of memory and meaning—for those who initially used and kept them, and for the future generations who continue to view them as evidence for our collective connection to the past and its enduring legacy. Keywords: medieval charters, deeds, England, Common Law, materiality, collecting practices, seals, disputes One August day in 1477, a Devonshire gentleman named Robert Spurway was asked to sit for a written deposition about an incident that had clearly remained strong in his memory for eighteen years (Figure 1a).1 Spurway testified that, in the autumn of 1459, he had intervened in a dispute between his neighbor, Thomas Worth of Washfield, and a certain Squire John Wenard from the neighboring county of Cornwall. This altercation had occurred at the quarter session held in Exeter after Michaelmas, and it was still notorious in public memory a generation later.2 The story behind it, and the trove of medieval charters that witness and preserve that story, among many others, are material memorials to the lived experience of the Common Law in later medieval and early modern England. Now housed in the Harvard Law School Library, they remain of enduring value to those studying the learned law as well as its everyday applications. According to a rare paper draft, drawn up in Latin and preserved in the same archive as the deposition, the trouble began when Wenard and Worth had met at Worth’s home about six weeks before the Michaelmas quarter, on August 11, to make an agreement regarding the division of certain lands.3 Spurway’s deposition describes the men as “copartyners,” and the 1 HSC Deeds 117 (dated 17 Edward IV) [18 August 1477], https://nrs.lib.harvard.edu/urn3:hls.libr:101159819. 2 The feast of St. Michael (Michaelmas) falls on September 29. This deposition was taken down at Spurway’s manor “Gormondishaies” in Tiverton, a name that I have not been able to locate in any of the standard topographical surveys of Devon. However, the Worth estate at Washfield would have been less than six miles away from Spurway’s home. In this document, and in HSC Deeds 116 (see below), the name “Wenard” is given as “Wynard,” whereas the spelling “Wenard” is given in a grant of 1453 (HSC Deeds 165) made in the name of this same individual. I have decided on the latter spelling here, but note that both spellings seem to have been in local use and do not necessarily designate different families. On the one hand, a certain “Wenard, of Cornwall” is mentioned as the father-in-law of Sir John de Stonore (d. 1361) of Stonor manor in Oxfordshire in John Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry; Or, Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland, etc. (London: Henry Colburn, 1837–1838), 441. On the other hand, a William Wynard is named as a public official in Exeter during the reigns of Henry V and VI, the founder of an almshouse in his name, and the owner of extensive lands in Devon. See George Alexander Cooke, Topographical Survey of the County of Devon, Historical, Statistical, and Descriptive, etc. (London: Printed for C. Cook by Brimmer and Co., 1817), 88. 3 HSC Deeds 116, dated at “Worth” (i.e. Washfield, Devon), 37 Henry VI [11 August 1453], https://nrs.lib.harvard.edu/urn-3:hls.libr:101159798. draft reveals that they were joint claimants to a network of properties that had been amassed in Cornwall by Humphrey Beville, the father of Isabella Worth, Thomas Worth’s wife. (Wenard’s connection with the Beville family is unclear.) One of the properties in question was the substantial manor of Woolston, named as “Wolveston” in the draft, which records that, in return for Worth’s grant of a clear title to it, Wenard would give Worth three other named manors in Cornwall and a dozen specified holdings in that vicinity. A similar paper draft would have presumably been made at the same time in Wenard’s name, making a corroborating grant to Worth and his wife. This draft does not survive, and was presumably destroyed when the deal fell through. This was the falling-out that Spurway witnessed in Exeter that September. Normally, Worth and Wenard would have attended the court to have their respective drafts transferred to parchment, publicly notarized, and properly sealed. Yet something had clearly occurred, in the intervening weeks, to scupper the arrangement—something so egregious that, as Spurway reported, Wenard “desired me specially to labor unto Thomas Worthe his copartyner for to have had an equal particion between them.” And when “yet agen the said John made me to labor and to offer in his behalf,” Wenard felt obliged to offer Worth an additional yearly rent of five marks, payable to himself and his wife’s heirs forever, if he would agree to the new arrangement.4 According to Spurway, Worth had retorted that he would only agree if “all deedis containing the heritance of his owne descent whyche were a litel befor taken away by the said John might be first to him be delivered agen.” As Spurway recalled, that was the end of the negotiation: for “upon which desir of deedis & of other thinges ther rehersid” the men “varied & departed in wrathe in my presence & hiryng & that whil I leve shall testefie.” The “desire of deeds”: Spurway’s testimony reveals that, at some point—probably when he had been a visitor at Washfield in August—Wenard had made off with Worth’s extensive family archive, or at least a portion of it. Recall that their projected transaction had involved at least four manors and multiple adjacent properties in Cornwall, each of which would have generated its own archive, all which may have been on hand during the negotiation of the paper drafts. As Tom Johnson has shown, these litigants were working in “a world awash with humdrum legal writings” that included “great hordes of private legal instruments,” most of which do not survive.5 Maybe Wenard thought that he was justified in rummaging through his host’s muniments and removing deeds that pertained to the manor he had been granted on paper; and perhaps he could not read well enough to tell the difference between those deeds and the other parchments stored there. Or perhaps he intended to hold some or all of Worth’s deeds hostage, as a guarantee of his acquiescence to the final deal. Either way, Wenard had obviously gone too far, as evinced by Spurway’s vivid memory of the scene and its evident public notoriety. Worth’s injury was one that would be felt by anyone with a family cache of documents that could all too easily succumb to fire, loss, or theft—and by 1459, that was any family in England with claims to any property at all. Just a few years later, immediately after her husband’s death in 1466, the Norfolk matriarch Margaret Paston would warn her eldest son John to guard against just such a calamity as had befallen Worth: “& in alwyse I avyse you for to be ware that ye kepe wysly youre wrytyngys that ben of charge, that it come not in here handys that may hurt you heraftere.” Recalling the multiple imprisonments her husband had endured, and the 4 In medieval England, the mark was not a coin but a unit of account, worth 13s 4d (two-thirds of a pound sterling). 5 Tom Johnson, Law in Common: Legal Cultures in Late-Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 241. 2 family’s ongoing litigations, she reminded him that “Youre fadere … In hys trobyll seson set more by hys wrytyngys & evydens that he dede by any of his moveabell godys. Remembere that yf tho were had from you ye kowd neuer gyte no moo.”6 Although unable to write letters on her own behalf, Margaret well understood that legal “writings and evidence” counted alongside “moveable goods” as very valuable material possessions.7 Especially for families whose fortunes had recently risen, like the Worths and the Pastons, deeds were not merely essential legal instruments; they were carefully curated heirlooms treasured for their own sake as part of the family patrimony. According to Spurway’s testimony, Thomas Worth called them “deeds containing the heritance of his own descent”: containers of a heritage that could be traced back two hundred years. They were vessels conveying the remains of his distant Worth ancestors and of the much more powerful Abbe/Abbot-Beauchamp family, whose lands had since come down to him via his own father’s strategic marriage. They also bound him to another local family, the Hawkyns or Hawkes, whose progenitor Robert de Hobekyn had been a serf. The very fact that the documents making up Worth’s archive in 1459 had been so carefully kept for at least seven generations by three different families of such varying socio-economic status—lords of the manor, local gentry, and small farmers descended from an unfree laborer—indicates that the “desire of deeds” was yet another thing that families passed down. On the dorse of the document that recorded Robert Spurway’s testimony to his father’s quarrel with Wenard, Thomas Worth the younger (Thomas Worth II), has written: “Herein so sign[ifi]e that T Worthe wold not [seal to] a partition for any thing without a deliverance of all deeds of his owne descent” (Figures 1b and 1c [detail]). 8 Among other precious items, the archive of the Worth family’s “descent” contained the fragment of parchment (7.5 x 18 cm.), the size of man’s hand, attesting that Robert de Hobekyn had been made a free man during the 55th year of Henry III’s long reign (1270–1271), in a ceremony witnessed by Thomas’s distant ancestor Richard de la Worthe (Figures 2a and 2b).9 Carefully folded into a tiny packet, as in Figure 3, it could have been secreted in a pocket or even worn as an amulet protected by a leather or metal casing. Indeed, dorsal discoloration and a dark stain on the worn exterior folds shows that it was frequently handled and displayed, making it an extremely early and unusual example of the personal identification documents that proliferated in England after the Black Death, in the later fourteenth century.10 Worth’s archive also contained an undated inspeximus declaring that Henry Abbe had, in the 18th year of Edward I (1289–1290), ceremoniously viewed an earlier undated charter made by his grandfather, William le Abbe, granting a furlong of land to that same Robert de Hobekyn: a grant then confirmed to Robert’s son, with Thomas Worth’s ancestor Alexander as a witness.11 A dark stain, similar to that marking the original manumission, may indicate that they were kept together Norman Davis et al., eds., Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, 3 vols. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1:333–334 (No. 198). 7 See Rebecca Krug, Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 17–64; Johnson, Law in Common, 254–61. On the meanings attached to writing and its material manifestations in late-medieval England, see, e.g., Susan Crane, “The Writing Lesson of 1381,” in Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 201–21; and Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 8 Even if Thomas the younger did not write the endorsement himself, his intervention is still important. 9 HSC Deeds 8, https://nrs.lib.harvard.edu/urn-3:hls.libr:36828856. 10 Johnson, Law in Common, 248–254. 11 HSC Deed 10, https://nrs.lib.harvard.edu/urn-3:hls.libr:36828872. 6 3 (Figures 4a and 4b). The archive also contained the deed that Thomas Worth had himself obtained in 1429, and by which he acquired the land named in that inspeximus, as well as the inspeximus itself.12 And when Worth’s desired deeds were finally recovered from John Wenard, as they evidently were, this archive would contain the nullified paper deed he had drawn up in 1459, as well as Robert Spurway’s sworn deposition bearing witness to Wenard’s perfidy. But why was that deposition taken down in 1477, so many years after Wenard’s theft of the family archive? Perhaps Spurway was ill or dying (“and that while I live I shall testify,” he had declared) and young Thomas needed a sworn affidavit to strengthen the retaliatory legal actions he was taking against Wenard (or his heirs).13 He may also have been moved to make this record for reasons more nostalgic, as a testament to his late father’s tenacity in regaining family heirlooms. As Thomas II’s dorsal inscription had put it, his father would not take “any thing” from Wenard except the return of his documents, and there may also have been more in the Worth archive than deeds. As Spurway had recollected, it was “desire of deeds and other things there rehearsed” that had caused the breach with Wenard in 1459. He could have meant that “other things” were said: invective was exchanged. But he could also have meant that “other things” were missing and enumerated by Worth in the “presence and hearing” of witnesses. The medieval archive was a trove of keepsakes, in which documents were preserved alongside articles of clothing, relics, and many other artifacts that had accrued value or evidentiary status.14 In the archive of the cathedral treasury at Exeter, for example—just a short walk from the place where Worth and Wenard had “varied and departed in wrath” (the quarter sessions were held either at the castle or in the cathedral’s chapter house nearby)15—a spearhead was lying on an unbound booklet made during the Domesday inquest of 1086, and was leaving an indelible mark on the parchment.16 During King Edward’s (in)famous Quo warranto proceedings, in the 1280s, one earl’s indignant response to the novel demand that all barons show “by what warrant” (quo warranto) they held their lands and titles was to brandish another 12 HSC Deeds 37, dated 8 Henry VI, https://nrs.lib.harvard.edu/urn-3:hls.libr:36828765. Later deeds in the archive suggest that Worth was still pressing a claim to the disputed manor of Woolston into the sixteenth century: see below. 14 See, e.g., Karl Josef Heidecker, ed., Charters and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Society (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000); Esther Cohen and Mayke De Jong, eds., Medieval Transformations: Texts, Power, and Gifts in Context (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Marco Mostert and P. S. Barnwell, eds. Medieval Legal Process: Physical, Spoken, and Written Performance in the Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011). 15 See A. H. A. Hamilton, Quarter Sessions from Queen Elizabeth to Queen Anne: Illustrations of Local Government and History, Drawn from Original Records (chiefly of the County of Devon) (London: Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1878), 29. 16 This booklet (now Q[uire] 85, fols. 436v and 430r) forms part of the corpus known as the “Exeter Domesday” (Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3500). It was bound with companion gatherings into a codex sometime around 1500. The components were later rebound and reorganized after the edition prepared by Abraham Farley and Henry Ellis, Libri censualis vocati Domesday-book, additamenta ex codic. antiquiss. Exon’ domesday. Inquisitio eliensis. Liber Winton. Boldon book (London: Printed by G. Eyre and A. Strahan, 1816). For a clear account of this process, see Colin Flight, The Survey of the Whole of England: Studies of the Documentation Resulting from the Survey Conducted in 1086 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2006), 38–39. This modern codex was unbound in 2014 and the medieval components are currently being digitized. I examined these booklets and their implications for understanding the processes undergirding the royal survey and its documentation in my article “Doing Things beside Domesday Book,” Speculum 93 (2018): 1048–1101. 13 4 such rusty sword in the judges’ faces: “ ‘Here, my lords, here is my warrant. For my ancestors came with William the Bastard and these lands were conquered by the sword, and by the sword I will defend them.’ ” His meaning was plain: the deed that guaranteed his rights was not a sealed charter; it was the blood shed by his forefather when he had used that very sword to advance the cause of Edward’s ancestor in 1066.17 Thomas Worth’s ancestor Henry Abbe had probably been preparing for these same proceedings in 1289–1290, when he inspected and authenticated—so he claimed—his own grandfather’s charter, which had probably never existed in written form. This was not an uncommon problem at the time, especially for those who had no weapons dating back to the Conquest; in this case, the missing deed pertained to a humble grant of land to the manumitted serf Robert de Hobekyn, made around 1270, when the only “proof” of the transaction might have been a pebble or a little pouch of earth. The Quo warranto inquest prompted a rash of retrospective record-making along these lines, invoking the “dead voice” (vox mortua) of legal codification through affective writing techniques.18 Yet objects and actions could still be both more authoritative and more potent than documents—even at a time when, according to M. T. Clanchy’s paradigm, legal transactions in England had allegedly moved “from memory to written record.”19 Just because documentation becomes more prevalent, it does not follow that the written artifact is always narrowly practical, kept solely for the value of the words transcribed upon it. It would be very hard to account for the existence of lavishly illuminated manuscripts or jeweled and gilded bindings if that were the case. To be sure, charters like the ones in Thomas Worth’s archive are not lovely, and some are not very skillfully written; indeed, according to Clanchy, these features should be construed as evidence of the degree to which record-making had become habitual and starkly utilitarian by the end of the thirteenth century. But as more recent scholarship shows, medieval documents also conveyed meaning through their physical features, the marks of handling and human contact, 17 The Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough, Previously Edited as the Chronicle of Walter of Hemingford or Hemingburgh, ed. Harry Rothwell; 89 (London: Offices of the Society, 1957), 216, ‘ “Ecce domini mei ecce Warentum meum. Antecessores enim mei cum Willelmo bastardo uenientes conquesti sunt terras suas gladio et easdem gladio defendam.’” This story, famous in its own time, appears in three related manuscript chronicles known as the “Osney-Abingdon compilations.” 18 On this potent medieval legal concept, see Jésus R. Velasco, Dead Voice: Law, Philosophy, and Fiction in the Iberian Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). For English manifestations, see Tom Johnson, “Byland Revisited, or Spectres of Inheritance,” Journal of Medieval History 48 (2022): 439–56. 19 M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307, 3rd ed. (Chichester, 2013). The larger narrative of writing’s scarcity prior to the eleventh century—and hence the arguments for its increased importance later on—has been definitively challenged by the work of Warren Brown, Mario Costambeys, Matthew Innes, and Adam Kosto, eds., Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). For a model study of pragmatic literacy, see Simon Franklin, Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950–1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Other studies include Olivier Guyotjeannin, Laurent Morelle, and Michel Parisse, eds., Pratiques de l’écrit documentaire au XIe siècle (Paris: Librairie Droz, 1997); R. H. Britnell, ed., Pragmatic Literacy, East and West, 1200–1330 (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 1997); Elke Goez, Pragmatische Schriftlichkeit und Archivpflege der Zisterzienser: Ordenszentralismus und regionale Vielfalt, namentlich in Franken und Altbayern (1098–1525) (Münster: LIT, 2003); Mary Garrison, A. P. Orbán, and Marco Mostert, eds., Spoken and Written Language: Relations between Latin and the Vernacular Languages in the Earlier Middles Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013). 5 display, ritual, and their relationship with other things. They were, in the words of Matthew Innes, “material actors within the societies they purported to define.”20 Even the formulaic language of a deed could be personalized in the performance that accompanied its making, and enlivened again through occasional readings, whether familiar or public.21 Deeds’ individual idiosyncrasies—scripts and seals, but also smudges and signs of use—were part of what made them objects of desire. As warrant for this claim, I reference an archive that I once knew intimately. The more than fifty documents that attest to the changing fortunes of Thomas Worth’s extended lineage— what I have called “The Washfield Saga”—are now among some 820 parchment deeds in the Historical and Special Collections of the Harvard Law School Library.22 The items in this larger archive were haphazardly assembled by Frederick Arthur Crisp (1851–1922), an English antiquarian and genealogist. In 1922, they were purchased by another English antiquarian, Alfred Butler, who sold them to Harvard College in 1923, after which they were moved to the Law Library in 1925. At each stage in this process, Thomas Worth’s “deeds of his own descent” came to serve as proofs of a different kind. For Crisp, acquiring ancient family archives was a means of safeguarding a collective English patrimony while certifying his own intellectual credentials. For Butler, conversely, maintaining the coherence of these collections was irrelevant, so he disarticulated and rearranged all of their components to form a single chronological sequence, presumably to attract a buyer interested in acquiring a set of historical specimens. For an American university, these decontextualized deeds accordingly constituted a ready-made archive that could help to ground a modern (formerly colonial) foundation in medieval English precedent. The Worth archive thus joined a large number of manuscript purchases facilitated by the chaos and cash-strapped postwar economy of Europe, to enhance the prestige of Harvard College. In the library of the Law School, specifically, they augmented a growing aggregation of medieval English statute-books and legal treatises, in order to create the impression that Harvard had inherited the mantle and matériel of the English Common Law. To ratify this tacit claim, a young English legal historian on the Law School’s faculty, Theodore F. T. Plucknett (1897–1965), reorganized the collection of deeds according to a classification of his own devising, so that his students and colleagues could view its contents through their modern Matthew Innes, “Archives, Documents, and Landowners in Carolingian Francia,” in Documentary Culture and the Laity, ed. Brown et al., 186. See also Johnson, Law in Common, 241–68. 21 For an exemplary analysis of affective documentation and the personalization of formulaic language, see Geoffrey Koziol, “A Father, His Son, Memory, and Hope: The Joint Diploma of Lothar and Louis V (Pentecost Monday, 979) and the Limits of Performativity,” in Geschichtswissenschaft und “performative turn”: Ritual, Inszenierung und Performanz vom Mittelalter bis zur Neuzeit, ed. Jürgen Martschukat and Steffen Patzold (Köln: Böhlau, 2003), 83–103. See also M. B. Parkes, Scribes, Scripts, and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation, and Dissemination of Medieval Texts (London: Hambledon Press, 1991); Petra Schulte, Marco Mostert, and Irene van Renswoude, eds., Strategies of Writing: Studies on Text and Trust in the Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008); Jonathan Wilcox, ed., Scraped, Stroked, and Bound: Materially Engaged Readings of Medieval Manuscripts (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013); Carol Symes, “Liturgical Texts and Performance Practices,” in Understanding Medieval Liturgy: Essays in Interpretation, ed. Helen Gittos and Sarah Hamilton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2016), 239–67. 22 Carol Symes, HISTORY IN DEED: Medieval Society and the Law in England, 1100–1600, An Exhibition of Deeds & Charters from the Harvard Law Library, with an introduction by Charles Donahue, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1993), 40–47. The catalogue is now available at http://www.law.harvard.edu/library/special/exhibitions/history-in-deed.html. 20 6 jurisprudential lenses.23 The notes he made on each deed, between the years 1923 and 1931, also became part of this new archive and were still interleaved with their medieval counterparts when Clanchy conducted research on the Harvard collection in 1972.24 Otherwise, all of these deeds remained largely forgotten until a newly appointed Curator of Manuscripts and Archives found ten dusty black boxes in a dark corner of the stacks in 1988. Plucknett’s notes are now enclosed in the same archival folders as the deeds. I know, because I put them there.25 Severally and collectively, these charters tell stories of land tenure and legal rivalries; they also tell other stories about documents as talismans of identity, status, and intergenerational affect. While I cannot know what fed Thomas Worth’s “desire of deeds,” I know what it means to develop an attachment to pieces of parchment for reasons that have little to do with their written content. Like Worth’s, “my” archive subsumed many smaller collections of deeds, chancily preserved over time. Like his, too, it was treasured because its ownership conferred legitimacy, an instant heritage. I have also witnessed the degree of these charters’ material attractions at first hand. Most of the visitors to the Law Library who are shown a careful selection—kept ready for the perusal of prominent alumni and eminent jurists—cannot read them, but they are still powerfully moved by a desire to make contact. “Can I touch them?” they invariably ask. And no wonder: medieval charters are tantalizing. They are tactile, haptic. In fact, they have to be touched in order to be read and, in many cases, have to be wrestled, because most have been folded so tightly for so long that they will spring back and withdraw into themselves, like turtles, if they are not carefully splayed open and gently weighted down. This is another quality that makes them animate: they move. They move, and they make noise. They can also be hefty, heavy with the burdens of wax and (in some cases) twisted silk cords or protective metal skippets, or encumbered with tangled bunches of pendant seals that knock together with a sound like dried chestnuts: seals of delicate beauty or proud heraldry or crude design, mostly green or brown or red, but sometimes a sullied white. Occasionally, a thumb has imprinted itself on the bulbous swell of a seal’s back. Occasionally, the wax is impressed with a circlet of braided rushes, still remarkably yellow.26 One example of royal letters patent measures nearly half a meter across and is freighted with the plate-sized equestrian seal of Henry IV; it must have cost so much—the waste of parchment alone was expensive—that the recipients dispensed with having the document decorated, so that the H of the king’s name is just a grid of ruled lines (Figure 5).27 How did the people of the past feel about these deeds? There are clues. A scruffy, undated and unsealed charter concerning Dunster Priory (Somerset) hardly seems like it could be 23 My reconstruction of the provenance is based on the brief account by Seymour de Ricci et al., Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada, 3 vols. (New York: Hon. W. Wilson, 1935), 1:1042–44. 24 HSC MS 180 (a copy of the Tractatus de legibus attributed to Glanville, made in 1327) includes notes by Clanchy (then at the University of Glasgow) dated March of 1972. A number of deeds from this collection were used in From Memory to Written Record, first published by Harvard University Press in 1979 and now in its third edition: see above, n. 19. 25 I was fortunate to be hired by David de Lorenzo in 1992, during my second year in the Ph.D. program at Harvard, and so to become the first (and only) Curator of Medieval Deeds and Charters at the Harvard Law School Library, a part-time post I held until 1995. 26 As in HSC Deeds 508, from Sandwich (Kent), http://id.lib.harvard.edu/alma/990058314090203941/catalog. 27 HSC Deeds 744, https://nrs.lib.harvard.edu/urn-3:hls.libr:8654805. 7 important, since it mentions just a few acres of land. However, it also notes that the prior of Dunster is a free tenant on this land—which mattered because, when the deed was made, the prior was attempting to achieve independence from the cathedral of Bath and needed to prove his autonomy. Hence the scrap of parchment that has been inserted into the slot for the missing tab and seal, declaring that “this charter is the best charter of all the other charters in the monastery” (ista carta meliora carta est ab omnibus aliis cartis monasterie)—something that would not be at all discernable from its appearance (Figures 6a and 6b [detail]).28 In another case, a note added to a deed aimed to transform it into a different kind of legal instrument and keepsake. On New Year’s Day in 1483, Thomas Staunton made a grant to John Wilne, Thomas Peg, and Robert Barker. At some later time, on the fold at the bottom of the Latin text, a shaky hand wrote, “I wille that Pegg & Robert Barker make / a lauful astate to John Wilne & Margaret his | wife of Þe place & to þe here[s] of Marg[ar]et” (Figures 7a and 7b [detail]).29 The original grant was a type of conveyance known as a “feoffment to uses,” making the three men tenants of a property; but with the additional note—which may not have been legally probative—the grantor is willing at least a portion of it to his daughter Margaret and his new son-in-law, the tenant John Wilne. The fact that Thomas Staunton did not simply preside over the formal documentation of this new arrangement suggests that he was dying and did not have time to do that. The preservation of this charter was thus an act of filial piety as well as a routine archival decision. In still another case, the people of Woolston—the Cornwall estate in dispute between Wenard and Worth—assisted in the production of a document testifying vociferously as to the name of their village, “swearing me with oon vois … how thay never herd it callid or knowen in court or out of court by the name of Wolneston a name feyned & new altered as ferre as any of ham can remember” (Figure 8). Thomas Worth II had come to their parish on the Sunday before Whitsun, May 23, 1501, precisely to have their voices recorded on parchment and so to capture their collective historical memory in his archive.30 Worth seems to have been trying to disprove any rival title to the manor on the grounds that it had been named as “Wolneston” or “Wolveston” in previous Latin deeds—including the paper draft granting “Wolveston” to Wenard in 1459. Certifying their collective affidavit was John Brode, curate of Minster, the parish that included Woolston manor. His hand is also that recording the deposition of Robert Spurway, taken down in 1477, indicating that Brode had been working as a Worth family scribe for at least a quarter century. If the material evidence of bygone transactions was as meaningful as I have articulated here, when did the “desire of deeds” abate? How did all of these parchment pieces come to be sold and collected and resold again? For one thing, the evidence required to prove title in England was already changing in the seventeenth century, after the end of the English Civil War, as were family fortunes. At the same time, the value of family archives as heirlooms was also being eroded. The Paston family’s “wrytyngys & evydens,” so carefully curated for nearly four centuries, were evidently considered worthless compared to the “moveabell godys” which 28 HSC Deeds 124, https://nrs.lib.harvard.edu/urn-3:hls.libr:101159663. Two other deeds (122 and 123) in this collection relate to the priory and the former, dated 1301, claims to be a transcript of an earlier missing grant. The priory achieved independence in 1332: see William Page, ed., A History of the County of Somerset: Volume 2 (London: Victoria County History, 1911), 81–82. 29 HSC Deeds 439 (22 Edward IV), author’s photograph. 30 HSC Deeds 118, dated 17 Henry VII [23 May 1501], https://nrs.lib.harvard.edu/urn3:hls.libr:101159837. 8 William Paston, the second earl of Yarmouth (1654–1732), began to liquidate in the first decade of the eighteenth century, in a vain effort to pay off his enormous debts. When he died without heirs or assets, his ancestors’ voluminous correspondence—the source of their fame today—was still stored, apparently untouched for decades, in the family house at Oxnead, a manor which the first William Paston had bought around 1420. There, they were examined by the Reverend Francis Blomefield, a local historian who described a room full of boxes, chests, and sacks containing “court-rolls, surveys, extent-books, deeds and other things” a well as “innumerable letters, of good consequence in history, still lying among the loose papers, all which I laid up in a corner of the room on a heap.” He informed the earl’s executors that the letters “seem to have some family affairs of one nature or other intermixed in them” and asked whether he should “preserve them, or whether you will have them burnt”—especially “those (of which there are many) that relate to nothing but family affairs only … a great number [of which] have perished entirely.”31 Happily, some eventually found their way into the hands of influencers like Horace Walpole (1717–1797), who recognized them as “invaluable” and advocated for their publication.32 By the end of the nineteenth century, then, when Crisp was assembling the composite collection that would form the core of the Harvard Law School archive, the contents of many old muniments chests had been on the market, or in the hands of antiquaries, for a century and a half. This makes the longevity of the Worth family’s collection at Washfield even more remarkable, since it appears to have descended intact from Thomas Hobekyn, manumitted in 1270 during the reign of Henry IV, to John Worth III, esquire, the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Thomas, who was still keeping the archive in 1800, the 40th year of George III. Even though these deeds were no longer legally potent, they appear to have been treasured nonetheless. In fact, John Worth III occasionally added new items to this old family treasure. The last addition is simply a letter, written to him by his paternal uncle, Charles Worth, on March 27, 1800 (Figure 9).33 My Dear Sir: The time draws near for my departure, therefor I am to beg your Aʄsistance in conveying me in your Chair tomorrow to Twiston. I should wish if it perfectly suits you to leave Washfield about 5 o’Clock to avoid the cool of the evening. Will thank you for any cuttings of Geraniums or anything that you think will be Gay for my garden Pots, and an HoneySuckle. Yesterday brought me the melancholy account of the death of My Deer Childe Henry last Sunday. I have known nothing but trouble these 5 Years but we must submit. My love to Mrs. Worth & the Children. I remain Your Affte. Uncle Charles Worth Cited by Davis in Paston Letters and Papers,” 1: xxv–xxvi. Cited by Davis in Paston Letters and Papers,” 1: xxiv. 33 HSC Deeds 64, https://nrs.lib.harvard.edu/urn-3:hls.libr:101010085. 31 32 9 Charles Worth appears to have been staying in a house near or on his nephew’s entailed estate. Almost in passing, amid the request for seedlings and transportation, he announces the news of his own son’s death. The shock and grief may have been what killed him. At the bottom of the page, John Worth added his own inscription: My poor Uncle Charles’s last letter. It must have seemed fitting to place this artifact, with its sad notice of an heir’s untimely demise, among the family’s cherished medieval charters. 10 [Figures and Captions] Figure 1a. Deposition by Robert Spurway of Tiverton (Devon), testifying to the “desire of deeds,” HSC Deeds 117. 11 Figures 1b and 1c (detail). Dorsal inscription by Thomas Worth the younger: “Herein so sign[ifi]e that T Worthe wold not [seal to] a partition for any thing without a deliverance of all deeds of his owne descent.” 12 Figures 2a and 2b. Manumission of Robert Hobekyn (measuring 7.5 x 18 cm.), dated to the 55th year of Henry IV (1270–1271), HSC Deeds 8. 13 Figure 3. Reconstructed folding of the manumission (Figure 2), showing its actual size (author’s photograph). 14 Figures 4a and 4b. Undated inspeximus of Henry Abbe, made in the 18th year of Edward I (1289–1290), testifying to an earlier undated charter made by his grandfather, William le Abbe, granting a furlong of land to Robert de Hobekyn, HSC Deeds 10. The dark stains, similar to those marking the original manumission (Figure 2), may indicate that they were kept together. 15 Figure 5. Letters patent (measuring 37 x 44 cm.) to John Norys and others, with the Great Seal of Henry IV (12 cm. circumference); the “H” of the king’s name is left unilluminated, HSC Deeds 744. 16 Figures 6a and 6b (detail). “This charter is the best charter of all the other charters in the monastery”—note appended to a charter from Dunster Priory (Somerset), HSC Deeds 124. 17 Figures 7a and 7b (detail). “I wille that Pegg & Robert Barker make / a lauful astate to John Wilne & Margaret his | wife of Þe place & to þe here[s] of Marg[ar]et,” HSC Deeds 439 (author’s photograph). 18 Figure 8. Certificate by Sir John Brode, curate of Minster (Cornwall), testifying that the people of Wooston, “me with oon vois” had “never herd it callid or knowen in court or out of court by the name of Wolneston a name feyned & new altered as ferre as any of ham can remember,” HSC Deeds 118. Compare the hand to that of the deposition in Figure 1. 19 Figure 9. Letter from Charles Worth to John Worth III, dated March 26, 1800, HSC Deeds 64. The recipient has endorsed this last “deed” in the Worth family archive, “My poor Uncle Charles’s last letter.” 20 Acknowledgments: An early version of this essay appeared in Medieval Materiality, ed. Anne E. Lester and Katherine C. Little, English Language Notes 53.2 (2015): 145–55. It has since been revised and expanded. Images are provided by the Harvard Law School Library Historical & Special Collections (hereinafter HSC), except where otherwise specified. I am warmly grateful to the Library’s staff, with whom I worked so happily during the 1990s and occasionally since. I am especially grateful to Charles Donahue, Jr., on whose expertise I constantly relied at that time, and whose influence has endured in so many aspects of my scholarship and teaching. Thanks are also due to Elizabeth Papp Kamali, who was my own undergraduate student during the years when I became familiar with this collection. Bibliography Manuscripts Harvard Law School Library Historical & Special Collections, Cambridge, MA: Deeds 8, 10, 37, 64, 116–18, 122–24, 439, 508, 439, 744 MS 180 (copy of the Tractatus de legibus attributed to Glanville) Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3500 (“Exeter Domesday”), Exeter, UK: Quire 85 Printed Primary Sources The Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough, Previously Edited as the Chronicle of Walter of Hemingford or Hemingburgh. Edited by Harry Rothwell. London: Offices of the Society, 1957. Davis, Norman et al., eds. Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century. 3 vols. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Farley, Abraham and Henry Ellis, eds. Libri censualis vocati Domesday-book, additamenta ex codic. antiquiss. Exon’ domesday. Inquisitio eliensis. Liber Winton. Boldon book. London: Printed by G. Eyre and A. Strahan, 1816. Secondary Sources Britnell, R. H., ed. Pragmatic Literacy, East and West, 1200–1330, Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 1997. Brown, Warren C., Mario Costambeys, Matthew Innes, and Adam Kosto, eds. Documentary Culture and the Laity in the Early Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Burke, John. A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry; Or, Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland, etc. London: Henry Colburn, 1837–1838. Clanchy, M. T. From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307, 3rd ed. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Cohen, Esther and Mayke De Jong, eds. Medieval Transformations: Texts, Power, and Gifts in Context. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Cooke, George Alexander. Topographical Survey of the County of Devon, Historical, Statistical, and Descriptive, etc. London: Printed for C. Cook by Brimmer and Co., 1817. 21 Crane, Susan. “The Writing Lesson of 1381.” In Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context, edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt, 201–22. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Flight, Colin. The Survey of the Whole of England: Studies of the Documentation Resulting from the Survey Conducted in 1086. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2006, Franklin, Simon. Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950–1300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Garrison, Mary, A. P. Orbán, and Marco Mostert, eds. Spoken and Written Language: Relations between Latin and the Vernacular Languages in the Earlier Middles Ages. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. Goez, Elke. 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Scribes, Scripts, and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation, and Dissemination of Medieval Texts. London: Hambledon Press, 1991. de Ricci, Seymour et al. Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada. 3 vols. New York: Hon. W. Wilson, 1935. Schulte, Petra, Marco Mostert, and Irene van Renswoude, eds. Strategies of Writing: Studies on Text and Trust in the Middle Ages. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. 22 Symes, Carol. “Doing Things beside Domesday Book.” Speculum 93 (2018): 1048–101. Symes, Carol. HISTORY IN DEED: Medieval Society and the Law in England, 1100–1600, An Exhibition of Deeds & Charters from the Harvard Law Library. With an introduction by Charles Donahue, Jr. Cambridge, MA: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1993: https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:499508680$1i. 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