During the Reign of King Henry III of England, in the 1230s: A Fascinating, Elegant Legal Manuscript Showing the Complicated Relationship Between a Once-Great Medieval Abbey and Its Neighbors

“Let those present and future know that thus it has been agreed between Simon, abbot of Rufford and the convent of the same place on the one side, and John Burdun on the other, concerning the very many disputes had between them….”

While the church of a monastic community was its beating heart, the archive was, and remains, its memory – an accumulation of records of things it owned and which provided for its upkeep and continuing survival. However, archives were not just passive collections of old records, but had to play active roles in the assertion of rights to contested estates and properties. The practice of people leaving such things to ecclesiastical communities on their death and then the next generation questioning such grants with the intention of keeping the goods is so common as to feature in almost every local chronicle time and time again. Thus, documents were necessary to push back against such counter claims and physically demonstrate the abbey’s claims to its gifts. The document itself was a statement of power and authority. The style of script was evocative of both.

In 1147, the once-great Rufford Abbey was founded by Gilbert de Gant, the First Earl of Lincoln, who installed Cistercian monks from the important Yorkshire Abbey of Rievaulx. Rievaulx now stands in ruins among the Yorkshire moors and Rufford Abbey would be largely unrecognizable to its medieval inhabitants.

Within the first hundred years of its existence, Rufford Abbey experienced a threat to its use of land. Between 1232-1237, Simon, the Abbot of Rufford Abbey, and John Burdun, engaged in a dispute over land left by Burdun’s grandfather to the monks. Burdun’s ancestors had been great benefactors to the Abbey. The lands in dispute by Simon the Abbot and John Burdun, as well as “a hundred sheep, five cows, one bull, eight oxen, ten pigs, and one horse” had been gifted to the abbey by John Burdun’s grandfather and father. This gift is confirmed by a charter from 1220-1230 held in the Nottinghamshire Archives (DD/SR/120/108). There appears to have developed a dispute over how the two parties would use their land, some of which John claimed was entirely his and some of which was to be jointly used.

The Abbot was engaged in much work during this period. And King Henry involved himself. As a contemporary history notes, “A grant was made by Henry III in 1233 to the Abbot and monks of Rufford, confirmatory of the gift of Ralph son of Nicholas of all his land in ‘Werkenefeld,’ accompanied by licence to inclose the said land with a dyke and hedge, so that beasts of the chase might have free entry and exit, and to cultivate the said land, build on it, or dispose of it as they will…” So during this period, King Henry III had his attention on Rufford.

Agreement between Simon, Abbot of Rufford and John Burdun, cementing the control of the Abbey over the land. [England, Nottinghamshire, ca. 1232-1237], contemporary with the separate agreement re: Ralph mentioned above. One leaf of vellum with distinct chirograph, written in 13th century in a luxurious legal script with elements of Romanesque and court hands combine to make a local product, with names of witnesses: Robert de Laxton, Magister Peter, Benedict de Roleston, Robert de Ripers, Gilbert de Mapilbec, Robert de Hokerton, etc. The ‘turn up’ has been flattened and the seal lost. Text does not appear in Rufford Charters, the edited collection of the master copy of the community’s charters, therefore this is the only known copy documenting this portion of the dispute.

The present charter is a fascinating glimpse into how religious institutions in the Middle Ages coexisted with their neighbors in ways at times beneficial to them and at other times confrontational. The end arrangement edified above in Rufford was that the Abbey would be allowed to hold the land and cultivate it, enclosing it with a ditch, without any duty to John’s family, until after the grains are carried away each year.

It comes with a full translation.

The document’s crenelated top portion speaks to another legal action. This is chirograph— a medieval form of duplicating and authenticating legal documents. Both parties would have an identical form of the text written out on a long piece of parchment which was cut in an intricate design, separating the two documents but allowing for them to be rejoined like puzzle pieces to prove the two parties hold the matching documents. To further provide authenticity, a word was usually included along the cut portion so that forgeries would be more difficult. This surviving portion is more likely than not the copy retained by Rufford Abbey, and therefore Simon’s, as it is more likely to have survived in the Abbey’s holdings and have been dispersed during the Dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII in 1536.

The script of the document is intentionally large and sumptuous, speaking to the grandeur Rufford Abbey felt for itself and its legal proceedings. It was most likely produced by the Abbey itself, using a Romanesque-influenced local script with elements of the more traditional court hands that would have been used in the Royal court for legal documents. The elegance of the script and the visual grandeur would have helped the Abbey enforce their claim on their ownership of the land.

For a long time in an American collection.

In 1251, King Henry III came in on the Abbey’s side and included these estates among those he issued an inspeximus for (a charter that endorses the claims of all previous charters for those estates, but gives it royal assent and weight), as is recorded in the Victoria County History, a comprehensive history of counties in England compiled in 1910.