11 - The Founders’ Book of Tewkesbury Abbey (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Top. Glouc. D. 2): Scripts and Transcripts

Summary

As has been well documented, the dissolution of the monasteries brought about the dispersal and destruction of a large number of medieval manuscripts of varying (and now often unidentifiable) significance to the modern scholar. It also, however, led to a counter-movement, rooted in an antiquarian interest in recovering the past, which expressed itself in the searching out, preservation and transcription of medieval manuscripts for a variety of reasons: historical, political, genealogical, topographical, literary. In particular, the visits to religious houses made by John Leland from the year 1535, when the Act for the Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries came into force, resulted in the various folio and quarto volumes of his notes and transcripts which came to be known as ‘The Itinerary’. Leland's notes often record material now lost, but both before and after his early death they had generated a spate of transcripts which have survived even when in some cases the original documents have not. This is the case with the two principal documents studied in this essay, both in a codex from the Benedictine Abbey of Tewkesbury (Glos.): the Charter of William Fitzrobert (1147–83), second earl of Gloucester, and the Chronicle of the Abbey. Into the twenty-first century these documents have been known to scholars only in transcripts of the sixteenth/seventeenth centuries.

Chronicles and charters were important to a monastic house because they confirmed rights and property. The Charter of William Fitzrobert was edited by Robert Patterson in his edition of Gloucestershire charters, using an early seventeenth century transcript (BL, MS Additional 36985). As for the Chronicle, William Dugdale's edition in Monasticon Anglicanum (first published in 1655) has been, and still is, the standard source for those interested in the history of Tewkesbury, its Abbey, and the relation of its benefactors to the great families of the medieval west Midlands, the Clares, Despensers, Beauchamps and Nevilles; it has been provided with a translation since 1712. Dugdale based his edition on an Elizabethan transcript (BL, MS Cotton Cleopatra C.iii) of a now-lost manuscript.