The Acta of English Rural Deans in the later Twelfth and early Thirteenth Centuries

Summary

This article brings together for the first time a substantial selection of the earliest known acta and charters of English rural deans, from the mid twelfth century to c.1220. The aim is to illustrate from documents issued by them some aspects of their role in English diocesan administration and jurisdiction at this early and important stage of their existence. Of the twenty-two texts included here, most survive as more or less full copies, but four are originals. The small number of ruridecanal letters surviving from this period, some quite lengthy, have been omitted for reasons of space, as have the few acta issued by deans in conjunction with others, such as when acting as papal judges-delegate, but the total of individual acta so far discovered is still pitifully small, considering the hundreds of deans who operated in England at this time. The rural deans of the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries are mostly shadowy figures about whom, as individuals, we know next to nothing. It is not that we hear little of rural deans, or do not know their names – quite the reverse, for they occur frequently in the charters and other legal documents of the period. Most commonly they appear as witnesses to gifts (particularly to monasteries), settlements and the like, but deans are also fairly often referred to in other people's charters as playing some part in the legal processes recorded therein. A major limitation of the surviving evidence, however, is its almost total silence on the inquisitorial and corrective powers of the rural deans. Among the acta printed below the only such case is the precious reference to the rural dean of Pirehill (or Stafford) exacting a penalty of ten shillings from a wife convicted of adultery, presumably in his rural chapter (no. 11). Other types of record show rural deans carrying out a variety of legal and administrative duties, but the extreme rarity of such references in their acta is due to the fact that the overwhelming bulk of the evidence surviving from this early period concerns the rights of individuals or monasteries to possess lands, churches and the like, since it was generally only documents which fortified those rights that were preserved.