Harrold Priory : A Twelfth Century Dispute

Summary

Introduction

The cartulary of Harrold Priory in British Museum MS. Lansdowne 391 contains on fo. llv the brief abstract of documents concerning the church of Stevington (Beds.), a neighbouring parish church which this Austin nunnery held by the grant of Baldwin of Ardres in the twelfth century and which was appropriated to the priory by Bishop Hugh de Wells of Lincoln in or before 1227. The abstract was printed in translation by the late Dr. G. H. Fowler in B.H.R.S. xvii, 35-6. At that time the text of the documents abstracted was unknown. The originals or copies had been among the muniments of Harrold Priory concerning Stevington when the cartulary was compiled in the fifteenth century, and the compiler noted of one of them (no. 2) : ‘a copy of this charter is in the fair psalter’ (copra istius carte est in pulcro psalterio’). This must be the copy which has now come to light, in a series of no less than nineteen documents concerning Stevington church, copied in the early part of the thirteenth century into a handsome psalter belonging to the nuns of Harrold.

Mr. N. R. Ker, Reader in Palaeography at Oxford, when examining the psalter in the summer of 1950, discovered these documents and kindly brought them to the Society’s notice. The psalter is now in the library of the Baptist College at Bristol (Z. c. 23), to which it was bequeathed in 1784 by Andrew Gifford; and the documents are here published by the kind permission of the College authorities. Mr. Ker points out that the psalter belonged earlier to Sir James Ware, in whose catalogue (Dublin, 1648) it is listed as ‘Theol. ms. 3 : Psalmi Davidis sive Psalterium. Adjiciuntur chartae quaedam domus monialium de Harewold in Com. Bedfordiae, in 4o [i.e. quarto] membran.’ He adds that the psalter is of the twelfth century, and is preceded by a Christ Church, Canterbury, calendar, in which an obit in a late twelfth-century hand shows that the book was at one time in Kent and came to Harrold second-hand. At the end of the psalter are various prayers. A sixteenth-century owner, John Sunnyng, ‘vicarius de Luswe (?)’ wrote his name on the last page of the text.