Introduction: A Digest of The Charters Preserved in The Cartulary of The Priory of Dunstable

Summary

INTRODUCTION.

Copies of the charters, by which churches lands rents tithes and the like had been granted to or by the Augustinian Priory of St. Peter at Dunstable, are preserved in a volume termed the Cartulary of that Priory, which is catalogued as “Harleian MS. 1885” in the collections of the British Museum. Other matters of very varied nature—notably pleadings at law in which the monastery was concerned—have often been added to such cartularies, perhaps by a monastic scribe, perhaps by a later collector of manuscripts when binding together documents derived from a common origin. But to the monastery, as to us, the charters were the most important content, inasmuch as they represented the title-deeds of the possessions and rights of this House, and could be appealed to if these were challenged.

Admittedly, the only scholarly way of publishing such a Cartulary is to print every entry in the original Latin, word for word. Before 1914 this method was still possible, at any rate for the wealthier Societies and the smaller cartularies; nowadays such a treatment is impossible for a small Society, nor is it likely to be resumed till a generation has passed. Yet the need to render these bulky and often disorderly collections of historical material available for study, is as great as ever; even an Index to a cartulary would be a great help to students.

In this Digest, something more than a bare index to the charters has been attempted:—

• (1) Entries of matter other than charters, such as writs, and records of pleas in which the Priory was concerned, have been merely listed; their interest is of a character different from that of the rest of the record, and they are presumably to be found in authentic form among the legal documents of the Public Record Office. Similarly, Extents of the Priory's possessions as a rule have been merely mentioned; the editor hopes eventually to utilise them in connection with similar documents from other sources:—

• (2) In the case of small grants of land by insignificant benefactors, the details are given in the briefest form possible; where the grant or subject is more weighty, a fuller abstract has been supplied :—