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Dating Undated Medieval Charters

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Dating Undated Medieval Charters Dating Undated Medieval Charters : Edited by Michael Gervers The BoydelI Press 04' /('7,A j THE CHARTERS OF KING HENRY 11: THE INTRODUCTION OF THE . ROYAL INSPEXIMUS REVISITED Nicholas Vincent It is hardly surprising that in his search for datable linguistic formulae in undated English charters, Michael Gervers, like Sir Frank Stenton before him, has drawn attention to the all-pervasive influence of the royal chancery. I This is not to say that every innovation in the wording of charters was first devised by the king or his officials. Nonetheless, since the terminology of private charters marched a step behind, but always in dogged attendance upon the terminology and processes of the law, and since, by the late twelfth century, it was royal law that dominated most forms of property transaction, it was the king and his courts who did most both to inspire and to police the evolution of new forms in the phrasing of private charters. To this extent, an understanding of the forms and phraseology of the King's own charters is fundamental to any search for the evolution of forms and phrases outside the royal chancery. In the present paper, I hope to show, with ref- erence to the charters of King Henry 11(1154-89), how the study of one particu- lar turn of phrase, later to develop into the instrument known as the royal inspex- imus, might assist us in understanding quite how perilous it may be to rely upon phraseology as a criterion for dating. My discussion here will be founded very firmly upon the work of two previous scholars: the Frenchman Leopold Delisie and the Englishman Vivian Galbraith. Between them, Delisie and Galbraith set a standard for the precise study of the language of twelfth-century charters that has seldom been bettered. There is still much to be learned about the linguistic devel- opments of Henry Il's chancery. Nonetheless, as an indication of the lines for future enquiry, and as an introduction to the perils and pitfalls of editing royal charters, I hope that the present enquiry may be of some use, even to those whose work lies far distant from twelfth-century England or the Plantagenet court. As always with the charters of Henry 11,our starting point must be the massive enterprise of Leopold Delisie. From his days as an aspiring chartiste in the 1840s, through to the year of his death in 1910, in advanced old age, Delisie sought to assemble a complete collection of those of King Henry Il's charters that con- cerned the King's dominion in France. The results of this enquiry began to appear only shortly before Delisle's death, but by 1910 he had published half-a-dozen articles on the subject and the first introductory volume of what he intended to be From Dating Undated Medieval Charters. Ed. Michael Gervers. Copyright (by the Editor and Contributors 2(00). Published by the BoydelI Press (in association with Collegium Budapest), PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF,G~ Britain. ISBN 0 85115 792 o. I. M. Gervers, 'The Dating of Medieval English Private Charters of the 1\velfth and Thirteenth Centuries', inA Distinct voice: Medieval Studies in Honor of Leonard E. Boyle, O.P., ed. J. Brown and W. P. Stoneman, Notre Dame, pp. 455-56, citing Stenton. 97 98 Dating Undated Medieval Charters a complete edition of texts, together with an Atlas of photographic facsimiles of originals.I The edition itself was completed posthumously, in a further three vol- umes edited by Delisle's pupil, Elie Berger.3 In all, DelisIe and Berger published more than 800 texts of Henry 11. Their edition, and in particular Delisle's Introduction, remains fundamental to our understanding of the Plantagenet chancery. For the purposes of the present discussion, the most dramatic and right- ly famous of Delisle's discoveries concerned the use of the formula Dei gratia in the King's title, Henricus Dei gratia rex Anglorumr Previously regarded as a hap- hazard element of chancery phrasing, the Dei gratia formula was shown by DelisIe to have been introduced at a fairly specific point, midway in the King's reign, at some time in 1172 or 1173. Until Delisle's enquiry many charters of Henry 11had proved impossible to date save within the very broadest of perime- ters. Delisle's discovery changed all this, suggesting that the presence or absence of Dei gratia could be used to determine whether a charter dated from the first or the second half of Henry's reign, from 1154 to 1173, or from 1172 to 1189. Delisle's claims did not go unchallenged, especially since, to begin with, taken aback by the brilliance of his own discovery, he himself was tempted to exagger- ate its infallibility. John Horace Round, whose attitude to the Ecole des Chartes and to all things French had soured considerably as a result of his own researches in the Norman archives, poured scorn upon Delisle's new theory.5 With his cus- tomary mixture of precision and brutality, Round pointed to a number of flaws in DelisIe 's initial report, and in particular, questioned whether charters that survived only in cartulary or later copies, as opposed to originals, could be dated according to their inclusion or omission of Dei gratia. All too frequently, as Round showed in example after cruel example, a later copyist might introduce the Dei gratia for- mula, imposing the most recent practices of the English royal chancery upon doc- uments which in their original state clearly belonged to the years before 1172-73. The criticism here was a serious one, and DelisIe was forced to take account of it in the more detailed treatment of Dei gratia which he contributed to his Introduction of 1909.6 Nonetheless, and despite various later challenges and qual- ifications, in particular with respect to cartulary copies and to originals produced 2. L Delisle, Recueil des Actes de Henri 11roi d'Angleterre et due de Normandie ~oncernant les provinces francaises et les affaires de France: Introduction (henceforth DelisIe, Introduction) and Atlas of facsimiles (Paris, 1909) (henceforth Delisle, Atlas). Articles in the Bibliotheque de l' Ecoles des Chartes 67 (1906): pp. 361-401: 68 (1907): pp. 272-314, 525-36: 69 (1908): pp. 541-80, 738-40 .. 3. Recueil des Actes de Henri 11,ed. L DelisIe and E. Berger, 3 vols, Paris, 1916-27 (henceforth DelisIe and Berger, Recueil). 4. See Delisle, 'Memoire sur la chronologie des chartes de Henri Il', Bibliotheque de /'Ecole des Chanes 67 (1906): pp. 361-401. 5. J. H. Round, 'The Chronology of Henry Il's Charters" Archaeological Journal Ss: (1907), pp. 63-79. For Round's experiences in France, see the extremely amusing study by Edmund King, 'John Horace Round and the "Calendar of Documents Preserved in France"', in Proceedings of the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies 4 (1982): pp. 93-103, esp. p. 103, where in writing to Maxwell- Lyte, Round expresses the hope that his remarks on Dei gratia might leave DelisIe "a crumpled heap". 6. Delisle,/ntroduction, pp. 12-38, and for Delisle's immediate reply, see Bibliotheque de l' Ecole des Chartes 68 (1907): pp. 515-36. The Charters of King Henry 11:The Royallnspeximus Revisited 99 by beneficiaries outside the royal chancery, the rule that Delisie devised remains a classic, arguably the classic, example of the use of linguistic formulae in the dat- ing of otherwise poorly dated medieval charters," . The chief flaw in Delisle's edition lay not with diplomatic, of which he was master sans-pareil, but in his failure to extend his search for the charters of Henry II much beyond the archives of northern France. Delisie did assemble lists of orig- inal charters of the King in the British Museum and the Public Record Office, and, by correspondence with H. E. Salter at Oxford, and Canon Foster at Lincoln, came to appreciate at least something of the riches that still awaited discovery in the English archives.f However, just as Round's work on the Calendar of Documents Preserved in France appears to have bred in Round a raging francophobia, in the same way, Delisle's experiences in England, and in particular his fight to secure the return of French manuscripts looted by the thief and bibliophile Libri, and thence sold to the utterly insufferable Lord Ashbumham, may have blunted the Frenchman's enthusiasm for the entente-cordialer As a result, Delisie and Berger, in publishing their 800 texts for French beneficiaries or issued in France, merely scratched the surface of the vast mountain of Henry II's charters that awaited discovery in England.l'' · '.. With this English material a start had been made, half a century earlier, by the Rev. R. W. Eyton, who in his Court, Household and Itinerary of King Henry 1/ had · attempted to reconstruct the King's movements by reference to the chronicles, the Exchequer records, and to the place of issue with which Henry II's charters end: · Testibus X apud Z.ll "Facts, simple facts", declared Eyton, "These are the prima- ry and most essential elements of pure history", a sentiment with which some but by no means all latter-day medievalists might agree.12 Eyton's Itinerary was 7. See in particular R. 1.. Poole, 'The Dates of Henry lI's Charters', English Historical Review 22 (1908): pp. 79-83; J. de Font-Reaulx, review of the rust volume of Delisie and Berger's Recueil, in Le Moyen Age (1915-16): p. 417, and the especially valuable study by H. Prentout, 'De l'origine de la formule 'Dei Gratia' dans les chartes de Henri 11', Memoires de l'Academie Nationale des Sciences, · Arts et Beiles-Leures de Caen (1918-20): pp.
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