Add Ch 75503

GRANT by Waleran FitzRanulf to St Stephen's Abbey, Caen, of the church of Bures St Mary, co. Suff., together with all other property, etc., of Waleran in Bures, and a house in London, made with a view to the establishment of a dependent priory at Bures; betw. 1068 (probably aft. 1072) and 1076. With the autograph signa of William I, Queen Matilda, John [of Bayeux], Archbishop of Rouen, Roger de Beaumont, Count of Meulan, and his son Robert. See further J. H. Round, Calendar of Documents Preserved in France, London, 1899; Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum, i, no. 116, and addenda, ii, p. 393; and G. R. C. Davis, 'A Norman Charter', B.M.Q., xxv, 1962, pp. 75-9. Reproduced in V. H. Galbraith, 'The Literacy of the Medieval English Kings', Proceedings of the British Academy, xxi, 1935, p. 201. The signa are illustrated in colour in A. Prescott, English Historical Documents, British Library, 1988, p. 14. The grantor of the present charter has been identified with Waleran, the son of Ranulf the moneyer, a tenant-in-chief of William I who held lands in Cambridgeshire, Essex and Suffolk: see further Sir Charles Clay, G.E.C. Peerage, xii (2), 1959, App. B, which includes an extensive discussion of the present charter. Extant documents bearing an authentic signum of William I are listed and the signa illustrated in P. Chaplais, 'Une Charte originale de Guillaume le Conquérant pour l'Abbaye de Fécamp', L'Abbaye Bénédictine de Fécamp 658-1958, Fécamp, 1958, pp. 93-104, 355-358, pl. ii [Departmental Pamphlet 1304], reprinted in Essays in Medieval Diplomacy and Administration, London, 1988. H. P. Kraus, A Rare Book Saga, New York, 1978, p. 138, refers to another charter bearing William's signum, formerly owned by Sir Thomas Phillipps and apparently not listed by Chaplais, and now, according to Kraus, in the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, Geneva. The charter was, until the time of the French Revolution, preserved among the abbey's archives (cf. pressmarks, etc., of Add. Ch. 67581, 67585, etc.) of which the main body is now in the Archives Départmentales of Calvados, at Caen. Like Add. Ch. 67574-67593, it formed part of a collection of charters presumed to have been acquired from the Abbé Gervais de la Rue (b. 1751, d. 1835) of Caen, French historian, by Thomas Stapleton, F.S.A. (b. 1805, d. 1849), a younger brother of the 8th Baron Beaumont, of Carlton Towers, co. York: cf. L. Delisle, Bibl. Nat. Cat. MSS. fonds de la Tremoïlle, 1889, p. 19. De la Rue was a refugee in England (and made F.S.A.) from 1793 to 1798. Transcribed, 1881, whilst at Carlton Towers, in Paris, Bibl. Nat. MS. Nouv. Acq. lat. 1428. Sold at Sotheby's, 22 Oct. 1920, lot 185, as the property of Baroness Beaumont of Carlton Towers, to F. Sabin (£500). Offered for sale by Maggs Bros. in a special catalogue dated (in ink) 1931 at £2,500, and acquired by Lord Maclay. Offered for sale (on Lord Maclay's behalf) by Maggs Bros., cat. no. 785 (1949), item 888, again at a price of £2,500. For an extremely garbled account of the circumstances of its purchase by the Museum, see Kraus, op. cit., pp. 137-8; among the many erroneous details in Kraus's recollection of this incident are the details of the grant, the previous owner of the document and the price. Purchased, with the aid of a grant from the Friends of the National Libraries, from Messrs Maggs Bros., 14 Oct. 1961.

Vellum; 1 membrane. Maximum dimensions: 250 mm. x 264 mm. 1068-1076. The charter was thus apparently drafted and written in the scriptorium of St Stephen's Abbey, Caen: 'The script is a distinctive and well-formed late-eleventh-century Norman book hand associated primarily with the names of Lanfranc (to whom its Italian aspect is presumably due) and the Abbey of Bec, from which it appears from other sources to have been brought by Lanfranc to the scriptorium of St Stephen's Abbey . . . when he became its first abbot in 1066, and from there also to Canterbury when he became archbishop': Davis, op. cit., p. 77. One scribe wrote the main text, and another the annotations to the signa. The annotations and the signa are in a paler ink than the rest of the document. '[The charter] has been carefully ruled with a stylus from the back (the hair side of the skin) to provide left and right vertical margins as well as horizontal lines; on the left, extending in a few instances as far as the centre, may be seen traces of an earlier ruling, made at a slight angle to the final one, and apparently cancelled before it was completed': Davis, op. cit., p. 77.