Our recent visitor to the Estate was Jordan Seymour, a PHD candidate from the University of East Anglia who is researching ‘The Charters of Revesby Abbey’.

Below he explains a bit about the Cistercian Abbey and what charters are.

What is a charter?

A charter simply serves as a record of a grant, be it of land, money, rights or some other gift, made by one individual to another, or to an institution such as an abbey. In the case of those made in favour of an abbey most, if not all, would have been written “in-house” by the abbey’s own scribes, a necessity of a largely illiterate world outside of the abbey gate. These documents would be written in medieval Latin, which has some small differences from classical Latin in terms of spelling, amongst other small changes. Charters to an abbey such as Revesby largely contain grants of land, with occasional monetary gifts attached. Charters often appear written almost as if a letter, usually addressed to a rather vague audience. By the mid-12th century, when Revesby was founded, abbeys often adopted what is known as a “house style” when writing their charters: many of their charters would follow a near-identical opening to each other, but specific to their own abbey. Revesby’s own house style is reflected in most of its 12th century charters opening with the words “Omnibus filiis sancte matris ecclesie [grantor’s name] salutem” or “To all sons of the blessed mother church [grantor’s name] sends greetings”. These house styles eventually fall out of use but show very prominently in the early records for Revesby. The main section of a charter would convey the nature of the gift (I.E. an acre of land given to the abbey), usually in return for prayers for grantor’s soul, and those of their ancestors and successors, to ensure that they could enter heaven without issue. This is not necessarily always the case, however. Sometimes the abbey would receive land in return for a small monetary payment to an individual, for instance, and would lay out when payments could be made, usually at an important saint’s feast. With Revesby payments to and from the abbey that are recorded in charters, for instance, usually indicate payments made at feasts like that of St Botolph. Some charters end with a dating clause, giving at least the year that the grant was made, but the majority do not, making dating the documents much harder. All of the charters I have looked at thus far, however, do include a witness list, a list of names of individuals that act as witnesses to the grant’s creation, giving the document its legitimacy. Some of these individuals are figures of note – the foundation charter bears the name of Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, for instance. Most however, appear to be local individuals of relatively little note outside of their existence within the charter. You can trace some family lineages through these documents, however, with sons of individuals found in earlier witness lists appearing in the witness lists of later charters.