Durham Cathedral Archive: Communar's Cartulary

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Introduction

	Contents
	Arrangement
	Bibliography

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Catalogue

• f.i
• f.1-55

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Contents

The Communar's deeds & Cartulary
Almost all the deeds relating to the estate administered by the monastic communar apparently survive. The reconstruction of the arrangement of the deeds, see below, leaves very few gaps that are not represented by extant original documents. On the other hand no medieval repertory of the communar's deeds survives, and it was presumably for this reason that Canon Greenwell did not attempt to reconstruct the class, as he did with the almoner's, Finchale and sacrist's deeds; unlike those deeds almost all the communar's deeds remain in the class Miscellaneous Charters, where they were listed in the mid-nineteenth century, very largely in a single block.
The deeds have suffered some damage since the beginning of the sixteenth century. This is clear when the originals are compared with the copies found in the communar's cartulary, for instance Misc. Chs 1964, 1980 and 2126. Such comparisons also reveal, however, that the scribe of the cartulary made a significant number of errors in copying the originals; some of the more conspicuous are noted in the description of the cartulary.
The arrangement of the deeds seems to have been largely the work of the energetic archivist Thomas Swalwell, monk of Durham c.1483-1539: the references on the dorse of the documents and in the margins of the cartulary are in his distinctive hand, apart from a small number of documents not classified as communar's deeds until the seventeenth century. Several groups of deeds had older numbers, see below, and an existing arrangement may lie behind the fact that some of the sections created by Swalwell start with documents concerning older holdings; the fifth and eighth sections are examples. To a lesser extent traces of the same pattern are perhaps to be seen in the cartulary, but in general the order in which documents were copied into the cartulary was somewhat haphazard, with, for instance, documents relating to Morton Tinmouth intervening, f.13v-14r, in the large block of ill-organized documents relating to property in the city of Durham, f.10r-49r.
The fact that the cartulary does not follow Swalwell's arrangement of the documents suggests that it was compiled before he made his arrangement; this is supported by the fact that his references were added to the original captions in the margins of the cartulary. The latest document found in the cartulary is a lease dated 12 March 1477/8; the scribe of the cartulary was responsible for the great majority of entries for the period 1490-1499 in Priory Register V (f.9v-51v). Moreover, although there is no reason to think that the cartulary is incomplete, it does not contain copies of all the documents that Swalwell classified as communar's deeds. While a significant proportion of those omitted are the counterparts of leases of communar's property, other omissions lack any obvious rationale, and so it is possible that some documents were put with the communar's deeds after the cartulary had been compiled; examples may well be two documents (Misc.Ch. 2100-1) apparently relating to Desborough (Northants.), whose endorsements reveal ignorance on the part of the fifteenth-century monastic archivist and Swalwell's belief that the property lay in Scotland.
The surviving identified deeds
(a) the current reference of each of the identified communar's deeds;
(b) the late medieval reference found on the dorse, or, where this is missing, the reference added in the margin beside the copy of the document in the communar's cartulary, or, in one or two cases, the reference that can be deduced from the reconstruction of the arrangement of the deeds;
(c) a reference to the folio in the communar's cartulary on which a copy of the document is to be found, many being the references added on the dorse by Thomas Swalwell, here silently corrected in the small number of cases where they are in error;
(d) an indication of when the first descriptive endorsement was put on the documents by a monastic archivist, except that this is left blank when the endorsement can be dated to the earlier fifteenth century, as is the case with most of the documents; the abbrevation “T.S.” stands for Thomas Swalwell, and “P.D.” for post-Dissolution.

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Accession details

Part of the medieval archive of Durham Cathedral Priory placed in the care of Durham University by Durham Dean and Chapter in 1948.

Conditions of access

Open for consultation.

Copyright and copying

Permission to make any published use of material from the collection must be sought in advance from Durham Cathedral Library (library@durhamcathedral.co.uk). The Library will assist where possible with identifying copyright owners, but responsibility for ensuring copyright clearance rests with the user of the material.

Arrangement

Conspectus of contents:

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Alternative forms

A negative microfilm is available at PGFilm 125

Bibliography

G.R.C. Davis, Medieval Cartularies of Great Britain (1958), no. 344.

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Handlist

f.i
f.1-55