14 August 2024
Fine along the dotted line
The Cotton Charters and Rolls held at the British Library include many important items, like one of the four surviving copies of the 1215 Magna Carta (Cotton Ch XIII 31A), or have impressive seals (Cotton Ch XXI 11), or illuminated initials and decoration (Cotton Ch XVII 7). But sometimes their appearance belies their importance, as is the case with Cotton Ch XI 73. This seems a fairly innocuous document, a small sheet of parchment, less than two inches by five, with a few holes, a little staining and no seal attached. Yet it is one of the oldest surviving records of its kind and preserves fascinating evidence of medieval England’s relations with Scotland.
The earliest surviving fine, issued in 1175: Cotton Ch XI 73
This charter is what is known as a final concord, or fine, and it has been described as the earliest surviving example of this kind of document (A Guide to the Manuscripts, Autographs, Charters, Seals, Illuminations and Bindings Exhibited in the Department of Manuscripts and in the Grenville Library (London, 1899), p. 42). It records that, before a tribunal of judges at Oxford, a woman called Ingrea, together with her three daughters, Gundred, Isabel and Margaret, agreed to give up any claims they had to some land in Oxford to Oseney Abbey, in return for the monks giving them 20s.
Medieval fines were court settlements putting an end to litigation — they did not necessarily have the connotation of a penalty for wrongdoing like the word does today. Originating in the late 12th century, fines became one of the standard methods to transfer freehold property until their abolition in 1833.
A fine would be copied three times onto a single sheet of parchment. Each was separated by a wavy line or the word ‘chirographum’, meaning handwritten, and then cut into three parts along that word or line. Each party would receive one of the top two copies of the document and the court would retain the bottom version, or foot. This was an early form of authentication. If the participants ever needed to prove that their copy was genuine, they could each bring their copies together and show that the cuts matched up.
A reunited chirograph in A C. W. Foster, ed., Final Concords of the County of Lincoln Volume 2 (Horncastle, Lincoln Record Society, 1920), frontispiece
As well as being the earliest surviving fine, what makes this charter particularly interesting is the dating clause, recording where and when the document was made. In the 12th century, most charters did not have a dating clause and historians have to work out the date by other means, such as the witness list. Fines were the first charters to regularly record their date, a typical formula being along the lines, ‘Given at London, Thursday after the Nativity of St John the Baptist, the third year of the reign of King Edward, son of King Henry’, which translates to 27 June 1275. But the dating clause of our charter is particularly unusual. The charter states it was given ‘close to the feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul [21 June] after the lord king took the allegiance of the barons of Scotland at York’. This refers to the submission of William the Lion, king of Scots (r. 1165–1214), and his clergy and barons, to King Henry II of England (r. 1154–1189), which took place on 10 August 1175. William had invaded England in 1174 but was captured and taken in chains to Normandy, where Henry forced him to agree to the Treaty of Falaise. William became an English vassal, handing over hostages and key castles, and submitting the Church of Scotland to that of England. The 1175 ceremony in York formalised Scotland’s new subordinate status.
Seal of William the Lion, in Walter de Gray Birch, History of Scottish Seals from the Eleventh to the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols (Stirling and London, 1905–07), I, p. 109
By using William’s submission as his frame of reference rather than the traditional year of the king’s reign, the court scribe who wrote this document clearly thought that the ceremony was a landmark occurrence by which other events could be dated. Little did they know that Richard the Lionheart (r. 1189–1199) would subsequently cancel the treaty in 1189 in return for King William’s gift of 10,000 marks towards the Third Crusade. William's submission to the English Crown did become, however, a benchmark for kings from Edward I (r. 1272–1307) to Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547) to try and assert their claimed overlordship of Scotland, sparking almost 300 years of intermittent wars between the two kingdoms.
This is just one of more than 1,000 Cotton charters and rolls that we are adding to the British Library's online catalogue. As the project progresses, further blogposts will highlight other interesting documents from the collection.
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