from Medieval Academy News (Spring 2004)

The DEEDS Project: Towards the Dating and Analysis of
English Private Charters of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
by Michael Gervers

The Norman contribution to the administrative history of medieval England is a commonplace of academic inquiry. One significant result of the Conquest of 1066, which has blurred our understanding of social, political, and economic change for the nearly two-and-a-half centuries between that event and the end of the reign of Edward I in 1307, is the custom of not including a date of issue in charters. Charters were the most ubiquitous records of the time, and it is estimated that for the twelfth and thirteenth centuries alone over a million have survived as originals or cartulary copies.

On the European continent in the eleventh century, time and place determined whether a charter would include a date reference. The closer the tie between the issuer and the Roman tradition, the greater the likelihood that it would be dated. But in Burgundy, as in Normandy, the custom of including dates declined steadily from the late tenth century until the middle of the eleventh century, when dating became quite rare. These territories lay well outside the formal control of the French king. It is above all this detachment from royal administrative supervision that may explain why, when the charters of the French monarchy continued to be dated, those of some of the more independent outlying provinces were not.

In this regard it was England’s fate that the Norman Conquest took place when it did, for with William I came the custom of not dating charters at any level of society. The Norman dukes, whose administrative system developed when ties with the French Crown were weak, were clearly unconcerned about the formal letter-writing conventions that European monarchs had adopted from the papal chancery. They bothered little with traditional formality, dispensed with all that was not absolutely essential to the message they wished to convey, and rarely included a date. They sought brevity and conciseness in their charters and carried that administrative principle with them to England where it became a long-standing tradition in its own right.

It was this tradition, rather than a conscious desire to dispense with the concept of time, that led to the enduring English phenomenon of the undated charter. In Normandy, dating returned to the charter text as royal administrative authority spread in the region after 1204, while in England the accession of Richard I in 1189 marked the regular introduction of dating to records emanating from the royal chancery. However, attachment to tradition being what it is, more than a century passed before that custom was adopted consistently by those who drafted charters elsewhere in the realm. It was not until the early years of the reign of Edward II (1307–27) that it became customary to include dates in private conveyances.

The development of a methodology to assign a date to undated medieval charters has been the primary occupation of the DEEDS Project over the past decade. The traditional method of ascertaining a relative chronology for undated records through the association of personal names with their counterparts in dated sources is fraught with uncertainty. The approach works reasonably well when one or more office-holders whose dates of tenure are known appear in the same record. It becomes distinctly hazardous, however, with individuals to whom a clearly defined chronology cannot be attached, since namesakes, even when occurring in groups, may well be different people several generations apart.

Problems arising from the misidentification of individuals are compounded in those records whose witness lists were omitted. In the case of records in which no more than two or three otherwise unknown names appear, other means are needed to determine chronology. Palaeography is not an option, as the great majority of the sources from the period have survived only in later copies. For the same reason, sigillography is also insufficient.

Seeking an alternative solution, DEEDS adopted a route suggested eighty years ago by the English medieval historian, Sir Frank Stenton. Faced with the reality that only 5% of the records he was editing bore dates, he determined that charter chronology was inextricably tied to the growth and development of the formulae which appeared in them. The term “formula” is somewhat ambiguous, as it suggests a set of words whose order and syntax does not change. Since nothing could be further from the truth in terms of the medieval legal phraseology of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, DEEDS uses the expression “word-pattern” rather than “formula” to designate any group of two or more words.

Charters from the period contain hundreds of thousands of such patterns. It is clear from the wide variety of dates associated with them that rather than being predominantly static, the language of the medieval charter was in constant flux. Consequently, it seemed reasonable that if the chronology of change were clear, it should be possible to use the rate of appearance of word-patterns in the record, and disappearance from it, to determine a fairly accurate date for any given record of this sort.

DEEDS researchers select those few dated private (rather than royal or papal) charters from the late eleventh through the fourteenth centuries that are available in the printed record and convert them to electronic format. Our collection of charters, representing approximately 8% of the extant corpus, and derived so far from 155 published cartularies and collections, presently contains over 8,000 such records. The raw text and attributes include date, date type, record type (grant, agreement, quitclaim, etc.), source (original or copy), place of issue, parish, and county concerned, religious or lay status of issuer and recipient, specific nature of issuer and recipient (religious order, or individual’s name, title, and occupation), and name(s) of religious houses and dates of foundation. These are integrated into one document by means of Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) and stored in the database.

Editors do not concur in their assessment of record types. As a consequence, DEEDS uses its own designation based on words of disposition. GRANTS, for example, invariably include forms of dedi and/or concessi, sometimes together with liveravi, tradidi, dimisi, assignavi, contuli, legavi, and donavi; QUITCLAIMS, forms of quietum clamavi, sometimes in conjunction with remisi, concessi, recognovi, resignavi, relaxavi, confirmavi, and dimisi. Lists of patterns have been established for each type.

In addition to the words of disposition, the basic diplomatic divisions into PROTOCOL, CORPUS, and ESCHATOCOL are defined, and further subdivisions, e.g., invocatio, intitulatio, and salutatio in the PROTOCOL, are identified. These segments are used subsequently to confirm and distinguish record types, and within each type to identify chronological changes in terminology, which then point to developments in the spheres of legal, social, and economic activity.

The establishment of accurate chronology also facilitates the identification of forgeries, since the purpose of forgery is to change past intent. DEEDS proposes to identify them through the analysis of content, particularly in terms of words in context, their placement in the text, and the frequency of their usage. Sections containing words, phrases, or concepts that appear to be outside their normal chronological context may be singled out as the possible entries of an “improver” or forger. Few forgeries entail complete records; the perpetrator is more likely to have tampered with the component parts.

By adding such chronological, spatial, lexical, and structural components, researchers at DEEDS anticipate that it will also be possible to improve existing methods of authorship evaluation. The result in the case of charters will be to identify the work of individual scribes, their dates of activity, and their patrons.

Charters are invaluable for interpreting the social, political, economic, and administrative history of the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries. That history reflects the individual circumstances that determined changes in the construction of legal texts and the constant adoption, formulation, and adaptation of words and word patterns. Simply put, changes in word usage and expression are an immediate reflection of social change. When the chronological and spatial context for a large number of charters has been established, it will be possible to determine when and why these changes took place.

The DEEDS Project is sponsored by the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. It is self-funded through the teaching of database software. As director (gervers@chass.utoronto.ca), I supervise six full-time staff and four graduate assistants. The Research Team welcomes collaboration with colleagues who have access to Latin charters in machine-readable form and who would be interested in analyzing them using the methodology developed at DEEDS. For a summary of that methodology, visit: http://lemo.irht.cnrs.fr/42/mo42_01.htm. Requests for access to our corpus of charters and search engine may be addressed to Michael Margolin (m.margolin@utoronto.ca).