On 27-Dec-22 11:33 PM, Alan Jones wrote:
Why was it not regarded as essential (at the very least beneficial) for the date when a charter was executed to have been recorded at the time?
Original charters are more likely to have a dating clause (sometimes
just a regnal year and/or indiction, sometimes also a month and
sometimes the exact date including the weekday, although accuracy in
each of these details was not the strong suit of many scribes) than are cartulary versions of these - usually because the latter were compiled
later, when the date did not matter very much.
Were subscribing witnesses to a charter assembled together when the parties named in it executed it? If not, what were they actually witnessing?
This is impossible to answer definitively. Where an original still
exists it is mostly the case that all witness subscriptions (whether
signatures or marks) were made on the occasion of the enactment, but
there are plenty of documents with further subscriptions added later. In undated charters - usually cartulary transcriptions or paraphrased
versions - these can be plainly anachronistic, leading to questions
about the authenticity of the document that may be misplaced. For
instance, the heir/s of a benefactor may have endorsed the original
charter along with clerics or others using titles of office that they
cannot have held at the time of the donation. It is not altogether rare
for two abbots of the same monastery or bishops of the same diocese,
perhaps successive although not necessarily so, to appear as witnesses
to the same business - clearly not simultaneously.
Peter Stewart
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