Continental Houses

A number of religious houses on the continent received grants of land in England, before the Norman Conquest, under a variety of different circumstances.  The church of Saint-Denis, near Paris, claimed to have been given extensive lands in Sussex, and interests in London, by Ealdorman Berhtwald, towards the end of the eighth century.  The church of St Peter’s, Ghent, claimed to have been given land at Lewisham in Kent, and interests at Greenwich and Woolwich, by Ælfthryth (daughter of King Alfred the Great, and wife of Count Baldwin II of Flanders), in the early tenth century.  It was presumably Emma, sister of Duke Richard II of Normandy, wife of King Æthelred the Unready, and later the wife of Cnut, who was instrumental in focussing the attention of her husbands on the abbey of Fécamp: King Æthelred himself promised to give certain lands in Sussex to the ducal abbey of Fécamp, a promise which in the event was fulfilled by King Cnut.  King Edward the Confessor gave land in Cornwall and elsewhere to Mont Saint-Michel, during his exile in Normandy; land in Essex to the abbey of Saint-Ouen, Rouen, in 1046; more land in Sussex to Fécamp, in 1054; land in Oxfordshire to Saint-Denis, Paris, at the instigation of Baldwin, in the mid 1050s; and land in Devon to the cathedral church of Notre Dame, Rouen, in 1061.  The abbey of Saint-Remi of Rheims was given land in Staffordshire and Shropshire by Ælfgar, earl of Mercia, in the early 1060s; this was probably a special case, since it arose from the death of Earl Ælfgar’s son Burchard during the course of an expedition to Rome in 1061, and from Burchard’s burial at Rheims.

The interests of continental houses in Anglo-Saxon England were doubtless more extensive than surviving charters would suggest; though one might suppose that the Domesday survey gives a good indication of endowments during the reign of Edward the Confessor.  Some curious 'omissions' from the record should be noted (e.g. Jumièges).  The nature and quality of the texts preserved in continental archives is very variable; some are straightforward royal diplomas, but others would appear to belong more naturally in the ‘continental’ diplomatic tradition.  <Forms of transmission: originals, cartularies, early modern transcripts of manuscripts now lost.>

The standard account of the English interests of continental religious houses is D. Matthew, The Norman Monasteries and their English Possessions (Oxford, 1962), esp. pp. 19-26; see also M. Chibnall, ‘Some Aspects of the Norman Monastic Plantation in England’, La Normandie Bénédictine au temps de Guillaume le Conquérant (XIe siècle) (Lille, 1967), pp. 399-415.  For the Norman Church in general, see D. Bates, Normandy before 1066 (London, 1982), pp. 189-235.  The pre-Conquest charters relating to the English interests of continental houses can be placed in their wider contexts by consulting the Calendar of Documents preserved in France, Illustrative of the History of Great Britain and Ireland, I: A.D. 918-1206, ed. J. H. Round (London, 1899); see also E. King, ‘John Horace Round and the “Calendar of Documents Preserved in France”’, Proceedings of the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies IV:1981, ed. R. A. Brown (Woodbridge, 1982), pp. 93-103 and 202-4. 

For accounts of particular religious houses in Normandy, see A. Du Monstier, Neustria Pia (Rouen, 1663); see also Gallia Christiana, 16 vols. (Paris, 1715-1865), vol. 11.  Cartularies of religious houses in France are listed by H. Stein, Bibliographie générale des cartulaires français ou relatifs a l’histoire de France (Paris, 1907).  D. S. Spear, Research Facilities in Normandy and Paris: a Guide for Students of Medieval Norman History, rev. ed. (Greenville, S.C., 1993), includes valuable checklists of Norman cartularies and lost Norman cartularies (pp. 27–53).

The charters preserved in continental houses will be gathered together in a single volume, which will contain fuller accounts of each of the religious houses in question. The charters in each archive may also be identified by using the 'Electronic Sawyer', and browsing under 'Archive'.

The series of archival profiles originated in 1991-3 as part of a survey of all 'archives' from which charters have been preserved. The profiles are made available here as work in progress, for general information, and remain subject to correction, modification, and updating.

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October 2011