Mont-Saint-Michel

<Founded 966; etc.>  <Alexander on M-St-M manuscripts.>  In 1033 Duke Robert of Normandy launched an expedition to invade England, on behalf of the æthelings Edward and Alfred; the fleet was blown off course to Jersey, and ended up at Mont-Saint-Michel.  It was apparently on this occasion that Edward was moved to grant St Michael’s Mount, and other land in Cornwall, as well as ‘the port which is called Ruminella’ (? Romney, in Kent), to the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel; though it is doubtful, of course, that the grant took immediate (if any) effect.  <Riwallon, Serlo, Scolland, et al., sent to England in early 1070s.  Labbé.  See also Orderic ii. 248.>

S 1061 is the charter by which Edward, ‘king of the English’, granted St Michael’s Mount and other lands in England to Mont Saint-Michel, some time between 1027 and 1035.  The charter is preserved in the twelfth-century cartulary of Mont Saint-Michel (Avranches, Bibliothèque municipale Edouard le Héricher, MS. 210, fol. 32v); see Mon. Angl. i. 551 (printed ‘ex ipso autographo apud S. Michaelem in Normannia’), Fauroux, Recueil, no. 76 (pp. 216-18), and Cartulary of St. Michael’s Mount, ed. Hull, Appendix 1 (p. 61).  The monks of Mont Saint-Michel subsequently entrusted their English lands to the control of Otterton priory, Devon.  A copy of the charter was duly entered in the Otterton Custumal (Davis 737, penes Lord Coleridge, Ottery St Mary, Devon; now on deposit in the Devon Record Office, Exeter); for an account of this manuscript, see Oliver, Monasticon Dioecesis Exoniensis, pp. 248-59, at 256-9.

Royal diploma.  1061.

Select bibliography

Neustria Pia, pp. 371-95; Round, Calendar, pp. 249-80.  See also Matthew, Norman Monasteries, pp. 11-12 and 22-4; Millénaire Monastique du Mont Saint-Michel, ed. J. Laporte, et al., 4 vols. (Paris, 1966-8).  For St Michael’s Mount, see Mon. Angl. i. 551; Mon. Angl. (rev. ed.) vi. 988-91; MRH, p. 91.  For Otterton priory, Devon, see Mon. Angl. i. 569-70, and Mon. Angl. (rev. ed.) vi. 1033-4.

Hull, P. L., ed., The Cartulary of St. Michael’s Mount (Hatfield House MS. no. 315), Devon and Cornwall Record Soc. ns 5 (Torquay, 1962).  <Keynes 1991, pp. 190-4 and 204.>  C. Potts, ‘Normandy or Brittany?  A Conflict of Interests at Mont Saint Michel (966-1035)’, Anglo-Norman Studies XII, ed. M. Chibnall (Woodbridge, 1990), pp. 135-56.  Oliver, G., Monasticon Dioecesis Exoniensis (Exeter, 1846).

<M-S-M vols. ULC 101.5.c.95.19- >

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October 2011