Rouen, St Mary's

The cathedral church of St Mary’s, Rouen. The church of St Mary's held an estate of 25 hides at Ottery (St Mary), in Devon, TRE and TRW (GDB 104r).  The cathedral disposed of the bulk of its lands in England in the 1330s; Ottery was purchased in 1334 by John Grandisson, bishop of Exeter, who founded the collegiate church of St Mary Ottery. 

S 1033, by which King Edward the Confessor granted land at Ottery to St Mary’s, Rouen, in 1061, was still preserved in its original single-sheet form at Rouen in the thirteenth century; the original is now lost, but the various extant copies of the charter constitute an instructive line of transmission.  An abbreviated text (without bounds and witness-list) was entered in the thirteenth-century cartulary of the cathedral church (Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS. Y 44 (1193), 26rv).  The charter itself was ‘inspected’ by Lucas, bishop of Evreux (1203-20), and Jordan, bishop of Lisieux (1202-18); the Inspeximus does not survive, but it is this version of the text (lacking the bounds, and with an abbreviated witness-list) which came to be incorporated in an early modern collection of charters now represented by a number of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuscripts (e.g. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS. 111, BL Lansdowne 447, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Dodsworth 10).  The charter was ‘inspected’ again in 1227, by Richard, bishop of Evreux (1223-36), and Roger, abbot of Saint-Ouen (1212-28); in this case, the Inspeximus itself survives in the archives of Christ Church, Canterbury (Canterbury, D. & C., Chart. Ant. R. 51), and proves to be a most interesting (and complete) ‘facsimile’ of its exemplar (see BAFacs. 42).  In 1270 the original charter of King Edward was the subject of an Inspeximus charter of King Henry III.  This Inspeximus is now lost, but can be shown to have contained a good text of the original: it was itself ‘inspected’ in 1380 (London, PRO, Pat. R. 4 Ric. II, pt 1, m. 3; see also BL Add. 28838, 84v-85r and 128v-129r, with bounds at 179r), and it was transcribed by an antiquary in 1611 (BL Harley 66, 143rv).

Royal diploma.  1033.

Select bibliography

Mon. Angl. ii. 1017-18; Mon. Angl. (rev. ed.) vi. 1118-19; Round, Calendar, pp. 1-19.  See also Matthew, Norman Monasteries, pp. 5, 24-5 and 103-4.  For Ottery, see Mon. Angl. i. 549-50, and Mon. Angl. (rev. ed.) vi. 1346-8.

<Keynes 1988, pp. 200-1.>

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October 2011