Each of the archival 'profiles' accessible from the side menu (Archives A-L) will come to serve (as the content is developed) as an introduction to the archive, comprising: (a) a brief history of the religious house in question; (b) information on the composition of the archive (single sheets, cartularies, etc.), including information about any ‘lost’ charters and ‘lost’ cartularies; (c) some account of the dispersal of the muniments at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, during the civil wars in the 1640s, or thereafter; and (d) information, in certain cases, on any other records which happen to be available (house chronicles, collections of obits, lists of benefactors, etc.). This is followed by a register of the documents in the archive, cited by 'Sawyer' number (e.g. royal diplomas in Latin; vernacular writs; ‘private’ charters, including leases; vernacular documents, including records, wills, etc.), and by a select bibliography for the house and its charters.
The separate introductions in any published or forthcoming archival volume will naturally take matters further, including an extended account of the history of the religious house in question from its foundation onwards, information on its endowment (as first recorded in the Domesday survey), and so on. The charters in each archive may also be identified by using the 'Electronic Sawyer', and browsing under 'Archive'.
Further information about the religious houses will be found in The Heads of Religious Houses: England & Wales, I: 940-1216 [1972], ed. David Knowles, C. N. L. Brooke & Vera C. M. London, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2001), and in David Knowles and R. Neville Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses England and Wales [1953], 2nd ed. (London, 1971), pp. 52-82 (Benedictine monks) and 463-87 (Appendix I: 'Religious Houses Existing at Periods before 1066').
For details of cartularies, see G. R. C. Davis, Medieval Cartularies of Great Britain and Ireland [1958], revised by Claire Breay, Julian Harrison and David M. Smith (London, 2010).
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.
Page maintained by SDK
October 2011