London, St Paul's

These working notes originated in the early 1990s. See now The Charters of St Paul's, London, ed. S. E. Kelly, Angl0-Saxon Charters 10 (London, 2004).

The church of St Paul in the city of London was founded by King Æthelberht of Kent, to serve as the episcopal see for Mellitus, whom St Augustine had consecrated bishop of the East Saxons in 604; see Bede, HE ii. 3. The fortunes of St Paul’s appear not, however, to have been secured until the episcopate of Eorcenwald (c. 675 - 693); Eorcenwald had also founded monasteries at Chertsey and Barking before his appointment to the bishopric, and was subsequently revered for his holy life (HE iv. 6). London’s importance as a centre of trade ensured that it remained a focus of attention. It was under Mercian control for much of the eighth and early ninth centuries; but as Mercian power declined, the bishop, the moneyers and perhaps the citizens of London turned increasingly for leadership towards the rulers of Wessex. The church of St Paul’s was a major beneficiary in the will of Theodred, bishop of London, c. 950 (S 1526, preserved at Bury St Edmunds); <? nature of these bequests - estates being transferred from bishop to canons>. Later bishops of London included Wulfstan the Homilist (996-1002), and the Normans Robert of Jumièges (1044-51) and William (1051-75). At the time of the Domesday survey a clear distinction was maintained between the estates of the bishop of London and the estates of the Canons of St Paul’s; it is possible that a prebendal system was in operation before the Conquest, but its proper establishment is attributed to Bishop Maurice (1086-1107).

An inventory of the muniments of St Paul’s, compiled in 1447 by Dean Thomas Lyseux, conveys an impression of the sheer bulk of documentary material which had by then accumulated in the archives; and it would appear that the archive was still largely intact at the outbreak of civil war in the seventeenth century. Following the confiscation of the lands of deans and chapters, in 1649, part of the muniments passed into the hands of Parliamentary agents; it was from one of these agents that some records and cartularies were acquired by the antiquary Sir William Dugdale, who (having returned them to St Paul’s after the Restoration) subsequently congratulated himself on his decisive role in their preservation (see Dugdale, History of St Paul’s, 2nd ed., pp. xvi-xvii and xxvii). The surviving muniments of the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s are described by H. C. Maxwell Lyte in the Ninth Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (London, 1883), Appendix, pp. 1-72; they were deposited in the Guildhall Library, London, in 1980. <See also Eighth Report, Appendix.>

The draft of Dean Lyseux’s inventory (formerly St Paul’s, D. & C., W.D. 11a (Davis 600)) is now Guildhall Library, MS. 25,511a; but the inventory is more easily approached through the contemporary fair copy (formerly St Paul’s, D. & C., W.D. 11 (Davis 601), now Guildhall Library, MS. 25,511), which also includes a valuable series of indexes to the contents of the different cartularies of St Paul’s (listed by Holtzmann, i. 178-80), several of which have not survived. The inventory mentions ‘duo rotule notabiles de antiquis priuilegiis ecclesie et diuerse carte regum in lingua Latina et Saxonica de maneriis diuersis et libertatibus ecclesie’, and ‘.VI. antiqui rotuli de antiquis cartis regum et libertatibus ecclesie’ (Guildhall MS. 25,511, 58v; Gibbs, p. vii, n. 2), from which it would appear that there were among the muniments of St Paul’s at least two rolls, considered to be in some sense special, which included ancient charters for the church written in Latin and in English, and at least six other rolls of a similar kind.

A surviving ‘rotulus libertatum ecclesie sancti Pauli’ (formerly St Paul’s, D. & C., A. Box 69 (Maxwell Lyte, pp. 48-9; Davis 598), now Guildhall MS. 25,272), written towards the end of the thirteenth century, exemplifies the nature of these charter-rolls. It comprises three membranes of parchment stitched together, and contains copies, under the heading ‘Carte libertatum ecclesie Sancti Pauli’, of over thirty post-Conquest texts, including several in the vernacular (P 27, 36-7, 39, 43); see also Gibbs, p. xliii, n. 3, observing that the copies appear to have been taken from originals. The roll also contains a text of a writ of Edward the Confessor, as a later addition on the dorse (S 1104, MS. 16); it should be noted in this connection that S 1104, MS. 15, is a sixteenth-century script-facsimile of the lost ‘original’ of King Edward’s writ, with drawings of the attached seal (cf. MS. 3). Another roll, which evidently contained a substantial number of pre-Conquest charters, and which is known to have existed in the seventeenth century, is now lost; but its contents can be reconstructed in some detail from notes made by two scholars working independently from the roll itself. Richard James (1592-1638), librarian to Sir Robert Cotton, made a series of notes from a ‘rotulus antiquus ecclesiae Sancti Pauli’, comprising extracts from about 20 pre-Conquest charters; the importance of these notes (Oxford, Bodleian Library, James 23, pp. 32-6) was first recognised by Marion Gibbs, who printed them in her Early Charters, pp. 1-8. Another series of notes from a ‘Rotulus cartarum in archivis ecclesie Pauline’ occurs in London, Lincoln’s Inn, MS. Hale 84, fols. 93r-94r, among papers of the antiquary John Selden (1584-1654). Selden’s notes provide further information on several of the charters included in the roll seen by James; for a preliminary account of the texts recovered from this source, see Kelly 1992 and Keynes 1993. It emerges from collation of the notes made by James and Selden that the roll in question included several charters relating to the activities of successive bishops of London in the eighth century, a series of later royal diplomas (some of which were not directly in favour of St Paul’s), and a group of vernacular writs, in the names of King Æthelred the Unready, King Cnut and King Edward the Confessor.

Further information on the charters of St Paul’s can be recovered from a volume of notes put together in the central decades of the seventeenth century by a person evidently attached in some way to the cathedral chapter; the notebook is now BL Lansdowne 364 (mentioned by Gibbs, p. viii). Among the items of interest are a brief history of St Paul’s (4r-7r), which appears to have been based on the person’s knowledge of the St Paul’s charters; a collection of ‘Formulae Fundationum cum anathemat. fundatorum’ (134r), comprising eight short extracts from pre-Conquest charters, some of which appear to be derived from otherwise unrecorded texts (see S (Add.) 1796b-d); ‘A noat of such writings as I sent up in a chest from Tewin [Herts.] to my uncle Dr <Layferld> at London March 29 1659 belonging to St Paul’s Church’ (136rv), itself an instructive reminder of the circumstances in which the archives had been dispersed; and a list headed ‘Priuilegia et terræ concessæ’ (145v, printed by Gibbs, p. viii, n. 3), constituting names of lands which appear to have been granted to the church, conceivably derived from another roll of pre-Conquest charters.

The charters copied in the cartularies of St Paul’s were rather different in character from those copied in the lost charter-roll seen by James and Selden; all of them are cast directly in favour of the church, and most of them are highly suspect in their received form. St Paul’s, D. & C., W.D. 4 (‘Liber L’) (Maxwell Lyte, pp. 60-9; Davis 596), now Guildhall Library, MS. 25,504, was written in the first half of the twelfth century. It begins with a series of purportedly pre-Conquest texts on 5v-14r, comprising S 5 (followed by the privilege of Pope Agatho which Bishop Eorcenwald brought back from Rome), S 453, 337, 908, 941, 978, 1056, and (Add.) 1243a. Two ‘private’ records in the vernacular, S (Add.) 1481b and 1481c, occur in subsequent sections of the manuscript; both appear to date from the second half of the eleventh century. All that survives of ‘Liber B’, compiled in the 1180s, is a bifolium from the opening quire of the manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson B. 372), consisting of a list of chapter-headings; there is an index to the contents of the whole book in Dean Lyseux’s Inventory (London, Guildhall Library, MS. 25,511), 95r-97v. ‘Liber B’ was, however, used in the seventeenth century by Sir William Dugdale, who printed texts of S 5, 453, 452, 337, 1495, 908, 941, 978, 992, 1056 and 1104 from this source, fols. ‘20a’ to ‘21b’ (see History of St Pauls, pp. 181-90, whence Mon Angl. iii. 299-304, and History of St Pauls, 2nd ed. (London, 1716), Appendix, pp. 3-14). St Paul’s, D. & C., W.D. 1 (‘Liber A’), also known as ‘Liber Pilosus’ (Maxwell Lyte, p. 60; Davis 597), now Guildhall Library, MS. 25,501, was written in the early 1240s. It gives pride of place to the writ of Edward the Confessor (S 1104), followed by a series of post-Conquest charters. An extension of the initial compilation (see Gibbs, pp. 279-80), on fols. 37v-40r, includes texts of S 453, 337, 908, (Add.) 1243a, 5, 941, 978 and 1056; the texts of S 453, 908, 941 and (Add.) 1243a are followed by statements indicating the existence of vernacular versions, apparently in the (lost) exemplar used by the scribe.

It should be noted that the cartularies include only two of the charters copied in the charter-roll seen by James and Selden (S 337 and 908); that S 452, 1495 and 992 occur only in ‘Liber B’; and that two of the charters in the cartularies (S 453 and 1056) have links with charters from the Chertsey archive (S 752 and 1035).

St Paul’s, D. & C., W.D. 16 (‘Liber I’), now Guildhall MS. 25,516, contains (on 40v) a post-Conquest record, in the vernacular, of dues rendered to the church at Lambourn, Berks. (P 141 (Robertson, Charters, Appendix I, no. 5)), said to have been derived from an old Lambourn missal. A copy of a short text listing the numbers of ‘ship-men’ to be provided from specified estates, most of which are known to have belonged to St Paul’s from before the Conquest, was added in the first half of the twelfth century to a manuscript of Anglo-Saxon laws (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS. 383, p. 107 (Ker, Catalogue, no. 65, art. 26)); see Robertson, Charters, no. 72, and D. Hill, An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1981), pp. 92-3 (and Fig. 165).

Royal diplomas. 5; (Add.) 103a; 337; (Add.) 367a; 452; 453; 908; 941; 978; 1056. See also 1783; 1784; 1786; 1787; 1788; 1789; 1790; 1792; 1793; 1794; 1795; 1796. See also S (Add.) 1796a-d.

Writs. 945; 992; 1104.

Miscellaneous. See 1785; 1791. See also S (Add.) 1243a, 1481b and 1481c.

Wills. 1495.

WM, GP, pp. 140-6; Mon. Angl. iii. 298-374 (not included in Mon. Angl. (rev. ed.)); VCH London i. 409-33; MRH, p. 430.

W. Dugdale, The History of St Pauls Cathedral in London (London, 1658);
H. W. C. Davis, ‘London Lands and Liberties of St. Paul’s, 1066-1135’, Essays in Medieval History presented to Thomas Frederick Tout, ed. A. G. Little and F. M. Powicke (Manchester, 1925), pp. 45-59;
Early Charters of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, London, ed. M. Gibbs, Camden Soc. 3rd ser. 58 (London, 1939);
C. N. L. Brooke, ‘The Composition of the Chapter of St Paul’s, 1086-1163’, Cambridge Historical Journal 10 (1951), pp. 111-32;
Harmer, Writs, pp. 235-43;
D. Whitelock, Some Anglo-Saxon Bishops of London, Chambers Memorial Lecture 1974 (London, 1975);
C. N. L. Brooke, with G. Keir, London 800-1216: the Shaping of a City (London, 1975), pp. 338-59 and 369;
G. Yeo, ‘Record Keeping at St Paul’s Cathedral’, Jnl of the Soc. of Archivists 8 (1986), 30–44;
P. Taylor, ‘The Endowment and Military Obligations of the See of London: a Reassessment of Three Sources’, Anglo-Norman Studies 14 (1992), pp. 00-00;
S. E. Kelly, <‘Toll Charters’>, Early Medieval Europe 1 (1992), pp. 00-00;
S. Keynes, ‘A Charter of King Edward the Elder for Islington’, Historical Research 00 (1993), pp. 00-00.
<books on St Paul's>
S. Keynes, 'The Burial of King Æthelred the Unready at St Paul's', The English and thieir Legacy 900-1200, ed, D. Roffe (2012), pp. 00-00