Tudor Records of an East Riding Manor: The Manorial Court Rolls of Swanland, 1507 to 1579: An Edition with Full Translation

Abstract

the leasing of its estates to lay tenants necessitated a total reorganisation of the abbey’s record keeping. Almost all the estate documents for Fountains, including the manorial records, have been lost, apart from the charters; cartularies, therefore, are of prime importance. In marked contrast to the abbey’s first cartulary compiled in the thirteenth century, in which its holdings appear under the granges in which they were situated, in all subsequent cartularies they are listed in alphabetical order. Five cartularies date from the long fifteenth century, one detailing the rights and privileges granted to the monastery by the papacy and the monarchy, the other four dealing with the abbey’s properties. A sixth may once have existed but has since disappeared. The ambiguously named President Book (i.e. precedent book), a quasi memorandum book closely associated with John Greenwell, which contains among much else genealogical tables of the abbey’s early benefactors and a chronicle of abbots in which the offending Robert Frank has been all but air-brushed out, supplies very detailed indexes and finding aids to these later cartularies. In addition to the in-depth discussions of the cartularies and other Fountains archives in five out of the seven chapters of the main text, the last quarter of the book has been given over to a series of appendices in which the President Book, the later cartularies, a rental volume, a deeds register and a charter of William of Goldsborough have been subjected to very precise codicological description and analysis. While anyone seriously interested in the history of Fountains will welcome new information about the abbey in the long fifteenth century, the questions raised in this study concerning the intentions of the compilers of monastic documents and the connections it makes between the various classes of records will be particularly relevant for scholars embarking upon an edition of a medieval cartulary.