![]() The charter in question, pictured below, is among the oldest in the college’s possession and dates from the mid-12th century (reference Brackley B.186). To illustrate what this might entail, and to show why I personally find charters (and large collections thereof) so engaging, I thought I’d spend my first contribution to this blog looking in detail at just one of the items still housed in the Muniment Room. But, as Magdalen’s own collection makes clear, modern historians and others can still call on thousands upon thousands of charters to inform their research. Of course, survival rates come nowhere close to this number. ( Michael Clanchy, for example, calculated that the peasant classes alone produced millions of charters in the century up to 1300.) They were, therefore, everyday objects produced en-masse with everyday implications. ![]() This would have also been true for charters in the early medieval period, when such things were typically issued (and retained) by those at the very top of medieval society.īy the 13th century, however, charters were being produced by members of almost every social rank, such that modern estimates for how many were written involve some fairly eye-watering numbers. Students with Dr Hannah Boston in the Old Library, Nov 2021īut, while it is true that these items have a certain “wow factor”, and can be used by historians and other interested researchers to shed light on a wide range of issues, they represent objects that would have been inaccessible (both intellectually and physically) to most people in the Middle Ages. After all, Magdalen can lay claim to some fairly spectacular medieval items in its collections, including a beautifully illuminated copy of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and a manuscript once owned by Thomas Becket, both of which I was lucky enough to see during a recent student teaching session hosted by Dr Hannah Boston in the Old Library just before my arrival. Some of you may be thinking that this is hardly surprising. ![]() It is also, as one of my predecessors noted in an earlier article on this blog, arguably the only room in the whole of Magdalen that would be instantly recognisable to any of our earliest Fellows.īut, if the existence of its contents, which range in date from around 1110 to the early 1600s, is known to many both within and outside the college’s walls, the average charter’s rather plain appearance and practical nature means they very often play second fiddle to manuscripts (especially the illuminated variety) in the medieval document pecking order. Home for over 500 years to Magdalen’s collection of around 13,000 medieval deeds, it is, quite simply, one of the wonders not just of the Oxbridge archival world but the wider UK one. As the newly arrived Magdalen Archivist, and as someone who has spent most of his professional life working with medieval charters, there really is no better place to be than the college’s purpose-built late 15th-century Muniment Room.
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