Catalogue description Ancient Deeds

This collection and Cap/I/15 contain the oldest original documents relating to the Dean and Chapter of Chichester which have survived.

Contains eighty-six documents relating to the diocese of Chichester, plus five which seem to have strayed from the muniments of the Abbey of St. Peter, Gloucester (now Gloucester Cathedral). They range from the two original Anglo-Saxon charters to the seventeenth century. Only three of the documents are later than 1537. The documents are important for the fragments which they add to our knowledge, of medieval Chichester in particular. To give one example, from the information in these charters, and Cap/I/15, together with the Chichester City charters (catalogued by W. D. Peckham in Sussex Archaeological Collections Vol. 89) the list of mayors of Chichester has been extended and considerably revised, and a list of reeves of the city has been made.

In this catalogue the Anglo-Saxon documents have been fully transcribed and translated. All the legible details of the other documents have been given, but endorsements have only been noted if they contribute any further information. Seals have been described only if the device or legend are at least partially legible. Where a very approximate date has been assigned to a document the dating has been on palaeographical evidence, for want of any other.

Arranged in chronological order

About half of these documents are copied in the episcopal cartularies. See Ep/VI/1

The tragedy is that they represent only a fraction of the originals which must once have existed. In Cap/I/17/25 there is a reference to the muniment room at the Church at Chichester, so some organised method of preserving documents existed by the middle of the thirteenth century. It was at about that date that the compilation of the earliest extant cartulary Liber Y (Ep. VI/I/I) was begun. Liber Y and the late fourteenth century cartularies were probably compiled as evidence in case of the loss of the originals, but in fact the compilation of the cartularies may have encouraged the neglect of the originals, which were no longer needed as legal evidence.

The religious changes of the sixteenth century meant the end of those masses for the dead and the chantries with which many of the documents were concerned. One cannot know the effect this may have had on the documents. It is usual to blame the Puritan troops of Sir William Waller, who sacked the Cathedral in 1642, for great depredations to all Cathedral property, including the muniments. However, at his visitation in 1616, Bishop Samual Harsnett found it necessary to ask "By whose default principally are your evidences wanting and lost ?" (Cap/I/12/3 pp. 267-271). There had obviously been some careless custodians of the records long before the Civil War.

When Canon William Clark (1696-1771) listed the "papers" in the "Chapter House Chest" and the "long box" he listed forty documents, of which nine are too modern to be of immediate relevance, fifteen are now part of Cap/I/17, and the rest are divided between Cap/I/15, Cap/III/1 and Cap/I/13.

In 1901, R. L. Poole reported to the Historical Manuscripts Commission that there were only twentyfive original charters remaining among the muniments of the diocese of Chichester. These twentyfive had been discovered "not long ago" in a drawer in the Canons' vestry, and removed to the Cathedral library. Poole added that it was difficult to be certain how many documents did remain, since they were neither in one depository nor under a single custody. He concluded from the various references to a chest, which housed the documents, that there had been at some time more than twentyfive originals, enough for a chest for them to be necessary.

The initial creation of Cap/I/17 as an archive group was done by C. E. Welch.

The text of about a quarter of the documents has already appeared in print, mostly from the transcriptions in the cartularies (See W. D. Peckham, Sussex Record Society, Vol. 46, and H. Mayr Harting, The Acta of the Bishops of Chichester, 1075-1207.)

A calendar is Cap/I/51/6