Medieval agreements and arguments

• Tasks
• Background
• Teachers' notes
• External links
• Connections to curriculum

Just like today, people had arguments in the Middle Ages about money, trading rights and land ownership. There are many documents at The National Archives that record these disagreements and the ways used to resolve them. Some of these documents concern the rich and powerful, but others show what ordinary people argued about and how they tried to settle matters. Use the different documents in this lesson to explore how people managed their relationships with each other and settle their disputes. 

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Tasks

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Background

In the Middle Ages there were many ways to solve arguments between people and record agreements that people made between themselves. The collections at The National Archives are a particularly good place to look for these kinds of documents because we have central records of government and court cases.  

At that time  the government was made up of the monarch (a king or queen) and their council, who advised them on important matters. The two important departments in the king’s household were the Exchequer (which managed the money) and the Chancery (which wrote the king’s documents and issued orders in his name). The Exchequer controlled the government’s money and was in charge of taxation. It also recorded payments made to and from the royal household. The Chancery produced charters (granting land or status) and writs, which called people to come to court. As well as these two offices there was also a central criminal court that heard more serious crimes, called the Court of King’s Bench.  

People outside the royal household would encounter these offices in different ways. If the king granted a charter to a town or person, then there would be a record of the charter kept in the Charter Rolls at the Chancery. If a person got a payment from the Treasury, they might need to give the Exchequer a receipt for that payment. If there was an argument that could not be resolved between two people, one of them might take the other one to court and there would be a record of the court case in the plea rolls of the King’s Bench. 

If someone, or a group of people, wanted to ask the king for something they would send a petition that would be considered by the king and often by parliament. They are often a complaint about something specific like someone taking someone else’s property and a request for the king to intervene. Sometimes the king intervened personally, but often the people who petitioned were told to take the case to court. These petitions are a way for us to find out about people’s problems in the Middle Ages, because they came directly from the group of people who were complaining.  

Rather than use a year date as we might expect (March 1st, 1309), most medieval documents are dated using the year of the king’s reign or regnal year (March 1st, the second year of King Edward II’s reign). The majority of the documents are in Latin, the language of documents and the law for the majority of the Middle Ages in England, but some are in English (the map in this lesson is in both languages!). All of the documents are written on parchment, the skin of an animal (normally either sheep or cows, though we do have some goat and deer in the collection). There is evidence of paper in England from the early 1300s, but it is not commonly used in England until the sixteenth century.  

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Teachers' notes

This lesson features a collection of documents that give students a sense of the breadth of the medieval collections at The National Archives. It helps students to think about how historians find out about the Middle Ages. Each of the five documents is a record of an agreement or a disagreement that happened in the Middle Ages in England. Some of the documents are very visual, like the map and the seal, and others less so, however all they contain a lot of interesting information about what life was like for people in the Middle Ages.  

The first document is from the Court of the King’s Bench, which was the highest criminal court in England in the Middle Ages. It records a short summary of court cases and the verdict of the court. This court case is about an island called Ravenser Odd, which was a sandbank in the Humber that rose out of the sea in about 1230 and sank again about 1360. At the end of the thirteenth century, Ravenser Odd had become a more attractive trading outpost than Grimsby, and the people of Grimsby were unhappy. They told the court that they were suffering and could not pay their taxes because people from the new island were going out in boats, arresting merchants and their ships, and compelling them to go to Ravenser Odd rather than Grimsby to trade their goods. The people of Ravenser Odd told the court that people were trading with them because they offered better prices and Grimsby was swindling merchants. Unfortunately for the people of Grimsby, the king’s court was not interested in their local trade dispute. The court ruled that the island of Ravenser Odd had not done anything that went against the king’s peace and so the people of Grimsby had to pay a fine for making a false claim. 

The second document is a charter roll, a record of all the charters that the monarch granted in one year. This is the ‘office copy’ of documents in case of any disputes. The original charter, with the king’s seal, would have been given directly to the person concerned. In this case, the king granted a charter to a woman called Matilda Passelewe, saying that she was allowed to hold a weekly market and an annual fair in her manor of Barewe in Suffolk. It also granted her the right to ‘free warren’. ‘Free warren’ means that Matilda and her heirs have the right to hunt small game (hares, rabbits – hence warren – pheasants and partridges) on her land. Large game, like deer or wild boar, was reserved for the king.  

The third document is a petition from a group of English merchants to Henry VI. This records a trade dispute whereby the people of Middelburg (the Netherlands) have attacked the merchants and imprisoned them in order to take their goods. The merchants are particularly angry as they had a letter of safe conduct from the city that had been ignored (they attached this as evidence, and the translated letter promising safe conduct is still available in The National Archives).  

The fourth document is a receipt for some money, given to the Treasury in exchange for one sterling mark (£1) by a woman called Ermengarda. This document is signed with Ermengarda’s seal, which was used in the Middle Ages instead of a signature to prove that a document was authentic. Ermengarda’s seal is unusual, as it appears to be a portrait of her wearing widow’s clothing (the kind of veil she is wearing was often worn by widows). This suggests that she may have wanted to commission a seal to demonstrate that she was acting alone after her husband died. There is more information in our lesson on seals. You can see a seal-matrix (used to press the wax into the seal shape) with a similar image at the British Library here. The place of women in the Middle Ages is also explored in another lesson on medieval women. 

The last document is a map of a place called Inclesmoor, in Yorkshire (the remaining moorland is now known as Thorne Moor and Goole Moor). Many of the villages and towns on the map are still there today (see list below). The map was drawn up to record a final agreement in a long-running land dispute between the Duchy of Lancaster (a powerful noble family who owned the land rights) and St Mary’s Abbey in York. The dispute was about who was allowed to cut peat to sell and use in different areas of the moor, and who was allowed to graze their sheep on different parts of the moorland. The map records which parts of the land are allowed to be used by the Abbey. It is helpful for students to use the transcript for the words used on the map and use a modern map to see the location today. 

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External links

Historical background on Medieval England from English Heritage:https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/story-of-england/medieval/ 

How parchment is made – video from the BBC on the parchment-making process. 

Parchment-making – a blog from Cornell University Library Conservation about the process of making parchment, with images of the different steps. 

A National Archives blog about medieval fashion https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/opus-anglicanum-medieval-embroidery-fashion/ 

A National Archives blog about a nun who faked her own death: https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/medieval-church-state-nun-faked-death/ 

Connections to curriculum

The development of Church, state and society in Medieval Britain 1066-1509: Society, economy and culture: for example, feudalism, religion in daily life (parishes, monasteries, abbeys), farming, trade and towns (especially the wool trade), art, architecture and literature.

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