TEORÍAS O MODELOS QUE EXPLICAN LAS RAZONES DE LA

Participation by lay parties, whether related to the grantor by blood, marriage or tenure, was a key method through which grantors could ensure the permanence of their grant, particularly after their death. Participation occurred in a number of forms: in the granting of joint acts, the laudatio parentum or consent statement,1 the issuing of separate confirmations, the shared obligation to warrant by the grantor’s heirs, affidation by heirs, the witnessing of documents and the affixing of seals.2 The key issue in analysing consent is the determination of its necessity, i.e. would the grant succeed in its absence or was it acquired as an advantageous precaution against future claims?3 This distinction is complicated by a wide variety of additional methods by which others might participate in the context of a societal culture which favoured the maintenance of the landholding relationship through frequent written confirmations.4 The dispositive clause, which recorded the precise terms by which lands or rights were transferred from one party to the other, provides the most significant amount of

1

As seen below, some of the laudatio words, such as consilio, voluntate and prece, communicated the counsel, request or prayer of certain parties. For clarity, the laudatio is termed a consent statement for, despite the nature of the terminology of the vocabulary, consent or assent was conveyed within this aspect of the document. Subtleties of vocabulary are referenced within examples.

2 _{‘Participation in land grants was thus a manifestation of a network of obligations and interests’. See}

Hudson, Land, Law and Lordship, pp.173-4. Regrettably, some topics are too large to be included here; e.g., witness clause analysis is a large-scale task requiring a dedicated prosopographical study.

Participation by heirs within the dispositive and holding clauses, as givers of warranty and within the pro

anima clauses will be analysed below; see pp.53-61; 262-70 and 174-5, respectively. Countergifting -

gifts of money, animals or goods to the grantor and members of his family in return for a grant of land - is an interesting future means of measuring consent that has been sacrificed to the word count. Separate confirmations will be discussed in Chapter Two.

3

Of the laudatio, White writes that,‘Whereas some writers claim that a relatively clear-cut legal rule or custom required that land be conveyed with the approval of relatives, others at least allow for the possibility that the laudatio was merely a precautionary practice used to stabilize land transfers that individuals could legally make on their own’. S. D. White, Custom, Kinship and Gifts to Saints: The

Laudatio Parentum in Western France 1050-1150, (North Carolina, 1988), p.95.

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evidence through which to explore this topic.5 The joint granting of acts by different combinations of the kin group allows the study of co-ownership between spouses and different family generations. The main alternative to the joint grant was the laudatio parentum, a statement of consent within the dispositive clause but separated slightly from the main grantor(s) by a series of nouns which described the laudator’s

involvement within each grant.

After a brief historiography of the treatment of consent, I will analyse the chronology and participants of joint acts and consent statements before examining the vocabulary of the laudatio. Finally, I will conduct a comparative analysis of participation by family or tenurial role revealing clear differences in participation levels between these two forms in the Scottish and, to a lesser extent, Northumberland acta, relative to those of Yorkshire and Durham. The decrease in joint grants, particularly by the thirteenth century, reflected the implementation of royal legislation which defined and protected the claims of heirs, wives and widows, facilitating their ability to grant individually. Additionally, the persistence of the laudatio, and to a lesser extent the joint grant, in south-east Scotland and Northumberland into the early thirteenth century, decades after they had begun to decline in the rest of north-east England, indicated the later appearance of royal reform in Scotland and the reduced infrastructure in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Northumberland.

Hudson’s study of consent clauses in English charters has identified three key areas of contrast to continental examples: that such clauses were rarer and appeared in no more than a third of total documents, that they declined after c.1170 and that they used a much narrower list of potential participants, typically immediate heirs or spouses.6 Like many others, Hudson stresses the importance of security in the

laudatio (as well as in other aspects of participation): ‘The grantor and the grantee both wished the grant to be as secure as possible, so that it fulfilled its intended

5

The practice of issuing separate confirmations was a related, but distinct, method of demonstrating consent and of strengthening transactions that had already occurred. See Chapter Two.

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function, and the laudatio was one way in which prudent donors and donees ensured this.’7 He concludes that in general, ‘the laudatio seems to have been notably less important in England than in France, although it may also have been less significant than in some other regions.’8 This is borne out by the later developments for family participation in each country; in England the written consent of the heir disappears from charters in the second half of the twelfth century, whereas in Normandy their consent continued and developed into the retrait lignager.9 Hudson demonstrates the rarity of consent in Anglo-Saxon England, in contrast to its more common appearance in Normandy, suggesting cultural differences in how parties expected to express consent within the records of landholding.10 As Hudson notes, the post-conquest distribution of acquired lands, i.e. those given by the grantor’s lord, reduced the levels of recorded consent. Lands received from lords were perceived to belong to the tenant by a weaker title than inherited lands which were more closely associated with the family and over a longer period of time: ‘...had the laudatio been extremely important, it could have subverted the limitations of diplomatic’.11 Thus, higher levels of seignorial consent were expected to be associated with acquired lands and familial consent with inherited lands.

White’s study of the laudatio parentum in France explored concepts of family

participation in the context of gifts to saints, focusing on its peak c.1050-c.1150 and its decline and eventual disappearance in c.1150-c.1200.12 By considering the

anthropological implications as well as the legal he categorised the laudatio as misunderstood, asserting it as evidence of the widespread norm that relatives should

7 _{Hudson, Land, Law and Lordship., p.181.} 8

Ibid., p.204.

9

Ibid., p.204.

10

‘Occasional Anglo-Saxon examples also show that kin felt they had an interest in some lands held, and possibly granted, by their relatives, but the kin’s consent to alienation was not a feature of Anglo-Saxon charters’. Hudson, Land, Law and Lordship, pp.174, 205. Cf. Tabuteau, Transfers of Property, Ch. 8.

11

See Hudson, Land, Law and Lordship, pp.205, 209-10.

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approve a grant.13 Furthermore, White uncovers a longer list of potential participants to the laudatio demonstrating wider perceptions of the family and negating the simple conceptualisation of this unit as suggested in comparable British sources:

...consenting kin groups varied widely in composition and cannot be routinely equated with “families” [...] when a new gift to a saint was made, consenting relatives were recruited in what now appear to be unpredictable ways from a larger pool of potential laudatores.14

Additionally, as alms grants were usually given for prayers for family members or occasionally lords, the desire to protect the relatives’ souls provided an additional incentive for ensuring that such grants did not fail through coordinated family activity. A rare and touching example demonstrates this contemporary fear and attempts to pre-empt its failure. In 1198x1199, Geoffrey Haget, king’s justice, made notification of his alms gift to Fountains Abbey requesting that, as they desired his eternal welfare, his heirs should confirm the gift and divide his inheritance among them harmoniously ‘lest by discord they incur loss’.15 Geoffrey’s heirs were his four sisters or their

descendants. Female inheritance, particularly of multiple women, can be seen at the root of many disputes as the co-ownership of their natal lands introduced a wider and more disparate range of agendas and patronage preferences from their husbands’ kin groups than had Geoffrey simply had other male blood heirs.16 Crucially, Geoffrey appealed to his heirs through the financial and material loss of property as well as the spiritual damage to his soul incurred by the loss of prayers secured by his gift in alms.

Joint Grants and the Laudatio

13 _{White, Custom Kinship and Gifts to Saints, pp.9-10. Cf. Hudson’s framework of principles, norms and}

rules. See above, p.20.

14 _{Ibid., p.95.} 15

EYC i 520. ‘Precor etiam vos ut in hereditate mea inter vos percipienda ita unanimes sitis ne per

discordiam vestram dampnationem incurratis.’

16

See F. M. Stenton, The First Century of English Feudalism 1066-116, (Oxford, 1932), pp.37-9 and no. 5 for the partition of the lands of Walter de Valognes during the reign of King Stephen among daughters in the absence of sons. For discussions of joint grants and consent statements by female heiresses see below, pp.38-47, particularly pp.46-7 where Scottish documents more regularly identified co-granting females as the heirs to their fathers’ lands.

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Joint grants were issued by more than one person and with plural granting verbs, e.g. ‘...A and my wife B, give and concede...’, whereas the laudatio was a sub-clause within the main dispositive clause, e.g. ‘I, with the consent of X, give to A’.17 296 documents, or 6.67% of the corpus, were issued jointly by multiple lay grantors, and laudatio in 505 documents or 11.39%.18 The overall small size of these groups reflected the preference for separate confirmations or for participation within a different aspect of the document.

As seen within Table 1.1, both joint grants and consent statements first appeared in 1091x1100, were present only in small possible numbers until 1121x1130, rose to a possible numerical peak in 1171x1190 and then declined numerically until the end of the period with a small rise in the second quarter of the thirteenth century. Joint grants declined proportionally during the thirteenth century, displaying possible peaks in 1111x1120, 1161x1180, and, to a lesser extent, in 1271x1280, and lows in

1141x1150 and 1221x1230. Scottish examples first appeared in small proportions in 1151x1160; however, the higher proportional figures in 1171x1200 than among the whole corpus demonstrated a Scottish preference for joint grants within this period. The steep proportional decline of Scottish joint acts to a low of 1.99% in 1221x1230

17

As the focus of this chapter is lay consent, the issue of joint granting by clergy and religious houses will not feature. It was routine for grants of monastic property by a religious house to be expressed as a joint grant by abbot and community or by the abbot with the consent of the community with regularity of expression. In comparison with lay joint granting, too few linguistic patterns of significance are revealed to justify their inclusion here.

18 _{The breakdown of participants within joint granting, statements of consent in this chapter and}

separate confirmations in Chapter Two are grouped strictly according to the language of the documents. Translations of words such as nepos,avus and atavi,which possess variable meanings, have been identified where appropriate. Additionally, I distinguish between the identification of the participant as ‘heir’ or ‘heirs’ without further information, most likely the grantor’s male children, and those identified by family role, most likely the grantor’s heir(s). Contemporaries likely knew precisely who the unspecified ‘heir’ was even when such information is not extant. A broad range of figures could be the grantor’s heir, e.g., sons, daughters, brothers, etc. By tracing the practice of identifying participants as ‘heirs’ or by family role we can draw some conclusions about the conceptualisation and planning of land decent between generations. See Appendix Three.

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coincided with a dip among the entire corpus. The proportional increases seen within the last decades of the table reflected the increased presence of Scottish acta amongst a much smaller overall sample.

Similarly, consent statements were more significant in the twelfth rather than thirteenth century but fluctuated more than joint grants. Notable peaks occurred in 1121x1130, 1151x1160 and in 1241x1260 to 15.52%, and lows in 1101x1110,

1131x1150 and 1261x1280. For both groups, most data peaks coincided with declines in the entire corpus. A preference for solo granting in response to weakened royal authority during Stephen’s reign may account for the dip in joint grants in 1141x1150 and a small decrease in consent statements. The steep rise of laudatio in 1151x1160 may represent the beginning of the reassertion of royal control. Consent statements were proportionally more significant than joint acts in 1141x1180. Scottish examples first appeared in 1131x1140 but, in contrast with joint grants, never exceeded the corpus average, demonstrating their reduced significance. Their period of greatest proportional significance deviated from the corpus patterns reaching 10.42% in 1181x1190. Hudson’s observed period of decline of c.1170-c.1200 for the laudatio is echoed, though the decline is steepest between 1171x1190. The persistence of both forms into the thirteenth century, particularly the laudatio,resulted from higher continued usage by Scottish houses and was illustrated by the steep rise in Scottish proportions in 1191x1240 for joint grants and 1211x1260 for the laudatio. Overall, this decline was linked to legislative reforms, which provided greater security for landholders, and a preference for the separate confirmation.19

Table 1.2 outlines the participants to joint grants and consent statements. As expected, most examples were issued by lay parties to religious houses, the former accounting for approximately half of their proportions within the entire corpus. Higher proportions of laudatio by higher clergy, notably still half of their figure among the entire corpus, reflected the occasional repetition of this clause in subsequent confirmations and exchanges, whereas joint grants by lay parties appeared only in

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notifications. The few documents by religious houses and lower clergy recorded exchanges, agreements or rare instances where lower clergy co-granted lands with their heirs which did not belong to their clerical offices.20 The few documents to burgesses and members of the clergy, higher or lower, accounted for significant proportional increases on their activity within the corpus. The four documents to higher clergy shared common grantors and subjects, being issued to Hugh du Puiset, bishop of Durham, and which recorded the quitclaim and subsequent confirmations of the church of Rounton and rights within it by members of the Conyers family.21

Charts 1.1-2 summarise the participation of religious houses in contrast with the entire corpus. A wide range of orders received both types of consent, though Templars and Unknown were absent from joint grants and such few examples of consent statements were issued to Hospitallers, Templars, Churches and Unknown that they appear as 0%.22 Proportions of laudatio to Augustinian and Benedictine houses equalled those of the entire sample. The Augustinian priories of Guisborough and Bridlington received the most laudatio with twenty-seven23 and fifteen examples,24 respectively,

20

For clerical joint acts with heirs, see Tables 1.10-11.

21

EYC ii 947-9, 951.

22 _{See Appendices Ten and Eleven which contain a full table with all the references summarised within}

these pie charts. Also, see Appendices Four and Five for tables of total participation. Fifty-three documents were issued to the Templars. See EYC iii 1531, 1626-9, 1769-70; iv 389; vi 118, 145; ix 18, 85; x 1306; xii 22-40, 86-97, 100-3. Mowbray 270. Newbattle 169. Thirty-six documents were issued to North Ferriby Priory by members of the de Hessle family, under tenants of the Tison family in Hessle and in South Ferriby, Lincolnshire, particularly before departing for the third Crusade. EYC ix 18; xii 22- 40, 86-97, 100-3. The Ros family also favoured the Templars through the figure of Robert de Ros II, including two documents by two of the three Trussebut widows who were related to the Ros family through the marriage of Roese de Trussebut to Everard de Ros (d.1183). See EYC x 15-6 for the gift of Agatha de Trussebut in her widowhood and a confirmation by Hilary de Trussebut which emphasise the period of widowhood as an opportunity for women to grant individually. Two other documents to the Templars were confirmations: EYC iv 389; Mowbray 270. As only five documents were gifts, gifts and confirmations or quitclaims, i.e. transactions that were more likely to be jointly issued, then the possibility of joint grants was reduced.

23

EYC i 596; ii 654, 659-60, 662, 667, 686-7, 695, 699-700, 707, 714, 719, 722, 754, 756, 764, 766, 769,

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but only five and three joint acts,25 respectively, demonstrating clear preferences for one form over the other. Of Augustinian houses with many documents, only

Brinkburn Priory used both forms in almost equal numbers. A large rise in grants with

laudatio to St Mary’s, York, accounted for the proportional increase to the Benedictine Order from seven joint grants to twenty-two consent statements,26 and small rises in other houses, notably Marrick Priory with one joint grant but seven consent

statements.27 Augustinian houses accounted for a much larger proportion of joint grants, increasing from 26% to 36%. St Leonard’s Hospital, York, received the most joint grants with forty examples.28 Originally dedicated to St Peter, and closely linked to York Minster, this Augustinian foundation was rededicated after serious fire

damage in 1137, becoming one of the wealthiest English hospitals. The success of this institution was a combination of the close relationship to York Minster, the declining popularity of St Mary’s, York, in the latter half of the twelfth century, and the large pool of potential donors from the city of York and its vicinity. In contrast, Benedictine houses received smaller numbers of joint grants: the most popular Benedictine house, Whitby Abbey, received only nine examples.29

While Cistercian houses accounted for the largest single recipient group to both forms of consent, they accounted for only a small increase among the entire sample. The most popular houses with joint grants were Fountains Abbey with thirty examples, Rievaulx with sixteen and Melrose with eleven.30 The other Scottish Cistercian houses

24_{EYC ii 1135, 1166, 1168, 1208, 1215, 1218, 1223-6; iii 1326, 1328, 1367, 1873; iv 390.}

25

Guisborough: EYC ii 655, 678, 720, 726, 1055. Bridlington: EYC ii 1208; iii 1366, 1372.

26 _{Joint Grants: EYC i 274, 620; ii 680; iv 33, 184, 351; vi 95. Consent Statements: EYC i 85, 248, 605, 631;}