Thirteenth-Century Churches and Documents

 The thirteenth century is strangely neglected by modern scholars.

How can you say that? cry medievalists. After all, Charles Homer Haskins, who really began medieval studies in the US, called the thirteenth the greatest century. In the church, it was the time when the popes came closest to exercising the absolute power they would have liked to have had at several other times, and the new Franciscan and Dominican orders rapidly spread, transforming ideas of the holy. Kings started keeping good records, and great counts and dukes drew up lists of who owed them homage, making political history much more straightforward. It was a time of the glories of Gothic architecture, as seen with the cathedral of Reims (below). It was when a number of great works of literature were composed (both epics and romances).

 But for monasteries, for cartularies, for the documents one finds in the archives, the period is relatively neglected.  This isn't a result of a shortage of records.  This is a matter of having too much.  The great nineteenth-century efforts to collect, analyze, and put into print the documents of a region, a monastery, a bishopric, all tended to start at the beginning, back probably in the Merovingian era.  They published everything they could find up through the tenth century. For the eleventh and twelfth centuries, they tried to include everything they considered most significant.

Then they got to the thirteenth century.  Lots and lots of documents, a lot of them long and highly repetitive.   Someone at the time would make an agreement with a monastery, and several more documents would be drawn up by various people who agreed and confirmed.  The careful nineteenth-century editors looked at all those documents and shook their heads.

They weren't the first.  Those compiling cartularies in the thirteenth century (that is, books into which original documents were copied for ease of reference and safe-keeping), quickly lost steam.

The scribe who compiled the cartulary of the bishops of Auxerre in the late thirteenth century noted that the bishop's documents had been organized into boxes by topic, the boxes identified as A, B, and so on.  He started with A, carefully copying each document, though there were quite a few of them.  Then he got to box B, and his heart must have sunk.  He copied a few, then said, "And many more on similar topics."  On to box C, where he started abbreviating heavily.

At right about the same time, at the monastery of Montier-en-Der (in Champagne), a scribe chose a few major topics for his cartulary and carefully chose documents to copy for each topic.  He did not abbreviate, he did not start writing fast and sloppily, but he had selected only about 100 documents to incorporate.  He skipped over far more documents than he included.  We know this because those documents still exist, in the same bundles as the ones the scribe chose to include.  It wasn't as if he just skipped trivial documents. He even skipped many documents issued by popes, probably because these long, elaborate charters simply confirmed an agreement that had been reached locally.  Too many documents, the scribe seems to have thought, let's just hit the highlights.

Scholars today, understandably, find it easiest to start their research with printed documents.  All serious medievalists studying society and the church will spend some time in the archives, but again the temptation is strong to stick with the printed record,with just brief excursions into documents that exist only in manuscript.  Those who analyze documents from a wide range of sources, over an extended period of time, which is what one does when studying events in the twelfth century or earlier, find the thirteenth-century plethora of records overwhelming and thus not worth investigating.

 Things have changed by the time one gets to the fourteenth century. There are even more records, especially as the spread of paper, far cheaper than parchment, greatly expanded the number of things considered worth writing down.  But scholars have adapted, focusing on just one manor, for example, or the acts of just one bishop.  They could, if they wished, go back and do the same with the thirteenth century, but they find the fourteenth century too interesting (which it is), between pope-king wars, gunpowder, the spread of eyeglasses, the Black Death, and so much more.

So people doing the sixth-twelfth centuries stay away from the thirteenth century, and those doing fourteenth-fifteenth also stay away from the thirteenth century.  Opportunity for grad students looking for a project!

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval documents, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

 

Lost documents

 We have now only a tiny fraction of the documents that existed during the Middle Ages.  Many of those losses took place during the medieval centuries, due to fires, mice (that will chew parchment), the disintegration of papyrus, the fading of ink so that even though the parchment survives the document becomes illegible, raids from Vikings or Muslim pirates, a gap in record preservation if a monastery lost its regularity for a while, or downright carelessness.

Early in the Middle Ages, up until the early eighth century, some cities still had municipal archives, in which all sorts of documents would be stored.  But these archives disappeared with the disappearance of notaries and, in probably most cases, the disintegration of the fragile papyrus on which most records would have been written.  Papyrus stopped reaching the West after the rise of Islam in the seventh century cut Europe off from Egypt, and it took a while to decide that parchment would do (especially since making it from sheep skin was a prolonged and expensive process).

In the next few centuries documents were rare.  Monasteries that were refounded in the ninth century, after the raids and the indifference (or even hostility) of the early Carolingians toward monasteries, to say nothing of the many occasions where a powerful layman took over a monastery, found they had very few documents.  They would assemble the best records they had, ask people with long memories what they might have heard, and ask kings or bishops to issue charters confirming everything that the monasteries had earlier acquired.

Most of the time, as near as we can tell, these lists of "property we used to have though the documents are lost" was fairly accurate, but of course it also provided an opportunity for creative embellishment.  Many monasteries, for example, claimed Clovis as their founder (though he actually founded zero monasteries) and had long lists of the property he had donated.  Sometimes the creativity was more plausible, and the monks really had owned the property, though perhaps it was someone less elevated than a king who had given it to them.

Kings and bishops liked to confirm monks in their property.  It showed their authority, as chief giver and determiner of who owned what.  Modern editions of monastic records will often include mentions of "lost charters," a summary of a donation or confirmation made, say, by the Merovingian King Childeric, because an authentic document of Emperor Louis the Pious said he was confirming this earlier grant.  This drives documentary historians crazy, because we have no idea if the "King Childeric" document ever really existed, yet there it is, with page number in the modern edition, document number, a date, and a summary as a "lost charter."

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the numbers of documents greatly increased.  Cartularies, collections of documents copied into a single volume, began to be produced in large numbers.  (A thirteenth-century cartulary from Auxerre is shown below.)

 

Once a cartulary had been produced, the big, messy pile of documents in the archives was much less significant.  Archivists worried less about preserving individual charters when they'd been organized and copied into a cartulary.

The messiness really was a problem.  One sad cartulary entry refers to a lost document that had been seen within living memory.  The scribe said he'd looked for it for over a year and couldn't find it, so although he could summarize it in a sentence or two, he couldn't copy it.

Then there were wars.  The wars of religion on the Continent in the sixteenth century burned many documents. In England, the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII at the same time led to documents just being tossed, as were the relics of saints.  The French Revolution of 1789, when France went officially atheistic for a while, led to the wholesale destruction and loss of monasteries and their archives.

One noted nineteenth-century French medievalist got his start when his family acquired a former monastery, complete with a pile of old documents.  Mom cut up the parchment to use to seal her jam jars, but the future medievalist started saving out documents from the pile and studying them.

Today we still have a certain number of cartularies where the original documents once copied into them have long since disappeared.  Some cartularies long assumed lost, such as the episcopal cartulary from Auxerre pictured above, emerged in private hands in the 1980s.  Many other documents are still in private hands, such as the ones cut up to made decorative images to sell.

No wonder medievalists have to be intrepid in figuring out pre-modern history.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval documents, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

 

White Archival Gloves

 It might seem self-evident that people should wear white gloves in the archives, to protect the documents from the touch of human fingers.  But medievalists do not wear such gloves, and most archives not only don't require them, but actively try to persuade visitors not to wear them.  Why is this? you say.

 Gloves have distinct disadvantages for handling rare and delicate objects.  For one thing, those white gloves probably have more dirt on them than a pair of recently washed hands.  Perhaps even more importantly, wearing gloves reduces the sensitivity of one's fingers.  The scholar is thus more likely to tear a page in a book just trying to turn to the next page, or to have a document slip from her hands and fall to the floor.  These obviously are bad events.

There is in fact an excellent reason to allow human fingers to touch medieval documents, and that is that most medieval documents were written on parchment, which started life as animal skin.  There are oils in parchment that are the same as the oils naturally occurring in human skin.  The oils can dry out, making parchment brittle, but careful handling by clean fingers can help restore the natural oils.

(This is very much not an invitation to smear olive oil or linseed oil on medieval documents.  And of course one should not be handling documents with hands freshly moisturized by lotions "in new lavender - nutmeg scent.")

So where does the idea come from that archivists should be wearing gloves, along with any scholars in the archives?  It may be partly related to the common expression, "He had to handle the situation with kid gloves," meaning he had to choose his response delicately.  Gloves! and delicacy! all in one phrase.  But of course the people who originated this phrase were not talking about archives.  (Kid gloves are thin, made from the skin of baby goats, as opposed to the horsehide or oxhide gloves used for heavy work.)

But the ultimate source of the belief that white gloves must be worn in the archives is doubtless movies and TV shows.  Just as scientists are always shown in a lab with strange whirling machines, and doctors are shown with white coats and stethoscopes, so librarians and archivists are shown with white gloves, as a quick shorthand to the audience of what kind of professional this is.  We do not need to copy scenes from the movies.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval documents and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Lost medieval manuscripts

 Most of the Middle Ages was pre-printing press.  Until the second half of the fifteenth century, everything had to be written by hand.  No printing, not even laser jets, no copy machines, only people writing or copying onto parchment or (by the fourteenth century) paper.  Understandably, there were far fewer books and documents than we have now.  This makes the loss over the centuries very noticeable.

Some medieval records we know only because the author's original manuscript (improbably) survives.  Others we know because the work was copied many times, such as the Arthurian stories I've previously discussed.  Property transactions at monasteries are known primarily if the records of these transactions were copied into cartularies.

It was not only the passage of time, with inevitable decay and fading, that did in medieval manuscripts.  Fire or flood will destroy parchment.  So will rats, who find parchment tasty good.  But the biggest losses were caused by humans.  Medieval bookbinders used old manuscripts in their bindings, a handy (free!) source of parchment.  The Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century destroyed many medieval records.  In France, the French Revolution of the eighteenth century destroyed many more, as these records were seen as oppressive tools of the ancien régime that was being overthrown.  Documents that survived into the twentieth century were sometimes destroyed during the two world wars.

And then a number of people set out deliberately to destroy medieval manuscripts.  They didn't do so with destruction per se on their minds, but due to seeing these manuscripts as sort of random pieces of interesting material, to be used or sold or recombined in ways to please the owners.  For example, there was a fad in the nineteenth century of carefully cutting out decorated initials from medieval manuscripts and gluing them to white paper, then framing them as attractive decorations.

Liturgical manuscripts especially, those which had been done with great care and artistry, were especially prone to such mutilation.  Even if the initials were not actually cut out, individual leaves might be separated from the rest of the book and sold individually.  Rare book dealers realized that they could make far more money selling individual leaves of medieval manuscripts than selling the entire book to one person.

A recent interesting example is the Beauvais missal.  It is a liturgical manuscript, highly decorated, which exists as a partial volume.  Recently a number of individual leaves, separated in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, have come to light, most in individual hands.  Some were picked up at an estate sale, where the deceased's heirs thought an attractive late medieval sheet of parchment ought to be worth something.  Lisa Fagin Davis, director of the Medieval Academy of America, has been on a mission to identify as many of these missing leaves as possible. This is what one of the missing leaves looked like.

 

I've had folks selling individual medieval manuscript leaves tell me, "Well, the leaves were already separated from the book when I got them."  I consider this similar to, "Well, the leopard was already dead when I made its fur into a coat."

It's disconcerting how limited our collection of medieval manuscripts must be compared to those that existed 500 years ago.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on manuscripts, writing, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.