Court rolls were a product of the medieval English legal system in which judges would travel (make a circuit, hence our word for circuit court) to each manor or abbey or significant holding and record transactions and adjudicate conflicts. Rather than recording these proceedings in a codex, they were recorded on single sheets that were joined at the top, creating a thick, difficult to manage roll. Each year, another sheet or two could be added to the original until they reached a critical mass and then a new roll would be started.
I first encountered the Bacon rolls at the University of Chicago in a Newberry Library summer seminar on Latin paleography led by Diana Greenway and Jane E. Sayersoffered through the Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies. [Gossip: Diana and Jane spent their free time in Chicago visiting Chicago mob history haunts—one of their many extra-paleographical passions.] It was my first formal contact with the Newberry Library and although I was a graduate student at Columbia University, there was a reciprocal arrangement between the Newberry and the Folger Libraryconsortiums, of which Columbia was a member. Like all Newberry programs it was life altering. I met scholars whose books I had read and who became friends: Barbara Rosenwein and Dyan Elliott, among others.
For one session we met at the University of Chicago Special Collections to look at English Manorial rolls in the Bacon collection. As a beginning paleography student, I found the English Latin charterhand nearly impossible to read. Because I don’t read it often, I still find it challenging but a word to the beginner—the vocabulary is very limited and once you begin to decipher it, you’ll notice that the most difficult parts are the many names of people and place names, whose spelling seems almost completely random—scribes spell the same name two or three different ways in a single line. My advice is to start with some transcribed documents (see the Harvard Law Manorial Rolls link below) and learn the hand, legal vocabulary, and abbreviations). No work, no reward and the reward here would be tremendous.
Tim Graham and I used a Bacon manuscript in our IMS (p. 258, Bacon MS 24) to illustrate the unique way that manorial rolls bind many sheets to the head of the roll rather than end-to-end, creating a thick roll:
For particularly long sessions, the scribes joined sheets end-to-end as well, making the entire roll unwieldy. I don’t think these were designed to be read often—they contain rents and land transactions that were likely only consulted if they were contested. There is little sign on the rolls I examined (a very small number of the total) that showed signs of editing, although there were multiple deletions, likely when debts were fulfilled or transactions completed, so perhaps they did see more use than I imagine.
We had hoped that our inclusion of the Bacon roll would lead to more study, but twenty years on, that hasn’t happened. So this Thesis in a Box is hoping a young scholar will become fascinated by their form and content and undertake a study.
When I was a curator at the Beinecke, I hoped to acquire a court roll fragment for teaching purposes because Yale did not possess any court rolls. However, I discovered that it was illegal to export court rolls in any form from the UK, so it became my white whale; I hoped that some binding fragment had been exported before the export laws took effect. I was not fortunate in my search. Given these restrictions, I thought the Bacon collection was unique in the United States, but University of Chicago University Archivist, Kathleen Feeney, whom I was lucky to run into in the hallway in special collections told me about a similar collection at Harvard Law School. (Note to all young scholars: you will learn more from the people who work in a library/archive than you ever will from printed materials. I always encouraged my graduate students to be social when traveling to archives—the real knowledge is in the people, not the books.) Kathleen also mentioned the exhibit of the Bacon materials in the 1970s and its catalog. The Harvard collection, it turns out, was in de Ricci all along, had I thought to look. If there are other North American court rolls, please write to me and I’ll include them below.
The Bacon collection contains many documents in addition to rolls and continues until 1785. The archive was put up for sale by the heirs of Nicholas Bacon in 1924 through the London bookseller Bernard Quaritch. —Professor C. R. Baskerville of the University of Chicago English Department helped to broker the collection. Martin A. Ryerson funded the acquisition. Professor John M. Manly, Edith Rickert and Lillian Redstone also assisted in the acquisition of the archive. Manly and Rickert would later publish the Manly/Rickert edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Chaucer’s life records.
Many of the Bacon court rolls have been digitized (it appears from microfilm) and are available through the finding aid (see below). Unfortunately, the right margin of many of these images cannot be seen in the viewer, but if you download the PDF, the material is there.
Some of the many possible avenues for new research: Matthew Collins has been doing DNA analysis of the many charters in English repositories to determine where the animals originated, how breeds changed over time, and whether the parchment was produced locally or imported. Notably, he recently discovered that some of the books in the Cistercian house of Clairvaux were bound in seal skin imported from Iceland! Here are two of the “hairy” books determined to be seal skin:
A more traditional line of inquiry would be to map out the various landholdings, the value of the rents collected and how they changed over time and various relationships between the lord who owned the land and the people who worked the land.
A book-history centered study would focus on the unique binding structure to inquire why this form was the one adopted for this material. Clearly it must have been useful for their purposes or it would not have been used but given how hard they are for the modern researcher to handle, it would be interesting to determine the advantages of such a format beyond ease of binding.
Bibliography:
Clemens & Graham. Introduction to Manuscript Studies. Cornell, 2007. pp. 255-258.
A searchable database has been made from all of the documents in the collection.
Finding Aid: Guide to the Sir Nicholas Bacon Collection of English Court and Manorial Documents circa 1200-1785. Excellent description of the many different types of documents in the collection and their importance.
Richard M. and Margaret McFadden Smith. The Sir Nicholas Bacon Collection : sources on English society, 1250-1700. Chicago, 1972. Exhibition catalog with images from the collection.
Medieval Genealogy UK: Medieval source material on the internet: Manorial records. I was unable to find mention of the Bacon rolls but that is likely because they have not been fully digitized.
History in Deed: Medieval Society & theLaw in England, 1100-1600, an Exhibition of Deeds & Charters from the Harvard Law School Library, November-December 1993. [Cambridge]: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1993.
Papp, Elizabeth Ann. Moulton Manor and its court, 1306-1418: crisis and reaction in a fourteenth-century manor. (B.A. Thesis, Honors in History) Harvard University, 1997.
