Scribes and Notaries in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Hospitaller Charters from England

A search through over 3,000 charters from the surviving cartularies of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem in England produces a meagre list of twenty-five individuals from the witness lists who are designated as being in one way or another responsible for the preparation of the document in question (Table 1). ¹ For the purposes of comparison, a similar search through the 10,300 dated English charters in the DEEDS ² database at the University of Toronto, covering the period 1100–1307, produced twenty-six names in a similar context (Table 2). For the most part, these individuals are clearly scribes, whose responsibility it was to compose and copy the record to which they attached their names. Those who “hanc brevem/cartam/convencionem/quietam clamanciam scripsit” seem to have been on a par with those “qui hanc cartam fecit” ³ or “composuit”. ⁴ On occasion, from the third quarter of the thirteenth century, an ecclesiastic identifies himself as the notarius. ⁵ With the exception of the notaries ⁶ , however, there are no references to scribes in the witness lists in either Hospitaller or database sources after c. 1272. ⁷ The date ⁸ corresponds to the beginning of the reign of Edward I, whose revisions to the common law were extensive.