The Crown, Three Benedictine Houses, and the Statute of Mortmain, 1279–1348

Bibliographic Data

ID10068046
AuthorsErnest D Jones
Year1975
Volume14
Issue2
Pages1-28
Publication date1975-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of British Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-9371 • E-ISSN: 1545-6986
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1086/385669
OpenAlexW2016515289
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited9

If not one of the pieces of Edwardian legislation which contributed to the growth of the English legal system, the Statute of Mortmain was nonetheless a most important enactment, a fact which has been realized in the not inconsiderable attention devoted to it by historians. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the crown's execution of the law in the period 1279 to 1348, with reference to the Benedictine houses of Crowland Abbey, Thorney Abbey, and Spalding Priory, and the statute's effects on the territorial policy of each of these. Information on their territorial policies is to be found in the three chartularies relating to them. These are the Spalding Register, written c1331, numbering 801 folios in two volumes; the Red Book of Thorney, written c1326, numbering 472 folios in two volumes; and the Wrest Park Chartulary, written in the mid-fourteenth century after 1343, numbering 257 folios. No doubt there may be omissions, but a close scrutiny of the Spalding Register and the Red Book of Thorney, which both contain land acquisitions added by later clerks up to 1348, shows how faithfully, if not in the Spalding case carefully, (the original Spalding clerk tended to be rather a haphazard organiser; the original Thorney clerk was a real craftsman) recorded are the land acquisitions made by these two houses from the later thirteenth century to the middle of the fourteenth century. There are literally scores of these, with the additional evidence of the Calendar of Patent Rolls , which is useful as a check as well as a supplement to the chartularies, and which almost invariably testifies to the reliability of the clerks

Aesthetics · Art · Legislation · Numbering · Period (music · Political science · Scrutiny · Statute · Classics · Historical Legal Studies and Society · History · Law · Mathematics · Medieval and Early Modern Justice · Medieval Literature and History

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub