Course:ARST573/Archives – History (Medieval)

European medieval archives were repositories, programs, or places in 5th to 16th century Europe that preserved records of enduring value. These archives varied according to time, institution, and region. These time periods included the Early Middle Ages, the High Middle Ages, and the Late Middle Ages. The two major types of medieval archival institutions were secular and religious. There are three main regions in medieval Europe that saw significant change in their archival practices: England, Italy, and the rest of Continental Europe. In the early Middle Ages, records were generally dispersed among institutions while in the later Middle Ages records began to be collected in their originating institutions.

Pre-Medieval Developments

See also: Archives – History (Ancient)

Before the 5th century, various regions of Europe maintained records of importance. These records included laws, evidence of administrative action, financial and accounting documentation, taxes, military records, labour records, and government records.

Especially influential in medieval Western European archival tradition were the practices of the Roman Empire, which immediately preceded. While the Tabularium continued to acquire records of the Roman Senate the emperors maintained their personal archives within their own palaces. This would later be reflected in the practices of medieval governments, institutions, and kings.

It is debated whether these collections were archives in the modern sense as there is no evidence of a records life-cycle or a consistent organizational policy. Nevertheless, by the 5th century there was the beginnings of a proto-archival tradition that would not be formalized until the later Middle Ages and early modern period.

Medieval Developments

The Middle Ages saw significant changes in archival practices. It evolved from collecting important and often sacred objects to systematically cataloguing administrative documents.

The late Robert-Henri Bautier suggested dividing the Middle Ages archival developments into four periods: the early medieval period, the 8th through the 12th centuries, the post-12th century developments of more institutionalized government, and the late medieval and early modern explosion of familial business archives. This is due to several factors including literacy rates and the growth of government bureaucracy.

Early Middle Ages (5th to 7th Centuries)

Mosaic of Justinian I in the church of San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy.

In the 6th century the Justinian Code, a collection of laws and legal interpretations developed under the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, defined archives as a place for the first time. In the Justinian Code, archives is defined as locus publicus in quo instrumenta deponuntur ("the public place where deeds are deposited"), quatenus incorrupta maneant ("so that they remain uncorrupted"), fidem faciant ("provide trustworthy evidence"), and perpetua rei memoria sit ("and be continuing memory of that to which they attest"). This legislation also therefore provided guidelines as to what an archives was, who had access to the records, and why the records in the archives were kept.

Records during this time were written only by and for a few ecclesiastical institutions and secular governments. The majority of "archives" during this time therefore formed around objects of particular religious or secular importance.Examples include cups, rings, wooden staffs, knives, and any other symbolic objects which retained memory of past events.

In addition to the variety of records and objects kept in an archives, the terminology used to refer to the archives as a place also varied. While the Latin term archivum ("archives") is used occasionally, the Latin terms for "treasury" and "store" are also used in reference to the same places. The variety of words used suggests that document storage may not have been defined by a dedicated space with its own specialized rules.

High Middle Ages (8th to 12th Centuries)

In this period the great feudal powers, the Church, and the towns organized their own record-keeping practices. This consequently resulted in the creation of local or national traditions and methods, which ultimately led to the various archival systems that came to be in modern Europe.

In addition to the growth of the powerful, there was increased literacy among the lay people. As a result, documents became less symbolic and more practical in use.This led to a larger generation of records, and the development of lay familial archives. (Reference needed)

Late Middle Ages (13th to 15th Centuries)

By the 13th and 14th centuries, local and national archives began appearing. The French Trésor des Chartes had its first archivist in 1307 and the archives of the kingdom of Aragon were created in 1346. These archival repositories were defined as loci publici in quibus instrumenta deponuntur ("public places where legal documents are kept"). This signifies a change in thinking of records as sacred or enforcing power, to thinking of records as legally binding. This may be a result of, or a cause of, later medieval society becoming increasing literate and litigious.

In addition to keeping archives, from the 12th century onward the principal governments of Western Europe began to keep records more systematically. This is evident through the creation of cartularies. Cartularies are copies of existent charters and legal records grouped together in one bound volume.

From the 12th to 17th century, the number of keys necessary to open archives, and the rank of the functionaries who had them into their custody were proportional to the authority given to the material preserved in the chamber and/or the chest.

Archival Institutions: Religious and Secular

There are many types of archives in the modern era including performing arts archives, fine arts archives, public archives, and personal archives. During the Middle Ages, archives were generally either religious or secular. Although these categories often overlapped in terms of their contents, they had distinct archival practices.

Religious Archives

See also: Faith Based Archives

See also: Archives – History (Early Modern) - Religious Institutions

Religious archives are those that dealt with records of either religious significance or were part of the institutional memory of religious institutions such as records on churches, monasteries, and cathedrals. Therefore, the content of religious archives focuses on their religious beliefs and practices. This resulted in collections of unique records such as gospel books, saints relics, chronicles, and inquisitional sentences. Those ecclesiastical institutions that preserved documents distinct from non-ecclesiastical institutions and people were usually the most successful in terms of establishing control over their records.

Christian Monastic Archives

The earliest objects preserved by monastic archives were books associated with saints and other religious persons. This is due not only to their religious significance, but also their precious illuminations. These books were kept with other objects such as saint relics because the content of these books was directed to the patron saint of the church, rather than the monks or the church itself.

Monastic scribes were not as concerned with the day-to-day business activities as they were with keeping charters and chronicles for future generations of monks. Monastic writings therefore served as memorials of their select triumphs or difficulties, rather than of their daily business. Monastic archives also might have contained more typically archival records such as cartularies, the accounts of officials, records of building campaigns, and estate accounts. The first medieval archives were therefore special places where valuables of all sorts were kept.

The monastery that had the archives was not always the creator of the records it kept. Also some scholars have suggested that moastic archives like the one at St.Gall, did not receive their records immediately after their time of use had expired. Rather, these records were kept by the priest-scribes in the locality in which they were used for several years before being transferred into the monastic archives.

Monastic archives as a place could either be wooden and metal chests or a permanent structure attached to the monastery. This was for both safety and because of the sacred nature of many of the objects.

Archives of the Inquisition

Cité de Carcassonne today

From 1231 to the mid-16th century, the Inquisition against heretical depravity used archives extensively. This was reinforced by the 1251 legislation from the Council at L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue which instructed inquisitors to preserve their records.

The most notable use of archives during the Inquisition was in the 13th and 14th centuries in Languedoc, where inquisitors uncovered heretics through records kept in the archives. Languedoc was unique in that the inquisitors established permanent tribunals with houses, prisons, and archives attached to them. At Toulouse, the inquisitors housed their archives at their residence near the Château Narbonnais, while at Carcassonne they were kept in a tower adjoining the inquisitor’s residence. A passage connected the tower and the residence at Carcassonne, but it was closed with a door to which only the inquisitors had the key. At some point the archives of the Carcassonne inquisition were moved to Montpellier. In most other cases, the inquisitors were itinerant and therefore did not establish archives in permanent places.

The archives established by the inquisitors aided their search for heretics in the region. Depositions, sentences, and manuals were the key records kept in the inquisition’s archives. In Toulouse, there is thought that there must have been a minimum of sixteen registers, while at Carcassonne there had been a minimum of eighteen registers and books.

They also had registers and indexes for the records, usually arranged by region. These registers and indexes provided a rudimentary finding aid for the inquisitors, making retrieval at a later date easier. This is unique, as most other records at this time in Europe were only used at the time of composition and not as sources of reference. In some cases, the inquisitors referenced testimonies from twenty years prior.

In addition to registers, access to the archives was supported by the ceaseless copying efforts of the inquisitors and their scribes. This accessibility enabled the inquisitors to reference the records for previous testimonies against particular individuals who they suspected of being heretics.

Aside from their use in finding heretics, inquisitional records provide a glimpse of the illiterate population, otherwise not widely represented in textual documents of the Middle Ages.

Secular/Lay Archives

Secular (or lay) archives are those that were kept by entities that were not officially affiliated with or had a role in religious practices (the laity). These included familial, governmental, and educational archives. Medieval secular archives are often overlooked by scholars due to the limited remaining evidence. Secular documents generally included different kinds of transactions from ecclesiastical documents such as women's mundia (documents designating legal persons), slave acquisitions, loans, dowries, and land sales. Secular documents were not necessarily private as some were created through court proceedings. Most of the evidence for lay written culture in continental Europe is Carolingian, which may not be representative of the early medieval norm.

The direct evidence for lay archives comes from remnants that have survived in the archives of a churches or monasteries. This is due simply to the fact that churches and monasteries as institutions had the resources to preserve records compared to the lay families. They were also less susceptible to dramatic changes and loss of land holdings. Examples of this include the Italian ecclesiastical archives of Lucca, Monte Amiata, Casauria, and Plancenza where batches of lay documents were deposited. Indirect evidence of lay archives exists in several early medieval law codes, where lay people used documents to guarantee certain rights and protect certain kinds of transactions. Several of these law codes suggest that lay people kept their archives in their homes.

Royal Archives

Stone statue of Hubert Walter, exterior niche of Canterbury Cathedral.

There are two types of royal archives, administrative and familial. Both administrative and familial royal archives were kept in local centres such as royal residences and royal ecclesiastical foundations. For instance, New Temple and St. Bartholomew’s Smithfield in London and the Chapel of the Pyx and the undercroft of the Chapter house housed royal records at various times throughout the Middle Ages.

Certain documents, especially chirograph copies of important decisions or agreements, were sometimes placed in the king’s collection of holy relics or in his treasury. Other copies were sent either with the other party involved in the actions of the document or to a religious house. In 1164 Henry II of England personally insisted that a third copy of the chirograph recording the Constitutions of Clarendon should be put ‘in the royal archives’ suggesting that there was a designated place for such documents. This practice became routine in 1190 - 1210 when Hubert Walter created a central government archives for the English king.

The French royal archives began in the 12th century in reaction to Philip Augustus' loss of his own fiscal records in a battle with Richard I of England. The first record received by the archives in 1194 was a treaty between Philip Augustus and the future King John of England. This trésor des chartes ("treasure of charters") was transferred by St. Louis to a building adjoining Sainte-Chapelle to be within easy reach of the advocates of the palais ("palace").

Aside from official records for administration, some monarchs kept their own royal family archives, which usually housed records regarding their title-deeds. There is evidence of this occurring in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Mercia (from the 8th century) and Wessex (from the 9th century). These records were kept in the monarch’s bookland estates, which were separate from their royal residence. These repositories could also hold copies of wills made by individual members of the royal family.

Often, the deposit of documents with the king’s relics or treasure would have required the involvement of the royal chaplains and/or the chamberlain. However, in the 10th century, records were sometimes entrusted to an exceptionally trusted adviser who was not in permanent attendance to the king.

University Archives

Medieval universities deposited documents of their activities in the camera actorum (chamber of acts) of the municipality that had jurisdiction over them or in the archives chests of ecclesiastical institutions. Therefore, records were kept by those institutions that had sovereignty over those that created the documents.

Learning shifted from monasteries in the early Middle Ages, to cathedral schools in the high Middle Ages, and finally to the establishment of universities in the later Middle Ages. As a result, very few universities have medieval records in their archives. Since learning originated in the monasteries and the cathedrals, it is in their archives that records of teaching, learning, and supervision are kept.

At Lincoln Cathedral in the 13th century, the Chancellor had charge of the scholastic books and saints’ lives as he was associated with the cathedral’s school. In Oxford, university records were also the responsibility of the Chancellor, the bishop’s deputy, who kept the records in the church. Later, the Proctors of Oxford University preserved the records in chests, to which only the Proctors had keys. This explains how the records of students, masters, and rectors have not survived within the confines of the university archives.

In the archives of the University of Bologna, the earliest series starts in the year 1377. The other records of Bologna were dispersed between the Church of San Domenico, the university assembly room, the city archives, and the rectores’ office.

Although universities were powerful institutions, this was not until the late Middle Ages. As a result, their archives were scattered between the various institutions that were in charge of education.

Archival Traditions by Region

Each region of Europe in the Middle Ages developed their own archival traditions. These traditions included means of organizing, preserving, and providing access to records. Factors such as government stability and legal traditions played key roles in the development of archival traditions.

England

Modern tiles outline the site of the minster next to Winchester Cathedral

There has been much debate surrounding the centralization of English archives in the medieval period. While some scholars insist that Anglo-Saxon monarchs kept their records in Winchester Cathedral, others emphasize the dispersal of royal documents in the various repositories across the country.

Anglo-Saxon

There has been some disagreement about the centralization of Anglo-Saxon archives. Much of the evidence from this period suggests that the private and public records of the Anglo-Saxon kings were deposited in several locations and not, as Cyril Hart and Elizabeth Hallam have suggested, into a centralized repository in Winchester. Also to be included in this list is the Anglo-Saxon haligdom, which was probably the sanctuary associated with the chapel royal.

Many scholars believe that the shire reeves kept their records in local repositories. These local centres of administration included boroughs, royal residences and royal ecclesiastical foundations.

Remnants of records suggests that the bureaucratic mentality of a royal administration that relied on a network of royal centres visited regularly by the king. These are not to be confused with the royal family archives.

Single documents like charters were sometimes bound or copied into religious books for safekeeping. Along with depositing two or three copies of agreements in different locations for greater security, this process continued into the Norman period.

Norman, Angevin, and Plantagenet

A common myth developed that a consistent policy of preserving public records in England owed its origin to Norman rather than Anglo-Saxon administrators, despite the above-mentioned evidence. The first instance of the Latin term archiva, meaning ‘archives’ in the sense of a safe and secret place for documents, was first used in England by Lanfranc in the early 1070s.

The Great Seal of Henry II

Gradually in the 12th and 13th centuries, more specific and uniform regulations were made for the safekeeping of records. In the 12th century, the thesaurus, the ‘treasury’, at Winchester was developing into a permanent central archive for the government. Examples of this include Henry I, who ordered that his coronation charter to be placed there, and Henry II, who ordered the papal bull of Adrian IV giving him jurisdiction over Ireland be deposited ‘in the archives of Winchester’. Later in Henry II’s reign this practice was abandoned. Instead, treasure chests were constantly moved to and fro between Winchester, London, and other royal palaces, hunting lodges, and fortresses. It is also at this point that the term thesaurus changes from meaning a fixed place to portable chests. Additionally, individual officials were entrusted with records, which were stored where they could.

By Henry III’s reign, the accumulated documents required a permanent repository. London and Westminster replaced Winchester as the centre for storing royal treasure, but other repositories remained scattered.

By Edward I’s reign, the largest archive in the kingdom was probably New Temple in London, as this was where plea rolls, Chancery rolls, charter rolls, and patent rolls were kept. After the dissolution of the Knights Templar by papal decree in 1312, the king lost his chief record custodians. This led to a survey of records by Bishop Stapledon, who in 1320 chose the White Chapel in the Tower as the central repository to which all the records were brought. This marks the first instance of the royal archive being in a fixed place under the king’s direct control.

One of the issues present throughout this period in English archival history is that the king’s clerks never made systematized guides for their records. Therefore, the medieval archivist’s problem lay in not knowing which page or roll to search in the first place.

Italy

Late Roman law emphasized the importance of writing in legal transactions. Since Visigothic and Ostrogothic kingdoms were direct heirs to roman legal traditions, this had a great impact on their record keeping practices. In the legal arrangements of medieval Italy, the concept that the form of a document is a substantial condition for its existence and its capacity to be used as evidence of past transactions was affirmed. This is most evident in the Italian city of Ravenna, which from 400 C.E. onward was the imperial and administrative capital of the West. Ravenna maintained a collection that included sales, donations, wills, ecclesiastical leases, church property, inventories, and court proceedings from c.455-700. Also included in Ravenna's collection was the praetarion prefect's archive, which functioned as an archival index. In addition to being the administrative capital, Ravenna had a powerful metropolitan church. The Ravennate church promoted encouraged registration of records to secure its gains, while the laity kept records in Ravenna due to it's status as the administrative capital. Everywhere else in Italy at this time, there was a retreat away from government archives at the local level. By the end of the 5th century, registration of records diminished due to changing rulers and legislation. It was not until Theodoric in 493 that the registration of records was reestablished and expanded.

The Basilica of Saint Anthony in Padua. It was in the sacristy of this basilica that medieval Paduan statutes were kept.

The clerical-lay divide evident in Ravenna continued for several centuries. This situation illustrates what some scholars call a "striking paradox" between the clerical monopoly on preservation and the growing dominance of laymen in the creation of documents that was present in the 8th century. This is evident in the records preserved by a monastery in Casauria. In the 1170s the monastery's archivist, Giovanni di Berardo, transcribed the archival records in two registers. One of the registers contains records of lay property called munimina arranged topographically by 9th century boundaries. The other register contains instrumenta, which are records in which the monastery was either the author or the beneficiary.

In the later Middle Ages, Padua provides a unique example of archival legislation. The first rules on preservation of the statuti (statutes or medieval municipal constitutions or laws) date back to 1236. These texts were to be copied four times, with a copy going to the podestà, the procuratore, the church in palacio comunis, and the archives ubi stabunt libri comunis. Two years later, Padua introduced legislation that records must be arranged into a strongwardrobe, with two lock and two different keys. This strongwardrobe was put into the sacristy of St. Antonio Friars. The ordering of these records were according to what type of document they were. There were also municipal rules that listed the information that had to be recorded for each document type. Municipal constitutions outlined the procedures that citizens and the chancellery had to follow in order to access the records. Some copies were reserved for only public servants to reference.

The largest early medieval Italian repository in terms of holdings is the archiepiscopal archive in Lucca, which contains over 1800 pre-1000 documents. This is followed by the over 900 pre-1000 records at Casuria and nearly 900 in Farfa's cartularies. There is also the abbey of S. Salvatore on Monte Amiata, which used to preserve about 180 pieces, that are now mostly in the Archivio di Stato in Siena.

In the 12th and 13th centuries, Italy experienced a "scriptural explosion, or revolution" due to the notaries and civic institutions who took over writing and archiving for the civic communities. At this time communal registers were highly used in addition to cartularies.

Francia and the Rest of Continental Europe

The Plan of St.Gall. (Codex Sangallensis 1092 recto)

Early medieval states on the Continent, such as Francia or Lombardy, had archives associated with royal palaces. In the 9th century there are references to dedicated archives at the palace in Aachen in Charlemagne’s last years.

The most evidence of archival practices in continental Europe during the early Middle Ages comes from Carolingian Francia. In particular, the monastery of St. Gall in modern Switzerland. This repository is unique in that it preserved the charters in the original rather than via a cartulary. There is evidence of an archiving process being present at St. Gall by the 9th century. This process involved extensive note-taking and folding of the parchment. The storage location for these charters remains obscure, however it has been suggested that they were kept close to the scribes in the scriptorium, or perhaps in the sacristy.

There were at least two instances of archival reorganization at St. Gall. Completed in 815, the first effort saw charters annotated with names of donors and the location of land. The second reorganization occurred c. 840 and involved the reordering and numbering of the charters by region.

The majority of early medieval archives of continental Europe used cartularies rather than reorganization of original documents like at St. Gall. In western Francia and southern Gaul, cartularies were a phenomena of the 9th century and beyond. This tradition of Carolingian cartularies did not continue as strongly as it began in the 9th century, dramatically tailing off by the late Middle Ages.

Cluny Abbey in 2004

During the 11th century, the archives at Cluny abbey began a process of cartulary compilation. The wealth of secular records present in Cluny were not represented in this cartulary project as they were not useful for the bolstering of Cluny's institutional memory. There are dossiers like Lilia's, a landowner who gave property to Cluny, that suggest Cluny ended up holding a large volume of secular deeds precisely because as it acquired land through the 10th century it also acquired the collections of title-deeds that went with that land. This practice changed in the 11th century when Cluny's focus was on institutional memory, rather than asserting land claims. In the 18th century, antiquarian Louis-Henri Lambert de Barvie examined the history of the archives at Cluny monastery. Over a series of visits before the French Revolution he described the 13th century "tower of the archives" on one side of the gatehouse, as well as transcripts of the original documents he found in the tower.

In 13th century Germany, Stadtbuch or city books appeared for cities such as Cologne (1212), Madeburg (1215), Lübeck (1227), Rostock and Wismar c.1250, and Hamburg (1248). The creation of the Stadtbuch and the liber civitatis, according to the German medievalist Andreas Petter, marks the start of Germany city archives.

Archives at the End of the Middle Ages

See also: Archives – History (Early Modern)

By the end of the medieval period archives began to form in permanent repositories such as government buildings, religious houses, and sometimes family homes. With the growth of literacy, many more documents were being produced by people who previously were not represented. This led to significant developments in archival practices in the early modern period.

Some archival repositories were destroyed or otherwise abandoned in the late medieval and early modern period. Examples include the 1531 plundering of St. Gall's monastic archives and the dissolution of monasteries in England..

See Also

Other History of Archives Pages:

• Archives – History (Ancient)
• Archives – History (Early Modern)
• Archives – History (Late Modern North American)

Other Pages of Interest:

• Faith Based Archives