The Production and Use of Administrative Documents in Somerset from Glanvill to Magna Carta

The Production and Use of Administrative Documents in Somerset from Glanvill to Magna Carta Robin Sutherland-Harris Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto 2016 Abstract This thesis studies how various kinds of administrative documents were produced and used through the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries within the geographical and administrative territory bounded by the shire of Somerset and the diocese of Bath and Wells. Documents were increasingly part of administration in medieval England at all levels, from royal government to the local land market, from archbishops to cathedral canons. Parallel to the growing importance of administrative texts, an increasingly regularized body of administrative personnel also emerged during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This thesis is therefore situated in the intersection of a flourishing documentary culture and a burgeoning administrative class. Theoretical frameworks provided by scholarship on the partial shift from memory to the written word, on textual communities, and on pragmatic literacy inform the analysis throughout. Focussing on the production and use of administrative documents over a short time period and in a specific region makes it possible to approach them in detail and at multiple levels. At the level of the institution, both the diocese of Bath and Wells and the monastery of Glastonbury made use of administrative documents while in conflict with one another. At the level of the individual, the archdeacons of the diocese found a range of administrative roles in royal government, in which they relied on pragmatic literacies tailored to their individual circumstances. At the level of the documents themselves, connections between surviving charter originals reveal the articulation of large-scale changes in documentary and administrative culture in the uneven small-scale nuances of scribal and chancery production. Each chapter examines documentary culture and pragmatic literacy in the local context, exposing bureaucratic rather than literary or religious reading communities. Rather than the high-culture focus adopted by most studies of medieval literacy, the emphasis here is on the more wide-spread and practically engaged world of administrative bodies, personnel, and documents; this allows a â core sampleâ of evidence from a local temporal and geographical microcosm to be tested against our understanding of macrocosmic changes in the uses of texts and the roles of literacy in the medieval west.Ph.D.2019-11-07 00:00:0