The Black Book of Peterborough, a Monastic Cartulary of the 12th to 14th Century
The cartulary of Peterborough Abbey, open at its copy of the charter of Runnymede. A house like Peterborough kept its lands by keeping its paperwork: the register recorded every grant, exemption and privilege the abbey could produce when challenged.
A cartulary is the least glamorous and most revealing object a medieval monastery produced. It is the book in which an abbey copied out the charters that proved what it owned, what rents it could claim, and which bishops and kings had confirmed those claims. Peterborough's — bound in black and worked on from the twelfth century into the fourteenth — sits open here at its transcript of the charter of Runnymede. The learning and the prayer are the parts remembered; the estate management is what paid for them. See how monasteries combined faith, learning and power.
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