A Thirteenth-Century English Charter at Brock University

Abstract

In the fall of 2008, staff of the Special Collections and Archives of the James A. Gibson library at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, discovered a small, tightly folded, and clearly very old parchment document in a bag in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. The document, which had been transferred to the Library from the President’s Office in 1976, was stored without being catalogued, probably because it fell outside the scope of the department’s collection policy. It remained unexamined for over thirty years until early in 2009, when the announcement of its ‘rediscovery’ caused considerable excitement among the Brock University and Niagara communities. Efforts to trace the provenance of the Charter prior to its arrival at Brock University have proven unsuccessful. The document, dated to the mid-thirteenth century, records a grant of land in the village of Clopton in Warwickshire (see further below) by Robert de Clopton to his son William; although some of the individuals and places named in it are known from contemporaneous records, it does not appear to be referred to in secondary sources pertaining to the family, the estate, or the county and, in fact, seems to be completely unknown. The Clopton charter now has the distinction of being the oldest item in the holdings of the James A. Gibson Library at Brock University. This paper offers a description, transcription, translation and preliminary analysis of the document.