Grant by Abbot Peter and the community of the Cistercian Abbey of St. Mary, Woburn of local fields and a mill pond to William de Medmenham, in confirmation of an agreement before the king's court at Westminster, fine monastic charter in Latin, on parchment [England (Woburn, Bedfordshire), dated 1203/04]

Large single-sheet document, with 13 long lines in an early English court documentary script, with ornamental elongated ascenders, capitals decorated with penstrokes, modern pencil '2' on turnup, reverse with Early Modern and modern endorsements, some folds and few tiny holes, else in excellent condition, seal tag present, but seal wanting, 120+23 by 170mm.

This is perhaps one of only three recorded items from the Registra, computos, rotulos curiae, cartas originales, etc. of Woburn Abbey that the antiquarian James West informed Thomas Tanner were among the holdings of the Duke of Bedford, with Tanner then reporting this in the 1744 edition of the Notitia Monastica. No part of the archive could be located by G. Scott Thomson in 1933 ('Woburn Abbey and the Dissolution of the Monasteries', Trans. of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser. 16, pp. 129-60, especially 151-2), and there are indications that the Duke no longer had access to this archive even in the 1740s (ibid., pp. 152-3). Scott Thomson suggests that the charters may have fallen to figures such as one Ralph Starky, who in 1619 who was accused of taking diverse leger books of diverse monasteries as well as charters and other documents from the Court of Augmentations on its dissolution, or were left in the custody of the bailiffs of the estate and thus did not pass to the ducal archive at Woburn. Apart from the discovery of this item, the only other charters of the house are British Library, Add. Charter 6026 (a grant to the abbey of the reign of John) and Add. Charter 19932 (a confirmation to the abbey of the time of Henry III), these acquired form the collections of the antiquary G. Baker in 1844 and the 1st Viscount Hatton, respectively.

This charter re-emerging in the collection of Ian Woodner (1903-1990) of Manhattan, real estate developer, artist and collector, whose substantial collections passed to his daughters, Dian and Andrea Woodner, and were dispersed by Christie's (this 23 June 1993, lot 32); acquired at that sale by the late Jeremy Griffiths of Oxford, and sold by him to Martin Schøyen (his MS. 1688/1), and thereafter kept in his London library.

Woburn Abbey was founded as a Cistercian house in 1145 with monks from Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire. Despite being one of the wealthiest houses in England, little is known in detail or with certainty of its history. Thus the emergence of any record, no matter how small, adds significantly to the history of the house. The last abbot received the oath of supremacy from the royal visitors in 1534/5, but came to regret it, and died soon after conscience-stricken over his cowardice. The house was suppressed in 1547, and the estate was gifted by Henry VIII to John Russell, the first Earl of Bedford. It currently houses the splendid art collection of the Dukes of Bedford. Almost nothing survives from its medieval library, with Ker recording only one extant manuscript (N.R. Ker, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, 2nd ed., 1964, p. 205: Oxford, Balliol College, 178A, a twelfth-century Florus diaconus) and two incunables (British Library, IB 118, and Cambridge, St John's, Bb.6.17).