A study of the fourteenth century cartulary of Scone Abbey and its context

Abstract

This thesis is a study of the fourteenth-century recension of Scone Abbey’s cartulary and its context. No monastic cartulary in Scotland has been analysed and edited since 1947. Since then both the scholarship and techniques used by historians have evolved and progressed to provide a wider and deeper understanding of cartularies as texts in their own right, rather than just extensions of an archive. These monastic cartularies were constructed with a particular purpose, in a particular way, and tied to a specific period in a monastery’s history. This thesis analyses Scone’s fourteenth-century cartulary using these techniques and edits a number of its texts using modern critical apparatus. Chapter 1 examines the historiography of Scottish monastic cartularies and the methodology used by their editors, while placing it in a wider European context. It also examines the two previous transcriptions of Scone’s fourteenth-century cartulary, one dated to 1738 and the other to sometime before 1745, and its publication as part of Liber Ecclesie de Scon in 1843. All these previous transcriptions have issues associated with them. This thesis also provides a history of the monastery from its foundation c.1115-20 until the estimated creation of the fourteenth-century cartulary. Chapter 2 is a summary analysis of the cartulary. It details the critical information contained in the cartulary, such as deeds, dates, locations, scribes, manuscript dating and binding. It also compares this recension to the later recension of the cartulary, dated to the fifteenth/sixteenth century. Chapter 3 presents the codicology of the current cartulary and reconstructs it, arranging the misplaced folios into the correct order. This chapter analyses the deeds in each quire and discusses the content and context of the transcriptions. Chapter 4 is an enhanced syllabus of the fourteenth-century cartulary using modern critical apparatus including an indexing system, a synopsis of the Latin transcription in English, and details of where else the deed may exist. Where a transcription has been omitted from Liber Ecclesie de Scon, it has been fully transcribed. Chapter 5 concludes the thesis and discusses possible directions future research could take.