Beschreibung:

Grant of Thomas, son of William Herbert of Somesal, Derbyshire, of land there to the Abbey of St. Mary’s, Rocester (Staffordshire), in Latin, manuscript on parchment [England (Staffordshire), early thirteenth century] Single sheet document, 11 long lines in a fine English secretarial script, initials in double penstrokes, seal tag attached with remains of seals within cloth bag, endorsed on reverse in English in a scrawling sixteenth-century hand as “The orygynall deed of grant of lands in Somershall to the Abbey of Rosceter”, small stains and folds, else excellent condition, 83+12 by 184 mm. The antiquarian endorsement suggests that this charter was obtained directly from the archives of the abbey after the Dissolution. The house was founded at Dovedale, Staffordshire, between 1141 and 1146 by Richard Bacon, nephew of the Earl of Chester, as a community of Augustinian canons. Its inmates acquired a reputation for pious aestheticism, and they attracted substantial secular and ecclesiastical patronage, and subsumed the church of Roscester with all chapels, appurtenances and lands in 1229. They bought exemption from automatic closure under the Act of 1536, but this was only a stay of execution and Cranmer wrote in August 1538 to Cromwell urging that commissioners be sent to “Rosceter, Tutbury and Coxden” to force the dissolution of these renegade houses. By September they had been closed, and the community pensioned and dispersed. The chapel was sold piecemeal for its building materials a month later, and the rest of the buildings (including the archive) was leased in 1539 to one of Cromwell’s men, and sold the year after.