The Cartulary of the Cistercian Abbey of Kirkstead, Lincolnshire. The Landscape Realities and Documentary Defences of an Abbey Site in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries

Abstract

This article outlines recent work to edit the thirteenth-century cartulary of the Cistercian abbey of Kirkstead, Lincolnshire, and highlights the manuscript’s potential as a case study for deeper understandings of cartulary compilation. Adopting new approaches to cartulary studies, it outlines the striking method and circumstances of the cartulary’s compilation in 1259–1260 and its extensive additions c. 1310. Instead of beginning a codex from scratch, a compiler-scribe drew together and radically expanded a suite of cartulary sections already begun in earlier decades by multiple scribes. The article also examines in depth the specific landscape and patronal contexts which catalysed archival rationalization and what this reveals about the abbey’s interaction with its locale. The cartulary confirms hunting as a major influence on Kirkstead’s development, though not in a typically combative way as evidenced elsewhere and reveals the abbey’s important part in the evolution of Tattershall Chase. The case of Kirkstead indicates how the evolution of a Cistercian landscape proceeded in lockstep with the development of its archive and how cartularization was a process rather than a moment in a house’s archival history.

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