Christopher D King PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

II: DIPLOMATIC
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presumably relied on the provision of one by the recipient, where this
was the Abbey, or perhaps the local priest, where the transaction was
between laymen. Good local knowledge may be imputed to such
scribes and hence the associated simple agricultural deedmaker seems
to promise most as a class of provenance.
14. Where the deed is, as just described, of local compilation,
the scribe is not subordinate to the deedmaker. The case of a
deedmaker who is a bishop or other diocesan official presents the
opposite relationship in that the supervision of the scribe by the
deedmaker is strong. The Bishop, if indeed he did not actually write
the deed himself, was literate, was attuned to transactions of our type,
and may be supposed to have had a fair interest in such events within
his diocese. On the other hand a diocesan estab'ishment was on the
face of it susceptible to a standardizing house-style which, while
regarding regional peculiarities prevalent in the cathedral city, may yet
have been no more sensitive to dialectal boundaries within the diocese
than might obtain in documents emanating from further away.
15. A third category of provenance is that represented by the
nobility. In general this would seem a source more remote from
knowledge of obscure tracts of land than were local deedmakers and
scribes. That these documents may also be less trustworthy for our
purposes than diocesan ones is suggested by the consideration that the
nobleman may have found it less to his taste or within his competence
than would the bishop to bother about the wording of a deed that
either drew up. Another point of like tendency is that a diocesan scribe
is most likely to have come from the parish clergy of the diocese, with
the feeling of the latter for local dialect, whereas a nobleman might
choose his chaplain from a possibly far-flung social circle.
16. On the other hand the higher clergy are affected by
learning, whereas a nobleman may be as rustic as any of his tenants
and surround himself with local stalwarts. Nor can the circumstance
be overlooked that WCB deeds relating to La and Ch are most
commonly from west Ch in the case of those of noble provenance,
whereas diocesan documents are mainly from such further purlieus as
Lichfield and Coventry. The foregoing considerations may have some
bearing on future comparison of the relative merits of documents of
different provenance but diocesan and noble classes will here
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