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- Housed in a modern wooden frame (406 x 457 mm); charter visible on one side only, with dealer's prospectus on back. The seal of Nicholas Basset is still attached; made of green wax (ca. 5 cm diameter) in near fine condition, pendant on blue-green cords; bearing the device of a knight in armor galloping on horseback with the legend “SIGILL NICHOLLI BASSAT”; covered by a little textile seal bag threaded over the cords., First initial “O” is slightly enlarged and embellished., Fourteenth-century English grant by Nicholas Basset, Lord of Tretone, to the monks of the Cistercian abbey of Garendon, of a place in “Brueria Treton” to build a monastery and to serve God and St. Mary there and to live according to the Rule of St. Benedict, together with a mill and various named lands, for the salvation of his soul and those of his parents and of all the faithful people, with the names of 12 witnesses. Includes medieval endorsements: “Nichs. Basset de fundacione.”, English cursive documentary script, and Produced at Bruern Abbey within Oxfordshire, England around 1300. This foundation charter was issued after the actual foundation of the abbey. The Cistercian Abbey of Bruern (Cottineau 1:517) was founded by Nicholas Basset on 10 July 1147, originally as a cell of Garendon Abbey (Cottineau 1:1254) in Leicestershire. By the end of the thirteenth century circumstances at the abbey -- presumably financial -- required the creation of another charter. The present charter would have been viewed as a posthumous grant by the late founder. The wording of the text reads like a twelfth-century document but the script is late thirteenth or early fourteenth. The monks have accorded themselves more generous land provisions than the founder had actually done. The seal appears authentic and either was unthreaded and reattached from a twelfth-century original or the monks still had the matrix. Even if it was known to be 150 years too recent to be genuine, it would have been acknowledged as the actual foundation charter. Bruern Abbey was suppressed in 1536. Purchased by Waldo Library from Mackus Company, Fairlawn Ohio, on May 2003.
- Data Provider:
- Western Michigan University. Libraries