Charters & chanceries

A charter is a formal legal document -- a grant of land, a privilege, a settlement -- and medieval Europe generated them by the tens of thousands through royal and papal chanceries, the administrative offices that drafted and issued official documents, and through monastic archives. This page gathers the large modern databases that catalogue them systematically: DEEDS (Documents of Early England Data Set), the eSawyer catalogue of Anglo-Saxon charters, published cartularies -- bound registers copying out an institution's own charters -- papal and royal registers, and the censuses scholars have built specifically to flag forgeries.

Charters record dates, places, and named parties at a scale few other medieval sources match, which makes them a natural fit for testing claims about medieval institutions as economic and logistical systems. The Champagne schedule and Hanseatic Shapley values both look for the fingerprints of coordinated commercial scheduling -- a trade-fair calendar, a merchant league's internal bargaining power -- inside charter series. Domesday horsepower reads Domesday Book's own survey data as evidence about the working capacity of a medieval estate, treating the charter record as a productivity instrument rather than only a legal one.