Ar a General Meeting of the SURTEES SOCIETY held in

Durham Castle on Tuesday, June 4th, 1878, Mr. Fawcett in the Chair

It was ordered,

That the Guisbro' Chartulary should be edited for the Society by Mr. W. Brown.

JAMES RAINE,

Secretary.

Published for the Society

BY ANDREWS & CO., DURHAM;

WHITTAKER & CO., 2, WHITE HART ST., PATERNOSTER SQUARE;

BERNARD QUARITCH, 15, PICCADILLY;

BLACKWOOD & SONS, EDINBURGH.

1894. W

INTRODUCTION.

THE present volume contains the remaining portion of the Guisbrough Chartulary from the original in the British Museum (Cott. MSS. Cleop. D. ii), commencing at fo. 234. It extends with interpolations down to No. 1089, after which the documents printed are from different sources, chiefly the Dodsworth MSS., now in the Bodleian at Oxford, and the Archbishops' Registers at York.

The earlier portion of the Chartulary relates almost exclusively to property belonging to the Convent in the neighbourhood of Guisbrough. These documents are succeeded by the deeds concerning their other estates in the East and North Ridings, Lincolnshire, Cumberland, Durham, and Scotland. Except the Cumberland series, and a few others, none of these documents have ever appeared in print before.

The general character of the Chartulary is of the usual type, chiefly relating to grants of land, tithes, and advowsons. Considerable light is thrown on the topography and genealogy of the district by the evidence contained in the documents printed here. Local heraldry, too, receives valuable confirmation from the contemporary authority furnished by seals

attached to documents still existing or described in transcripts. The reader will find a list of all instances of this kind in the index, under the heading " Arms." The names of many places, which in their modern forms are unintelligible, here become pregnant with meaning. To take a couple of examples out of many. Fowgill in Ingleby Arncliff only sounds grotesque, but in its original form, Fulekelde, the full or possibly foul spring, the meaning is quite clear. Heselgrive in Marske is the griff or abrupt ravine overgrown with hazel shrubs, now Haselgrove, partly visible to the traveller on the sea-side of the railway shortly before arriving at Saltburn. Here the griff has been corrupted into grove, a word conveying an entirely wrong meaning. Skinningrove, formerly Scineregrive, is another instance of an almost similar change.

In a couple of instances the subject-matter of the gift calls for a few remarks. At Coatham, and there alone, although the Canons had property elsewhere on the sea-coast, they possessed salt-pans or saline. The natural conformation of the district explains their occurrence here. It is flat and marshy, as the names Coatham Marsh and Marsh House bear witness, and is also intersected by sluggish streams, admitting the sea-water some way up their course, so as to render the flooding of the salt-pans at high tide a matter of no difficulty. In only one case (No. 786) is the exact site of a salt-pan mentioned. Here a grant was made of а "salina in mariscis de Cotum cum areis et omnibus pert. suis," at the rent of a sceppa of salt a year. The salt seems to have been made by a process of evaporation,