Forged charter of Abbey of St. Vincent, manuscript in French on parchment [France, 16th century]

Agreement between Jacques Praillon, abbot of St. Vincent of Metz, with Bertignon Paillas, for the abbey to receive all rents and rights from the latter in the town of Domangeville and the neighbourhood of the Abbey of St. Vincent, manuscript document in French on parchment[France (Metz), dated February 1294, but in fact sixteenth century] Single sheet document, 12 long lines in secretarial script, endorsements at foot, folds and slight discolouration, seventeenth- or eighteenth-century endorsements on reverse, else in good condition, 150 by 340mm.; in fitted red-cloth covered case Provenance: 1. Most probably written in the sixteenth century for the archive of the Abbey of St. Vincent in Metz (see below). The house was founded in the tenth century, and forcibly closed at the time of the French Revolution when the thirteenth-century abbey church became the local parish church and its goods and archives scattered.2. Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872), but unnumbered like many charters and fragments from this collection: his smudged pencil description on reverse; most probably bought while on the Continent in the 1820s, and perhaps acquired alongside part of the manuscripts of Gerard Meermann (1722-1771) from the Jesuit Collège de Clermont in 1824, as several known codices from that provenance can now be shown to have been once in the medieval library of St. Vincent; sold after Phillipps' death by his heirs to the Robinson Bros. of 16-17 Pall Mall.3. Passing as part of the unsold residue of that collection to H.P. Kraus of New York in 1978: his sale description included.4. Schøyen Collection, London and Oslo, their MS 1003, acquired from Kraus in March 1991. Script:Here the script is of the greatest importance, as this charter is clearly dated 1294 ("Lan de graice nostre Signor M.CC. quatre vins et quatorze ans"), yet the script cannot be before the sixteenth century. The presence of the signatures of the parties involved in apparently different hands, suggests this was not a fair copy of an older original charter that had become damaged. The document is perhaps a forgery, created in the abbey in the sixteenth century to support their claim to these rents and rights in a legal dispute.