The Darley Abbey Archive, 85 documents on parchment [England, 1160s to late fourteenth century]

The Darley Abbey Archive, a vast collection of 85 documents from the Augustinian Abbey of St. Mary, Darley, Derbyshire, all in Latin with some Middle English placenames, single sheet manuscripts on parchment[England (Darley, Derbyshire), 1160s to late fourteenth century] 85 single sheet documents (including a list of debts and the will of William Marshall of Derby dated 1265, a record of alms given to a newly founded hospital of St. Helen in Derby by William de Voleta, from the early thirteenth century, and a terrier of the lands of the Abbey of Darley in Normanton by Derby, dated 1348 and 1386), in a variety of English secretarial hands, many with wax seals in wide variety of floral, animal and letter styles (seals of the abbey as well as the grantors or addressees), overall all in fair and presentable condition and affixed to individual paper surrounds with descriptions, these kept in three large nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century archival boxes; detailed listing of individual charters included with lot Provenance: 1. Augustinian Abbey of St. Mary, Darley, Derbyshire: founded initially in 1154 by Robert de Ferrers, 2nd Earl of Derby through a donation to St. Helen's Priory, but delayed until c. 1160 when Hugh, the rural dean of Derby donated suitable land at 'Little Darley' for the site of the actual monastery. It was a daughter house to St. Helen's Priory. It fared well and grew to be the largest and wealthiest abbey in Derbyshire, was valued at £72, 19sh. and 3 and a half d. in 1291. However, in the first half of the fourteenth century, due either to failed harvests and mortality of cattle or more scandalously the wanton selling off of its assets by the abbot, the abbey slipped into financial ruin. It was surrendered for dissolution on 22 October 1538, and the abbey and its buildings sold to one "Mr. Robt. Sacheverell, gent.". they were subsequently almost completely demolished (with only the Abbey Inn, a local public house and a single local residence having any claim to be a standing part of the monastery). The archive along with the abbey's other goods and chattles entered private hands at the same time. 2. E.H. Dring (1863-1928; see also lot 56 above), acquired around 1910 or 1920; and passing by descent to his son E.M. Dring (1906-1990), sold after his death to Quaritch.3. Schøyen Collection, London and Oslo, their MS 1604; acquired from Quaritch, London in August 1992. Text:The early decline of this influential monastic house, so that it dwindled into insignificance almost a century before the Reformation, ensures that little survives of it. Only three books from its large library are now known (Bodleian, Auct. D infra 2.8; Laud gr.28; and e Museo 222; all twelfth or thirteenth century: N.R. Ker; Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, 1941, p. 34), and while a thirteenth-century medieval cartulary does survive and has been edited (British Library, Cotton MS Titus, C IX, wanting its opening leaves, augmented by a few additional charters in a transcript of a slim 22 page record of a late fourteenth-century cartulary in the hands of the master of Emanuel College, Cambridge, in 1780; R.R. Darlington, The Cartulary of Darley Abbey, Highgate, Kendal, 1945), that does not include some sixty-six of the charters in the present archive. These remain unstudied and unpublished and promise much for the future history of the abbey through its heyday and long into its slow collapse throughout the fourteenth century. The survival of this archive intact in private ownership is a remarkable event, due in some part to the collecting habits and interest of the Drings, and this may well be the last English monastic archive of this large size to appear on the open market.