Over the course of his career, Richard Britnell has frequently used charter evidence to document major attributes of the economy and society of medieval England. One thinks immediately of his pioneering use of royal market charters to illustrate the spread of commercialisation, but other examples also come to mind, such as the role charters played in creating the trust in public norms and rules that underpinned economic growth in the period and the way in which charter use facilitated pragmatic literacy. His work has demonstrated the value of looking at the medieval economy as something embedded within a larger social and political framework, such that changes in law or administrative procedures could have significant repercussions on economic activity and vice versa.

This essay on the use of charters in medieval England is offered in the same spirit. One of the primary manifestations of the entrepreneurial spirit of the period involved the commoditising of land and the formation of an increasingly active land market. Beginning in the later twelfth century, people came increasingly to treat land as an economic asset rather than as a static source of consumption and marker of status. A host of other changes happened in conjunction with this development. Some were principally economic, such as rising monetisation and an increasing emphasis on producing commodities for sale. Others involved law and politics, such as the introduction and subsequent expansion of the possessory assizes and the use of ‘feet of fines’ to record land transactions in royal court records.