How Land Should be Given

When King William I gave land in England as “a perpetual inheritance” to the Norman abbey of La Trinité du Mont in 1069, he made the gift by means of a knife, which he jokingly gave to the abbot as if he were going to stab him in the palm, saying, “This is the way land should be given.” This was not the usual way to give land, of course. But the story presupposed that there was a customary legal ceremony for doing so, which William would ordinarily have performed by placing the knife – which symbolized his gift – in the abbot’s hand. In any case, the king’s act was still represented by the scribe who recorded it in a charter as a clear sign that with many “nobiles” standing beside him as witnesses, he had given land to La Trinité. Using a staff rather than a knife, John Burnet performed a different version of the same ceremony sometime during the 1070s, when he made a deathbed gift to the Norman abbey of Saint-Martin de Sées. After the abbot came to his house and granted him the society and benefit of the abbey by handing him a staff, John and his brother Herbert first held the staff in their own hands and then gave a tithe to the abbey by handing the same staff back to the abbot, with many men of good judgment present to witness the ceremony.

It was also customary for donors of land to monasteries to make their gifts ceremonially by placing a knife, a charter, a book, or a glove on the patron saint’s altar. Here, at the right of the lower register of the illustration from the late twelfth-century cartulary of Mont-Saint-Michel (Fig. 58), a king gives land to the abbey by placing a glove on the altar of St-Michel, while witnesses stand behind him. Above, the king, now clad in the garb of a penitent, requests the society and benefit of the abbey, which, the image shows, he will receive from the saint through the abbot’s mediation. In Figure 59, which shows an image accompanying a charter, King Edgar is about to hand to Christ a book symbolizing the gift of land that the king made to the New Minster at Winchester in 966.