Grant by Richard Bowyer, prior of the Augustinian Priory of St. Thomas the Martyr, Baswich, Staffordshire, of land called Gardenscroft next to the priory's land, and other estates, to Edmund, Earl of Ferrars, in Latin, manuscript on parchment [England ('Chartley', probably Stowe-by-Chartley, near Baswich, Staffordshire), dated 10 December 1433]

Single-sheet document, with 14 long lines in English secretarial script, indentured at head, in outstandingly fresh condition, 159+23 by 275mm., seal tags present with red wax seal of the abbey in pointed oval form showing the priory with an enthroned St. Thomas Becket (compare British Museum seal cast lxxii.41, and that attached to British Library E 329/373 dated 1433), the present one in excellent condition: chipped at edges, but not cracked

Provenance:
1. Written for the Augustinian Priory of St. Thomas Martyr, Baswich. The house was founded in 1174 by canons from Darley Abbey in Derbyshire, only one year after the canonisation of its dedicatory saint, Thomas Becket. It received royal patronage in the 1240s and following that came under the protection of the Earls of Ferrers, but the wealth and popularity of the house began to crumble from 1400 onwards and few records survive of the final century of its existence (however, a manuscript codex of Augustinian Observances from the house survives in Cambridge University Library, Add. MS. 3572). The house was dissolved in 1538.

2. June O'Donnell (d. 1979) of Guilford, who also owned the Orcadian charters sold in our rooms, 8 July 2020, lot 79, and the English Book of Hours with a particularly dark and menacing Middle English rhyming anathema sold in our rooms, 7 December 2020, lot 66.

3. Alan G. Thomas (1911-92), London bookseller (and here with his signed cataloguing); his posthumous sale in Sotheby's, 21 June 1993, lot 11 (part 11), to Martin Schøyen (his MS. 1675/10) and thereafter kept in his London library.

Text:
A truncated version of the text here was published from a now-lost copy of the charter that was once part of Phillipps MS. 7910 (see F. Parker, 'A Chartulary of the Priory of St Thomas ... Stafford' in Coll. Hist. Staffs, 8:1, 1887, p. 188), but until now the full text has not been known.