The seeds of modern bureaucracy? Charisma and routine in the charters and charter rolls of King Henry III

Kourris, Andrew (2024) The seeds of modern bureaucracy? Charisma and routine in the charters and charter rolls of King Henry III. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

This thesis represents an attempt to peek behind the veil of mystery that still shrouds the royal chancery: the writing office of the medieval kings of England. This office had many tasks, not all of them administrative, and it would take an entire career and several weighty volumes to tackle all that is waiting to be discovered. It has been a challenging task even to trace the output of one document type and its records across a single reign: the charters and charter rolls of King Henry III. To provide value for the reader, I have found it helpful to summarise and synthesise some pre-requisite secondary research before adding my primary contributions. First, the reader will find an explanation for my focus on medieval bureaucracy, the reign of Henry III, and the charter as a document. There will be an overview of some theoretical frameworks that help explain the sometimes-contradictory objectives of medieval bureaucracy. Next will follow a brief history of the charter and of the English royal chancery, covering ground from the Roman Republic to the eve of King Henry III’s accession. This concludes the introductory part of the thesis. The next section is intended to probe the secrets of the Henrician chancery by collating information from every recorded charter of Henry’s reign. Such information includes beneficiaries, witnesses, dates, and places of issue. Some categories, such as the days of the week on which charters were issued, help illuminate the chancery’s working practices, while others, such as lists of beneficiaries, help establish for whom King Henry’s charter-writing apparatus was chiefly working. The last section outlines the results of a palaeographical survey that I have conducted into the handwriting of King Henry III’s chancery scribes, providing hitherto unexplored data on staffing and working patterns. Some concluding remarks complete the thesis.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of History
Depositing User:	Zoe White
Date Deposited:	03 Apr 2025 12:16
Last Modified:	03 Apr 2025 12:16
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/98929
DOI:

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