Notaries in Medieval and Early Modern Ireland

In June of 2023, I arranged to meet my friend and fellow historian Caoimhe Whelan for a short breakfast during one of my rare trips to Ireland. I had given the rest of the day over to research, a concession of one day in what was supposed to be a family holiday. At breakfast, Caoimhe introduced me to Stuart Kinsella, Christ Church Cathedral’s Research Advisor; he was chasing down the scribes and notaries of the Cathedral’s later medieval manuscripts, and had run across a few pages at the back of my dissertation – an appendix cataloguing all of the notaries I had found in the process of investigating the life and career of Anglo-Irish author and notary James Yonge. In introducing me to Stuart, Caoimhe inadvertently cancelled my vacation. Breakfast was consumed. We talked. We ordered coffee. Stuart got out his carefully compiled list of notaries. We talked some more. Soon we were ordering lunch. We compared images, debated the merits of early 20th-century drawings of documents lost in a catastrophic 1922 fire a half mile from where we sat, and began making plans. By the end of the morning, we had explored several possibilities for a project far wider than my study of James Yonge or Stuart’s study of Christ Church scribes and notaries. Every spare moment I could get for the rest of my time in Ireland was given over to notaries. (Caoimhe would go on to destroy my summer holidays the following year with a grainy image of a notarial signum taken at Sarah Graham’s lecture at Leeds, but that is a tale for another time.)

            Notaries were specialized legal scribes used principally by the ecclesiastical courts to record proceedings and produce official documents. Notaries could be found in every corner of medieval and early modern Europe, and were particularly prevalent on the Italian and Iberian peninsulas where they also played a role in civil courts. In England and English-controlled Ireland, English civil law did not provide for notaries, and as a result they were far fewer in number. Notaries found their way, however, into civil procedures, particularly in cases where an official witness was needed. Notaries not associated with the church were paid by laypeople to produce documents that might be helpful in future cases in the ecclesiastical courts, particularly those regarding marriage or legitimacy.[1] In Anglo-Ireland, these specialized scribes also created new, authenticated copies of documents that had become faded or damaged. Notaries also served as official witnesses in disputes, creating documents functioning similarly to a sworn deposition; their instruments record in a matter-of-fact way dramatic moments in the lives of ordinary people. For instance, a 1406 instrument of James Yonge records that Robert Burnell wanted John Lytill to place his seal on some documents; Lytill refused, and Burnell responded by seizing Lytill in a Dublin street and holding him hostage until he acquiesced.[2] Another instrument by Thomas Baghill records an attempt to interfere in a will. On his deathbed, William Moenes was approached by his brother, Robert, who attempted to claim William’s property, despite the objections of William himself, who even in his extremity protested that he wished his property to go to his uncle’s daughters.[3] Both of these instruments were probably intended for later use in civil cases regarding the disposition of property.

            Notarial instruments are most easily identified by their signa. Each notary developed his own unique signum manuale, a pen-and-ink drawing that he used to authenticate the documents he created. These frequently looked like altar crosses. During the Tudor period, notarial signa became panels of knotwork.

Signum manuale of William Walch (fl. 1525-1538) on a document created in 1525 in the Waterford area and now housed at the National Library of Ireland, D.2129. Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Once developed, a notary’s signum remained fixed; he would use the same signum for the rest of his career. On an instrument, the signum manuale is also accompanied by an eschatocol, a formulaic attestation that the notary has heard and witnessed what is recorded in the document and that the contents are true to the best of the notary’s knowledge. Eschatocols frequently begin with an E that can be quite plain or highly ornamented, depending on the notary. Again, notaries’ Es tended to remain somewhat fixed. The signum and eschatocol provide a key to identifying a notary’s handwriting in other contexts. For instance, James Yonge was also the scribe of over one hundred surviving documents, signed and unsigned. Notary William Somerwell, who worked for the archbishops of Armagh, was also one of the principal contributors to the registers of archbishops Nicholas Fleming (1404-1416), John Swayne (1418-1439), John Prene (1449-1453), and John Mey (1443-1456).

Signum manuale of William Somerwell (fl.1422-1459), on a document bound into the Registrum Iohannis Mey, PRONI DIO 4/2/6, Book 3, fol. 393, reproduced by permission of the Deputy Keeper of Records, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI).

Signa have also been instrumental in identifying groups of notaries. For instance, James Yonge’s student Thomas Baghill borrowed portions of his master’s signum when developing his own.[4]

Signum manuale of James Yonge (fl. 1404-1438), deeds of the Guild of St. Anne, Royal Irish Academy 12.S.22–31, no. 343 (12 December 1432). By permission of the Royal Irish Academy © RIA.
Signum manuale of Thomas Baghill (fl.1419-1439). Note Baghill’s imitation of Yonge’s cross outline. Deeds of the Guild of St. Anne, Royal Irish Academy 12.S.22-31, no. 253 (27 January 1431). By permission of the Royal Irish Academy © RIA.

We’ve also discovered signa in contexts outside of notarial instruments. Of particular note is the signum of an as-yet-unidentified notary in the margins of a Hiberno English translation of Gerald of Wales’ Expugnatio Hibernica.[5]

Our survey of Anglo-Irish notaries is still in its infancy, and we are seeking sources of funding. We are currently trying to document as many notaries from medieval and early modern Ireland as possible as an entry into a larger exploration of notaries’ training, scribal networks, and documents. We hope to create a searchable online database of notarial marks and scribal hands for Ireland as a starting point for a more extensive resource cataloging the marks of medieval and early modern notaries of the British Isles. We would also love to see a future collaborative database of European notaries.

            Ian Doyle once wrote of palaeography that “the jigsaw puzzle we are all working on is so big that it may need the help of every eye to try to fit a piece in it.”[6] We believe the same is true of medieval and early modern notaries. This is where you, dear reader, come in. We heartily invite researchers in any area of medieval and early modern Europe to let us know about any notaries or notarial signa you encounter in your own research. The project’s email address is notarius.ie@gmail.com. We welcome your comments and contributions!

Theresa O’Byrne

Associate Researcher, Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland

Latin and history instructor, Delbarton School


[1] C.R. Cheney, Notaries Public in England in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, p. 56; Patrick Zutshi, “Notaries Public in England in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Historia, Instituciones, Documentos 23 (1996), pp. 421-33, at p. 426.

[2] Trinity College Dublin MS 1477, no. 69, 16 March 1406.

[3] Royal Irish Academy 12.S.22-31, no. 826, 17 April 1434.

[4] Theresa O’Byrne, “Notarial Signs and Scribal Training in the Fifteenth Century: The Case of James Yonge and Thomas Baghill,” Journal of the Early Book Society 15 (2012): 305–18.

[5] Trinity College Dublin MS 592, fol. 6v.

[6] A.I. Doyle, ‘Retrospect and Prospect’, in Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 142–6 (pp. 145–6).

From Chequered Board to Medievalist Commons: The Medieval Studies Research Blog Turns Ten!

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the University of Notre Dame‘s Medieval Institute‘s Medieval Studies Research Blog—a benchmark and milestone—which warrants both celebration and reflection on the evolution of the project, especially certain important actors and pivotal moments that have shaped the academic blog into an accessible resource for so many scholars and medievalist as well as general and public audiences.

Image from the Medieval Studies Research Blog. Header Image: John Mandeville writing his travelogue. This image comes from a unique, Bohemian picture book version of the Voyage d’outer merLondon, British Library MS Additional 24189, fol. 4. Screen shot by Richard Fahey (2024).

The project was conceived by Dr. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, now an Professor Emerita of English and Medieval Studies at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in the study of Middle English manuscript studies. Kerby-Fulton intuited that an academic blog could become an asset to the medieval institute, and so she brought together a team of graduate students to whom she pitched her academic blog project. Kerby-Fulton, in her wisdom and generosity, leaned on the next generation of scholars to get her project off the ground. Although she was the founder, the project, then called the Chequered Board, has always endeavored to support and lift up students and junior scholars. She envisioned the academic blog as both a forum for public medievalism, a space for academics engaging directly with general readers and a public audience, but also as a serious online, open-access resource for specialists in the field.

Dr. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Emerita Professor of Middle English and Manuscript Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Photo by Matt Cashore (2006).

Many of the earliest blogs in fact, came from assignments in her graduate classes, asking students to reflect and analyze aspects of Middle English manuscripts and their intricacies and peculiarities. Dr. Kerby-Fulton had long recognized certain parallels between modern websites and medieval manuscripts, characteristics that print culture often passed by, including marginalia and visual formatting, as well as their respective function as multimedia objects, especially the interplay between aesthetic (whether illustrations or illuminations) and textual elements in both websites and manuscripts. Just as websites frequently feature a combination of texts, images and paratexts, so too do medieval manuscripts, and this affinity is at the heart of Kerby-Fulton’s vision for the project.

Indeed, my first-ever blog “Bobbing for Answer” discusses the Bob and Wheel in the manuscript containing Gawain and the Green Knight, and builds on Kerby-Fulton’s own work in her foundational text, Opening Up Medieval Manuscripts. My blog explores possible ways in which this poetic feature could offer semantic options and performative opportunities for readers of the poem in its manuscript context. These graduate student blogs, however, were just the beginning of the project.

Images of Arthur, Guinevere, Gawain & the decapitated Green Knight in British Library, Cotton Nero MS a.x f.94v.

Dr. Kerby-Fulton then organized a team of medievalist graduate students to conceive of possible directions and special series, as well as to help her run the blog project (then known as the Chequered Board). From project’s inception, she encouraged students take the reins and shape what would become the University of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute’s Medieval Studies Research Blog into the active resource that it is today, open to academics of all levels from graduate students to senior scholars.

In order for the project to run efficiently, a blog manager was selected from the team, Dr. Nicole Eddy, who had previously worked for the British Library and had headed up their medieval manuscript blog, so she was familiar with the online genre and brought a wealth of knowledge and experience to the project. After her foundational role in establishing the blog and getting the project off the ground, blog management passed to Dr. Andrew Klein who continued the work. Once Dr. Klein left for his current position, the role of blog manager was handed off to Dr. Karrie Fuller. It was around this time that the project shifted from Dr. Kerby-Fulton’s personal research initiative to a project funded and overseen by the University of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute, which came with rebranding and the new name for the project, the Medieval Studies Research Blog, which remains its title today.

Dr. Nicole Eddy (left) and Dr. Andrew Klein (right). Dr. Eddy is currently Managing Editor at Dumbarton Oakes (image from Facebook post) and Klein is currently Associate Professor at St. Thomas University (image from faculty page).

All projects need funding and institutional support to survive, and without the steadfast championing of the Medieval Studies Research Blog by Dr. Kerby-Fulton and both the Medieval Institute Director, Dr. Thomas Burman, and the Associate Director of the Medieval Institute (and fellow contributor), Dr. Megan Hall, our beloved Medieval Studies Research Blog may not have endured. Instead, it thrived and continued evolving into the valuable open access online academic resource it is today.

Dr. Megan Hall (left) and Dr. Thomas Burman, Associate Director and Director of the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame. Images taken from faculty page.

After a few years of managing the blog, Dr. Fuller passed the role to me, and it was at long last my turn to take the helm of the project  Although I had been a contributor and partner throughout the entirety of the project, I have served as blog manager has for the past five years, in which we’ve seen the project continue to expand and transform to meet the diverse and ever-changing needs of the field. 

Dr. Karrie Fuller, currently Blog Manager at AptAmigo (image from LinkedIn) and Dr. Richard Fahey, currently Blog Manager at the Medieval Studies Research Blog, in addition to other academic and editorial positions (image from faculty page).

At the Medieval Studies Research Blog, we are blessed to have our regular contributors (currently including Dr. Linnet Heald, Dr. Nick Kamas, and Dr. Charles Yost, all graduates of the Medieval Institute) in addition to guest and alumni contributors. The work of many junior scholars affiliated with the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame has fostered the growth of our project, which has since received attention from departments of education, scholars, enthusiasts, fellow bloggers and even the occasional author of fiction. 

I would like also to cast a spotlight on some of the projects and special series, which in addition to the many excellent blog posts featured on the Medieval Studies Research Blog, have helped shape the project. Some of these projects include: The Medieval Poetry Project and A Scientific Analysis of the Pearl-Gawain Manuscript. New projects are rolling out in force this year, such as the Medieval Homily Project and Medieval Fable Project, while older special series, such as Working in the Archives, continue to prove a resource for young scholars in the field. And now, the MSRB now also features transcripts and reflections on its sister-project, the Meeting in the Middle Ages podcast spearheaded by William Beattie and Ben Pykare. Having a somewhat unique perspective—a kind of bird’s eye view—serving in various roles at the Medieval Studies Research Blog, I’ve had the privilege of advancing the project and watching as it has continued to gain traction and momentum in the field, and I am so excited to see where the next ten years take us, and what is in store for the MSRB.

Most of all, on this 10th anniversary of the Medieval Studies Research Blog, we at Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute want to thank you—our readers—for being so interested and invested in this public medievalism project, and for helping us sustain our viewership. Here’s to another successful year and continued growth and expansion of the Medieval Studies Research Blog.

Stay tuned for a forthcoming Meeting in the Middle Ages podcast interviewing the four blog managers of the Medieval Studies Research Blog, coming this spring!

Richard Fahey, Ph.D.
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

Ivo of Chartes, De adventu Domini (On the Advent of the Lord)

Born around 1040, Ivo of Chartres is primarily known to modern scholarship as a canonist, and he is occasionally recognized as a prolific writer of letters, but relatively little regard has been given  to his surviving collection of homilies [1]. This scholarly neglect has been most keenly demonstrated by the absence of critical editions of the sermons, despite the call of Roger Reynolds over thirty years ago, with the overall effect of reducing the quality of academic discourse on one of the more prominent liturgists of the period of the Investiture Controversy [2].

Cambridge, Corpus Christi, Parker Library 289. Ivo of Chartres, Sermo de sacramentis neophitorum, here ascribed to Hugh of St. Victor. Images courtesy of The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. 

The text most commonly cited in scholarly literature, and the one used in my translation of this homily, is that published by Jacques Paul Migne in Patrologia Latina vol. 162, which is in turn based on previous editions by Fronteau and Hittorp. Although I was not able to consult them within the scope of this project, more than seventy manuscripts survive that contain some or all of the homilies included in the Migne edition. The most important would be Chartres, Bibliothèque Municipal 138, which formerly belonged to Chartres Cathedral, but it was heavily damaged in the Allied bombing of the city during the Second World War and is now largely unreadable. The remaining manuscripts are distributed broadly across Western Europe, with large concentrations in the British Museum, various colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the Vatican. A surprising number of the extant witnesses date to the twelfth century, suggesting that this collection became popular shortly after its creation. The collection as a whole, to the best of my knowledge, has never been translated into a modern language. This specific sermon, however, was partially translated in the late 1940s as part of a broader gathering of works from across the Patristic and Medieval homiletic tradition [3].

The homilies in Ivo’s collection fall broadly into two categories. The first, encompassing numbers 1–6 and 22–24, are essentially liturgical commentaries, offering detailed allegorical explorations of various rites (e.g., Sermo I, De sacramentis neophytorum), other incidental features (e.g., Sermo III, De significationibus indumentorum sacerdotium), or specific prayers (e.g., Sermo XXII, De Oratione Dominica) of the Church. The balance of the homilies are on the feasts of the church, beginning with Advent and working through the feasts of the Nativity, Circumcision, Epiphany,  Purification (Candlemas), and the Lenten and Paschal cycles. The audience for some or all of these homilies appears to have been an assembly of the local clergy of Chartres: many of the manuscripts add the phrase “in synodo habitus” (something like “considered in synod”) to the titles of some of the texts, and even in the text below Ivo addresses his audience as “Your Fraternity,” strongly suggesting, at least to me, that he was speaking to other clerics [4].

The text presented below is the first of the festal homilies and discusses Advent, or, as Ivo insists, both Advents of Christ. The entirety of the work maintains a parallel structure, contrasting the first Advent, i.e., the earthly ministry of Christ, with the second, during which Christ will return as judge. Throughout, an emphasis is placed on the redemptive and restorative work that has already been accomplished during the “hidden” Advent, which prepares his audience for the completion of salvation in the second, “manifest,” coming.

Nick Kamas
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

  1. The most comprehensive study of Ivo of Chartres is by Rolf Sprandel, Ivo von Chartres und seine Stellung in der Kirchengeschichte (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1962). His life is also occasionally discussed in other secondary literature, especially on Ivo as a canonist, e.g., Christof Rolker, Canon Law and the Letters of Ivo of Chartres (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
  2. Roger Reynolds, “Liturgical Scholarship at the Time of the Investiture Controversy: Past Research and Future Opportunities,” The Harvard Theological Review, 71 (1978): 109–124).
  3. Ray C. Petry, ed., No Uncertain Sound, Sermons that Shaped the Pulpit Tradition, (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1948), 140–142.
  4. Credit belongs to Margot Fassler for suggesting the setting for these homilies, The Virgin of Chartres (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 136.