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Nicholas Karn, The Cartulary of St Leonard’s Hospital, York: Rawlinson Volume, ed. David X. Carpenter, The English Historical Review, Volume 132, Issue 558, October 2017, Pages 1305–1306, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cex221
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Extract
St Leonard’s in York was one of the largest and wealthiest of the hospitals in medieval England, and its influence and repute spread across much of Yorkshire and the north. It is thus very welcome that a considerable part of its surviving records have now been put into print in a modern, accessible edition. The importance of the hospital means that the cartulary contains a great deal of information that will serve to illustrate the social, economic and cultural history of Yorkshire through the Middle Ages.
The hospital originally had three cartularies. One, concerning assets in the North Riding of Yorkshire and counties beyond Yorkshire, is not known to have survived; another, now British Library MS Cotton Nero D iii, includes general charters concerning the hospital and its administration, together with charters concerning assets in the City of York itself; while the third, now Bodleian MS Rawlinson B 455, concerns assets in the West Riding and the East Riding of Yorkshire. It is the latter volume alone that is edited here; the editor states his ambition to edit the Cotton volume at a future date and to provide a reconstruction of the missing volume (vol. i, p. xl), As well as the cartularies, full use has been made of supplementary sources, including Roger Dodsworth’s notes (also now in the Bodleian) which record the lost original charters of the hospital, as well as extents of the hospital’s lands, now preserved in the Lichfield Record Office (vol. ii, pp. 905–28).
