The Metham Family Cartulary: Reconstructed from Antiquarian Transcripts

The Methams were once a leading gentry family of Yorkshire, whose origins can be traced to a member of the twelfth-century minster community of Howden. By 1405 the family had reached a peak of its influence, with great estates spread across the East Riding and Vale of York acquired through marriage, the rewards of office and also by exploiting the debt market. At that point Sir Alexander Metham commissioned a cartulary, a book in which to register the family’s deeds and other documents, of which there were once well over a thousand. The cartulary survived till around 1680 and carried with it a large part of the history of the East Riding. But then it disappeared, though not before it had attracted the attention of two great Yorkshire antiquaries, Dr Nathaniel Johnston and James Torre. Their transcripts from this lost volume allow a reconstruction of over 700 items of its former contents, and with it open a new window on Yorkshire in the middle ages. The edition offers in addition a new biography of Torre and a key to the decoding of Johnston’s notorious handwriting, which has frustrated and defeated scholars for over two centuries.