charters

At first glance, charters seem to be nothing more than obscure and boring legal documents, as dull in the Middle Ages as they are today. On closer examination however, there is much more to charters than stiff, dry records of medieval legalese. We can learn much about local, social history, as well as the wider political machinations of history from these documents, details left out of more narrative-style documents like chronicles and annals. But what is most interesting about medieval charters, and perhaps most surprising, is that a large number of the surviving documents are actually forgeries. The Middle Ages has been called the “golden age” of document forgery and many of these fake charters are so expertly crafted that