The community of the realm in Scotland, 1249–1424
History, law and charters in a recreated kingdom

In my previous post, I explained that many of the charter texts surviving only in charter rolls and printed in the Register of the Great Seal (RMS) were not edited or explicitly listed by Archie Duncan in the main body of his edition of Robert I’s acts (RRS, v). Instead, one was left to glean the existence of these other rolls texts from the tables he printed at the back of the volume. Getting one’s head round the texts enrolled in the single surviving intact charter roll, ‘Roll IV’, is fairly straightforward. However, Duncan’s tables point out the fact that there once were some 20 additional rolls and one book recording charters of Robert I’s reign. We know of their contents due to indexes made in the early 17th century, when antiquarians made copies of some of the documents therein. These are printed in Appendix 1 to the 1914 edition of RMS, i.

The tables shown below list all 108 acts of Robert I printed in RMS, i, Appendix 1 (also known as ‘Ra’). The numbers run to 110 because there are a single charter each of David I and William I. Table 1 shows the documents from these fragmentary transcripts of lost rolls which have already been entered into the PoMS database as of 17 September 2018. There are two reasons why these documents were entered in the normal process of working through Robert’s acts. The first is that the charter had a date, and Duncan entered a short note of the act in the chronological course of his edition. The second is that the full text of the act has survived either as an original or other copy, and that this full text was printed in RRS, v, in the numbered sequence. 66 of these texts have been entered into the PoMS database, under the H-number displayed in the rightmost column. The table also gives which roll the text was copied from, and where in the sequence of the entire rolls it fell, by way of its index number.

Table 2, below, lists the remaining acts of Robert I which were not printed by Duncan or noted in the chronological sequence. These have not been entered into PoMS, as of 17 Sept. 2018. There are 36 of these texts. As the table shows, a handful of these were noted as lost acts by Duncan.

As of 22 Nov. 2018, one hundred additional texts of acts of King Robert I have now been calendared and added to the People of Medieval Scotland database.

Seventy additional texts were printed from the sole surviving charter roll of Robert I, printed in the main body of RMS, 1. Thirty additional texts were added from the documents printed in appendix one of RMS.