The Ridale Papal Letters and Royal Charter: A Twelfth-Century Anglo-Scottish Baronial Family, the Papacy, the Law and Charter Diplomatic

Abstract

THREE original papal letters issued between 1156 and 1176 for the Ridale family concerning lands in Scotland and the North Riding of Yorkshire survive among the manuscripts of their descendants, the Riddells of Whitefield, Hepple, Northumberland.1 The letters were well-known in the nineteenth century but they have been little studied since despite being among the earliest extant papal letters for a twelfth-century baronial family (indeed, the only Scottish examples) and, as a set of such documents, extraordinarily rare.2 As late as the 1820s, the Riddells also still held a King David I of Scotland charter granting Walter de Ridale land in Lilliesleaf and elsewhere in Teviotdale, Roxburghshire (1145×1153).3 It is now lost, but its text contains the earliest Scottish royal warrandice clause and one of the earliest Scottish references to tenure for a specified amount of knight service.4 Pope Adrian IV issued the first papal letter in 1156 for Walter’s brother Ansketill, confirming his possessions and especially Walter’s bequest to him by his testamentum of the Scottish estates. Such a bequest of land held by knight service to a secular beneficiary is another rarity.5 Ansketill was also given the right to appeal to the papacy if his property was disturbed. Pope Alexander III confirmed Adrian IV’s letter in 1165, incorporating additionally land in Brawby in the North Riding of Yorkshire, and confirming an early example of a judicial settlement negotiated before a Scottish king, Malcolm IV, between Ansketill and Uchtred the priest of Lilliesleaf (itself now lost, but apparently extant c.1705).6 Between 1166 and 1176, Alexander III confirmed the same estates to ‘W’. de Ridale, Ansketill’s son, noted that Brawby was held from Hexham priory, and added an estate in Berwickshire.7