Original documents.
By the kind permission of C. Winston, Esq., I am enabled to bring before the readers of this Journal a copy of an original document, belonging to C. J. Pocock, Esq., of Bristol, which exhibits a remarkable instance of the use made of the terrors of excommunication in the thirteenth century. All are familiar with the employment of this instrument on many important occasions, and also as an ordinary means of enforcing obedience to the decrees of the ecclesiastical authorities; but to find it introduced by express stipulation as a sort of penalty into a private transaction of inconsiderable moment, is I think sufficiently rare to deserve notice in the Archæological Journal.
Hawisia de Wygornia (i.e. of Worcester) was the wife of Peter de Wygornia, and in all probability resided at Bristol in their stone house near All Saints church-yard or cemetery, at the date of this document, the feast of St. Edmund the king, 1254. She appears to have been desirous of confirming a grant that had been made by her husband to Richard de Calna (Calne in Wiltshire) of a piece of land near that church-yard or cemetery, in which both she and her husband were interested: most likely it was her inheritance, and she and her husband held it in her right. To have effected such a confirmation in the then state of the law of this country, either her husband must have joined with her in a species of conveyance called a fine, which at that time had not very long been employed for such purposes, and was in fact a compromise, with the consent of the court, of a suit against the husband and wife, commonly fictitious, by acknowledging the land the subject of the suit to be the property of the plaintiff, who was in reality the person to whom it was intended to be conveyed; or, if a custom existed at Bristol similar to what there was in many cities and towns, a remnant perhaps of Anglo-Saxon law, her husband and herself might have accomplished the same object by a deed acknowledged by them before the mayor or other proper officer for that purpose, whoso duty it would have been to
