Definition
Charter Rolls are a series of official English royal records — preserved on parchment rolls — containing royal charters granted from the reign of King John (1199) through the reign of Henry VIII (1516). They constitute one of the primary classes of medieval English public records and are housed in what is now The National Archives at Kew.
The Charter Rolls recorded formal grants made by the Crown, including:
- Grants of privileges, liberties, and franchises to cities, towns, and boroughs
- Grants to bodies corporate and private trading companies
- Grants of markets, fairs, and free warrens
- Creations of nobility
- Grants of privileges and protections to religious houses and monasteries
Each entry on the rolls represents a charter — an instrument of royal grant — that had been engrossed (formally written out) and preserved as the permanent Crown record of that transaction. The rolls are arranged chronologically by regnal year.
After 1516, the function of recording royal grants largely shifted to other classes of record, principally the Patent Rolls, which had run concurrently with the Charter Rolls since the reign of King John.
Common Confusion
CHARTER ROLLS should not be confused with CHARTER in its modern commercial or admiralty sense (a contract for hire of a vessel or aircraft), nor with CHARTER PARTY, the instrument governing such arrangements. The word "charter" in Charter Rolls refers specifically to the medieval Latin carta — a formal written grant of rights from a superior to an inferior — and carries none of the contractual freight of its modern commercial descendant. Researchers encountering "charter" in historical English legal sources must determine from context whether a royal grant instrument or a commercial hire arrangement is meant.
Charter Rolls are also distinct from other classes of early English rolls. The PATENT ROLLS record letters patent (open letters) granting rights, offices, and pardons; the CLOSE ROLLS record letters close (sealed, addressed to specific recipients); the FINE ROLLS record payments made to the Crown for various grants. Charter Rolls record the most solemn form of royal grant — the charter — distinguished from letters patent by greater formality and, typically, greater permanence of the rights conveyed.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in English legal history, property law, ecclesiastical law, or the history of municipal corporations will encounter Charter Rolls as primary source material for establishing the origin of franchises, liberties, and corporate privileges that persisted for centuries.
Several research traps are worth flagging:
First, the rolls themselves end in 1516, but the rights and privileges they record did not end there. A borough charter enrolled in 1300 might still be litigated in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Researchers tracing the legal authority of municipal corporations or ancient markets will need to start here and follow the chain forward through subsequent confirmatory grants and litigation.
Second, the Charter Rolls have been calendared — that is, summarized in English and indexed — by the Public Record Office in the Calendar of Charter Rolls (6 volumes, covering 1226–1516). The calendars are reliable navigational tools but are summaries, not transcripts. For evidentiary or textual purposes, the original Latin rolls or the printed facsimile editions must be consulted.
Third, not all royal grants from this period appear on the Charter Rolls. Grants of lesser formality might appear only on the Patent Rolls, and some transactions appear on both. A search limited to Charter Rolls alone may miss relevant grants. Cross-checking with Patent Rolls and Fine Rolls is standard practice for serious historical research.
Fourth, in English legal proceedings into the modern period, the Charter Rolls carried evidentiary weight as public records. Hubback's Evidence of Succession (cited by Burrill) treats them as authoritative evidence in succession and inheritance disputes involving ancient grants — a reminder that these rolls were not merely antiquarian documents but live legal instruments well into the nineteenth century.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical law dictionaries are in close agreement on the core definition. Bouvier and Burrill give nearly identical formulations: rolls preserved among the ancient English records, containing royal charters from 1199 to 1516, comprising grants to cities, towns, corporate bodies, trading companies, markets, fairs, free warrens, creations of nobility, and religious houses. Black's is characteristically spare, adding nothing beyond the dates and the word "ancient."
Burrill's citation to Hubback's Evidence of Succession is the most practically useful signal in any of these entries — it points researchers toward the evidentiary function of Charter Rolls in inheritance and succession litigation, a dimension the other dictionaries omit entirely.
None of the historical dictionaries address the relationship between Charter Rolls and the concurrent Patent Rolls, the cessation of the Charter Roll series in 1516, or the existence of the printed calendars that make the rolls accessible. These are significant gaps for any researcher who needs to actually use the records rather than simply understand the term.
The Bouvier entry for Charter Rolls is immediately followed in the source text by the unrelated term CHARTIS REDDENDIS, and the preceding Bouvier passage about vessel tonnage, captains, and demurrage is from the Charter Party entry — an artifact of alphabetical arrangement in the original dictionary, not a substantive connection to Charter Rolls.
Jurisdictional Note
Charter Rolls are exclusively an English record series with no direct counterpart in Scottish, Irish, or colonial American law. However, because many early American colonial grants and corporate charters derived legal authority from English royal charters — some of which are recorded in the Patent Rolls rather than Charter Rolls — researchers in early American legal history may need familiarity with the broader family of English royal record series.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Not applicable. The matching encyclopedia entries (Charter Parties in admiralty law; Charter Schools in administrative law) concern unrelated uses of the word "charter" and would mislead rather than assist the researcher.