Medieval Forgeries, Part 1

Everything written is written for a reason. That reason could be to persuade, to entertain, to outrage—authors always have a purpose. Sometimes that purpose is to convince the reader of something that is simply not true.

The Making of Medieval Forgeries: False Documents in Fifteenth-century England (by Alfred Hiatt, 2004), in an overview of forgeries starting in 1066, points out that we have 208 documents from the time of William the Conqueror, but 62 were produced in the 12th century, not the 11th. Their legitimacy cannot be proven by what we know of his reign. Hiatt also relays, in the same chapter, the story of the falsarius ("falsifier") Guerno, a monk from Saint-Médard in Soissons, whose deathbed confession admitted to numerous forgeries to supplement archives in both England and on the continent.

Papal documents at Canterbury that establish the primacy of Canterbury's archbishop over the archbishop of York have been theorized (without sufficient argument to the contrary; link) to be produced by Lanfranc himself, a man who otherwise has a spotless reputation.

Forgeries could be used to assert authority, as in the Canterbury case. They could also be used to legitimize claims in court, such as when inheriting estates; to secure land rights or gain tax exemptions from the king; or even to rewrite history to avoid blame or to attribute greater glory to someone.

Forgeries can be detected by anachronisms, expressing themselves in grammatical ways or with words or references that only occurred at a later date. They could have internal inconsistencies that are easily refuted by known established facts or events. Sometimes, they are just so out of place that there is no reason to believe that they are true.

Abbeys and monasteries often produced documents on their own to convince someone that they had land rights, or independence from secular bishops or other authorities. The Abbey of Saint-Denis used many forged documents to assert its independence from the bishop of Paris. They were very clever about it, too. Tomorrow I'll tell you what techniques they used to make their documents appear authentic.