Foundation Charter of Cluny

The charter was drawn up at Bourges and written, its last line says, by a deacon named Oddo acting for the chancellor. Bruel printed it from the original, or a contemporary copy, now in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. A fourteenth-century copy heads it “the testament of William the Pious” and notes that it shows the monks of Cluny to be exempt from their foundation.

It is a legal act and speaks in the donor’s voice: why he gives, what he gives, on what conditions, and what curses fall on anyone who breaks them. It says nothing of how the house was actually settled. The dating clause gives the day, the regnal year of King Charles and the indiction, but no year of the Incarnation; see the dating note of the Founding of Cluny.