Historians have long used the archives of major institutions to shed light on medieval society, but in more recent decades the focus has turned towards the proliferation of legal documentation possessed by those lower down the social order and the increasing penetration of legal processes into their everyday lives. Yet, in recapturing this world, there is a danger that we take for granted the immense documentary power of a large institutional repository. This article follows several legal conflicts across the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries involving the monks of Durham Priory to demonstrate the extent of this archival culture, showing how they turned to their vast array of documentary evidence for information about those who had incurred their wrath. Using their archives, they traced the descent of holdings, the offices held by key individuals, and previous payments in account rolls, all in a bid to demonstrate their rights, the ‘abuses’ of officials, and to counter legal opposition. Not content, the monks then compiled this evidence into an alternative narrative of events that questioned previous legal proceedings and ceremonies, constructing an institutional memory that saw contradictory documentation as ‘entirely most falsely forged’.

历史学家长期以来一直利用主要机构的档案来揭示中世纪社会，但近几十年来，焦点转向了社会底层人士所拥有的法律文献的激增以及法律程序日益渗透到他们的日常生活中。 。然而，在重新夺回这个世界的过程中，存在着一种危险，即我们认为大型机构存储库的巨大文献力量是理所当然的。本文追踪了十四世纪和十五世纪初涉及达勒姆修道院僧侣的几起法律冲突，以展示这种档案文化的范围，展示他们如何利用大量的书面证据来获取有关那些激怒他们的人的信息。他们利用自己的档案，追踪了资产的来源、关键人物担任的职务以及账簿中以前的付款，所有这些都是为了证明自己的权利、官员的“滥用职权”，并反击法律上的反对。僧侣们并不满足，他们随后将这些证据汇编成另一种事件叙述，质疑之前的法律程序和仪式，构建了一种机构记忆，将相互矛盾的文件视为“完全是最虚假的伪造”。