When Edward II's officers put together an inventory of the goods and chattels left by Roger Mortimer in his castle and the abbey of Wigmore after his rebellion in 1322, everything was catalogued down to bed linen, the cruets: even the peacock. Amongst this collection of aristocratic bric-a-brac, in the keeping of Wigmore Abbey and sandwiched between ‘four books of romances’ and ‘one coffer containing charters, deeds and other records’, is listed ‘one brass horn that with a certain falchion is said to be the charter of the land of Wigmore’.

Such symbols of conveyance are not unusual. A wide variety of objects either have survived or are recorded as being used to mark grants. There is a long tradition of so-called ‘tenure horns’, such as the ‘Pusey Horn’ held in the Victoria and Albert Museum with its early fifteenth-century inscription recording it as a token of a grant by King Cnut to William Pusey. Knives are also common tokens. Such objects served as a tag for a memory in the ‘pre-literate’ period, the transfer of the object being a physical act that could be watched and remembered at the same time as the words of the transfer were heard and remembered.

Whilst knives seem to have been common symbols of conveyance, swords were not. Clanchy provides three examples of the symbolic use of swords in connection with land ownership. He repeats Walter of Guisborough's account of the Earl Warenne's display of a rusty sword before Edward I's Quo Warranto proceedings. He recounts how in the 1130s the knight Thomas de Muschamps, becoming a monk at Durham shortly before death, laid his sword on the altar as a remembrance when he invested the house with his estate at Hetherslaw. Finally, he records how the royal treasury held the sword that was miraculously provided by St Odo of Canterbury to the English king Athelstan at his victory over the Scots at Brunnanburh in 937.

None of these examples are really what might be called a ‘charter sword’. The sword Warenne brandished might have been a symbol of his status as earl as we discussed above, and therefore in some way a mark of the grant of land and territory, were it not for its rusted state.