How a 650-year-old document was used to circumvent laws dating back to Magna Carta

Real wealth lay with landowners...just like today when half of the land in England is owned by only 25,000 people.

For the rest of the population, there was just one goal: to grow enough food to survive. Victories over the French (notably Crecy in 1346) meant little to the lower orders.

The feudal system of the Middle Ages forced peasants into virtual slavery, with monarchs from William the Conqueror onwards rewarding nobles with land, assuring themselves of both taxes and loyalty.

The lower orders, who worked all hours on tiny plots of land, had to ask permission from their master to leave the village, to ground their corn in his mill or even for their daughters to marry.

The Black Death of 1348-50 is estimated to have wiped out one-third of the world's population and up to 50% in Yorkshire.

Fresh visitations of the disease, particularly in Birstall, Ossett, Dewsbury, Wakefield, Halifax and Leeds, coupled with civil turmoil, ensured the county's population did not recover its pre-1348 levels for at least 200 years.

The plague did produce one benefit for Yorkshire's surviving poor: the shortage of labour forced many nobles to offer better working conditions and higher wages.

The drastic decrease in population meant an oversupply of food, so prices dropped. It was perhaps the beginning the end for late-stage feudalism.

So, then, after this brief history lesson on the late Middle Ages, to the emergence at auction of an illuminated Royal License, bearing the Great Seal of the Realm and witnessed by Edward III himself at Westminster on November 15, 1368, a time when the king was beginning to ail and the country was more than 30 years into the 100 Years' War with France.

The 20-line document, in Latin, which fetched more than £23,000 at Bonhams in London, bears more than a whiff of 14th century sleaze in that it broke the rules in granting a fabulous gift to one David de Wollore, chaplain to the King and to the Church of Hornsea (or Hornsee) and Master of the Rolls from 1345-1370. One of many favours granted to him by King Edward, it consisted of 12 "messuages" (urban properties with land), two gardens, 10 acres and rents worth £4 7s 8d in Ripon.

According to the licence, the properties were valued by John de St Therskelf, eschetor (local official responsible for upholding the King's rights as a feudal lord) in the county of York, and stated that 10 of the "messuages" may be assigned to "render divine service every day at the altar of St Andrew in the collegiate church at Ripon" and granted the two others "to the chapter of the church at Ripon...for the maintenance of the fabric of the said church, all to be held in perpetuity."

Basically, this meant that the extremely well-connected de Wollore, an attorney in Chancery from about 1329, controlled 10 properties which were to augment a chantry chapel at Ripon Minster (Cathedral from 1836) and two more to aid the Minster's fabric fund, creating the foundations for more lucrative new chantries for the Minster.

This contravened the Statutes of Mortmain, which re-established the prohibition against donating land to the Church in perpetuity, a ban which originated in Magna Carta in 1215.

But, as is often the case throughout history, the privileged de Wollore, with Establishment connivance, bypassed the rules.

The seal, an important work of art in its own right, bearing the Great Seal of Edward III in green wax and a depiction of the Biblical story of David and Goliath, had been held in the same family, dating back to de Wollore himself, for more than 650 years.

*At the same books and manuscripts sale at Bonhams, a first-edition copy of A Voyage Round Great Britain, Undertaken in the Summer of the Year 1813, and Commencing From the Land's-End in Cornwall, by Richard Ayton (1786-1823), illustrated by artist and printmaker William Daniell (1769-1837), made £1,920 and an 1822 first-edition volume of 42 aquatint views of the Lake District by Theodore Henry Fielding (1781-1851) realised £960. An archive of 1,700 photographs of comic actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977), in preparation for the book My Life in Pictures by Charlie Chaplin, fetched £3,330.