n.MYOO-nə-məntChiefly Britishan archival document Smith 1938a, 17The repair room now used is in the basement, some distance removed from the muniment rooms, and the equipment is of the simplest, but it is sufficient to take care of all necessary repairing.Fitzroy 1938, 126Here were edited and released for the convenient use of students a great mass of material formerly scattered over the kingdom, hidden in the attics and cellars of public buildings and the muniment rooms of private residences, in places where no one could have hoped to have had access to them—cartularies, chronicles, yearbooks, King's Council and early chancery proceedings, records of fines and pipe, patent, close, hundred and manorial rolls.Jenkinson 1944, 8Indeed in the case of more than one city company the saving of the muniments has been almost the only consoling feature in the tale of destruction of beautiful and historical things.Plavchan 1984, 71Visitors toured the muniment room and were shown preservation methods and reprographic techniques employed by the Archives.Chiefly Britisha document that records the legal rights or privileges of a person, group, or organization Christopher 1938, 84As archivist to a borough dating from the seventeenth century, you are to state requirements for a new muniment room in connection with the municipal buildings.Sen 1944, 153The first formal date in the history of the department is May, 1891, when with the sanction of the home government definitive steps were taken by the Government of India for concentrating in one central office all its extant muniments which had till then been lying scattered in the various secretariat offices at Calcutta.National Archives 2023Muniments are documentary evidence kept securely and retained by the diocese in order that it could defend it’s [sic] title to property or claims to various ecclesiastical rights.St Andrews 2023The archives are held in either the manuscript collection or the muniment collection. ¶ The easiest way of determining whether an item is manuscript or muniment is to consider whether it would have been created by the University. This includes: ¶ senate minutes ¶ matriculation and graduation records ¶ titles for University properties ¶ administrative files ¶ records of students and staff ¶ financial records.
Notes
Muniments2 are kept for use as evidence to defend title or other property rights to land, possessions, or inheritances. In some, but not all, of these cases, muniment identifies a record created by a government or other organization in the conduct of its official business—as opposed to a “manuscript” collected by an archives. The first sense, nearly synonymous with document, is the most common one. The term is rarely used in the archival literature today, and it was and is much more commonly used in the British Empire than the United States.
