First, please understand I'm not assuming someone will want to tackle all these, but if you see one that interested you, I'd be grateful. I haven't found clear answers for these elsewhere. If this is too long, please feel free to delete it

Thanks in advance.

I have been researching some grants and deeds which date from about 1190 to 1348, in which my family name appears (more on that, as it comes up).

I started out simply transcribing and translating them (with help, thank you r/askhistorians and u/telkanuru), but as I spend time with them I find myself wondering about the people and their lives. I have been doing much reading (finished Cantor's book on the Black Death recently, for example), but honestly there's a lot that seems either contradictory, or inconclusive, or I just am not understanding the whole picture.

• Most of the grants (of those actually dated when executed) were made on Sundays. Is this because after church, everyone from the parish would be present and it was more convenient?

• Would a scribe trained in the legal terms and charter 'hand' travel from community to community regularly for this, or would they be called in as needed? Or would every town just have “that one guy” who was really good at this stuff?

• The witnesses number maybe ten at most, sometimes only five men named but always say “and many others”. If there are only five or ten listed by name, does that imply that they are direct abuttors or live/own closer to the land in question? My thinking: just list those few who are directly affected and who are most familiar with the parcel of land in question because it affects them most, and the rest are just incidental witnesses.

• Grantees all pay annual fees in addition to some consideration paid at the time of the grant, to the person making the grant. One fee was a single grain of pepper, to be paid at Christmas, for a 1/2 acre parcel. For the majority of these grants, the person making the grant is apparently just another neighbor (i.e. not the Lord of the Manor). Why fees in addition to the initial payment, and why some so apparently small as a “grain of pepper”?

• Where do the fees ultimately end up, in the grantor's pocket, to the Lord, or are they kicked up the chain to the King?

• I know the definition of “ownership” is changing in this period, so this may be a flawed question. Would these people have considered themselves “owners” of the land? Or were they merely people (families even, for hundreds of years) who live on this land held in turn by the Lord (who further had a debt to the King for having been granted it in the first place), and by making a grant are simply shifting their responsibility for the land to a new person/tenant? Kings come and go, but the same family names show up in these grants for three hundred years. Would they have ever just assumed it was “their” land, and not the Lord's or the King's? At what point did someone truly own land?

• The earliest grant also mentions these fees and considerations “excepting duty/service to the King”. Does this mean that the fees and duties owed to the grantor are one thing, and in addition, if the King comes along to raise an army (or fund it, thru taxes), that the grantee understands he's on the hook for this extra 'service'?

• The first deed as I mentioned was from ca. 1190, a little over a century after the Norman invasion. My understanding is the inhabitants of England were beginning to adopt last names in this period (as a result of the French influence). Some of the deeds follow the convention where a given name was listed, along with a descriptive term or occupation (“the archer”, “the French”, “the clerk”). But a very few seem to have actual Family/surnames, names which are capitalized and missing any sort of comma followed by a “le” or “the” article and descriptive term. For example, there are three men from one family (reference made to “his brother”, and all three have the same last name. How common would it be for someone to have an actual “last name” as we know it, in 1190?

• To drone on, one name on the deeds (my family name in particular) shows up in other reference books (Wheatley's “English Surnames” for one) as being Saxon in origin. If it's a Saxon description, and three men in the parish share it, is it safe to assume that the name is old enough that it's no longer merely a differentiating descriptive term (like “John, who is the Archer”), but rather has already become a true “family” name, (like “John Archer”, and his son “William Archer”, etc.). Why the mix of simple descriptives, and others with surnames?

• I learned that “William” became a popular name in this period partly in honor of William the Conqueror. But that’s presumably for people on the winning side. Why would a family with a Saxon surname (mine) name a child “William” so soon (well, 125 years) after the Battle of Hastings, if they were Saxon. Wouldn't they still be a little peeved? This is less distant in time than the U.S. is today from the Civil War, and yet there is still much ire felt by the losing side in that one.

• Would the clerk who wrote the grant list himself as a witness? I have one with “Geoffrey, the clerk” as a witness ('Geoffrey clerico').

• A charter of about 1220 (undated) no longer references 'virgates' as the earlier ones do, but now describes discrete meadows with messuages, enclosed fields (many with field names), marl pits, hedges, boundary ditches, etc. I understand that in the earlier medieval period one might own a collection of strips, perhaps not even connected, that might be conveyed altogether (in virgates, for example), and you'd farm your narrow strips separately, alongside other men in the same field. But by mid 1200s these parcels now appear to be consolidated chunks of land in 3, 5, 10 acre parcels, with permission given to travel over other land to get to them (they are landlocked). Are people in this period living in and on what we today might understand to be 'farms', with a house on the same plot of land, and one or two large fields all connected? Are virgates no longer being farmed the way they used to be?

• Is it true that only land-owning men were witnesses to these grants, and if so, does that imply anything about social status or wealth if a person shows up on grants as early as 1190? Does having a family name at this time imply anything either? Were these people serfs, or tenant farmers?

• Would they have had any familiarity with the Latin used, and been able to later refer to these documents when disputes arose or was everyone pretty much illiterate except the scribe?

• The grants all stop in 1348. Is it a simple case of everyone dying off, or was there a general slackening everywhere of the legal process in general because of the upheaval caused by the waves of plague coming through?

Thanks again