This paper has to do with an unidentified object that is too well known to be suspicious. If we are well informed about Robert de Torigni’s first years as abbot of Le Mont Saint-Michel, it is because he or another monk told us what he did, in very specific detail. How he told us this is what interests me, and I refer to this ‘how’ as an unidentified object because, to my knowledge, no previous historian has reflected on the nature of this accessible and useful evidence. We know what it says. Do we really know what it means?

I

What we have is a series of ‘entries’ – if that is the right word – entries dated only by years from 1155 to 1159, in the cartulary of Mont Saint-Michel (Figs 1–4). And because these items are typically the abstracts of charters, focusing on transactions and listing their witnesses, they have the looks of copied charters such as fill the cartularies of Normandy, including this one. Léopold Delisle numbered and printed these entries seriatim in his edition of Robert’s chronicle; and so does Coraline Coutant in her recent thèse de maîtrise for the Ecole des Chartes. Moreover, Coutant confirms the appearance of Delisle’s edition by describing each entry like a charter (in style chartiste); that is, they seem to be reluctant to think of these texts as anything other than a continuation. Yet even these editors hold back from the concept of charters in a cartulary. Delisle wrote of a récit détaillé of Abbot Robert’s first years, as if that were something any reader would understand. In 1966 André Dufief borrowed his word récit without comment. In recent years Katharine Keats-Rohan referred to ‘a register of acta’ produced from 1155 to 1159 without explaining the diplomatic place of a register within (or appended to) a cartulary. That a collection of abstracts in chronological order might be a diplomatic anomaly seems to have eluded everyone until Mme Coutant, who suggests acutely in her unpublished thesis of 2009 that, taken together, these notices bear resemblance to the genre gesta abbatum. Here let me add that neither she nor any other writer, to my knowledge, has likened this record to pancartes, although on its face the written summation of transactions bears some resemblance to the diplomatic of multiple copies otherwise well known in Normandy.