muniment

n.MYOO-nə-mənt Chiefly Britishan archival document   Chiefly Britisha document that records the legal rights or privileges of a person, group, or organization  

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.