English Government in the Thirteenth Century

English Government in the Thirteenth Century Edited by

Adrian Jobson

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ENGLISH GOVERNMENT IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

The size and jurisdiction of English royal government underwent sustained development in the thirteenth century, an understanding of which is crucial to a balanced view of medieval English society. The papers here follow three central themes: the development of central government, law and justice, and the crown and the localities. Examined within this framework are bureaucracy and enrolment under King John and his contemporaries; the royal chancery; the adaptation of the exchequer in response to the rapidly changing demands of the crown; the introduction of a licensing system for mortmain alienations; the administration of local justice; women as sheriffs; and a Nottinghamshire study examining the tensions between the role of the king as manorial lord and as monarch.

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ENGLISH GOVERNMENT IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

Edited by Adrian Jobson

THE BOYDELL PRESS THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES

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© Editor and Contributors 2004 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2004 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge The National Archives, London ISBN 1 84383 056 6

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. PO Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604–4126, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data English government in the thirteenth century / edited by Adrian Jobson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–84383–056–6 (acid-free paper) 1. Great Britain–Politics and government–1154–1399. 2. Great Britain–History–13th century. I. Title: English government in the 13th century. II. Jobson, Adrian, 1973– DA225.E54 2004 320.442⬘09⬘022–dc22 2003024573

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

vii

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

ix

ABBREVIATIONS

xi

INTRODUCTION

1

Why 1199? Bureaucracy and Enrolment under John and his Contemporaries Nicholas Vincent

17

The English Royal Chancery in the Thirteenth Century David Carpenter

49

Finance on a Shoestring: The Exchequer in the Thirteenth Century Nick Barratt

71

The Mortmain Licensing System, 1280–1307 Paul Brand

87

The Local Administration of Justice: A Reappraisal of the ‘Four Knights’ System Anthony Musson

97

Women as Sheriffs in Early Thirteenth Century England Louise J. Wilkinson

111

King and Lord: The Monarch and his Demesne Tenants in Central Nottinghamshire, 1163–1363 David Crook

125

Index

141

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PREFACE

This volume was inspired by the conference held on Saturday 16 March 2002 hosted by the Medieval and Early Modern Records Service at the Public Record Office on the theme ‘The Birth of Red Tape: English Government in the Thirteenth Century’. Many debts of gratitude are incurred in the preparation of a conference such as the one that this volume records. A special debt of gratitude is owed to Sean Cunningham and Nick Barratt for their support and encouragement in instigating the conference. For their assistance in organising the conference, thanks are due to Claire Bertrand and Eleanor van Heyningen of the Interpretation Team. I am grateful to Elizabeth Hallam Smith for chairing the opening session and Adrian Ailes and Nigel Taylor for helping ensure that the conference ran smoothly on the day itself and fostering good relations between the conference delegates. Thanks are owed to James Cronan, Hannes Kleineke, James Travers and Colin Williams for their invaluable help in the preparation of this volume. I would like particularly to record my thanks to the Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales for their permission to reproduce David Carpenter’s paper. Thanks are also due to Aidan Lawes of The National Archives and the staff of Boydell & Brewer, and in particular Caroline Palmer, for their help and support in the production of this volume. A special debt of gratitude is owed to David Carpenter for his guidance and advice since my undergraduate days. Most of all, I would like to thank my parents for all their support and encouragement over the year and also my grandmother, who passed away shortly before the completion of this volume. This book is dedicated to her memory. Adrian Jobson Chiswick March 2003

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Nick Barratt worked for four years at the Public Record Office before joining the BBC as a historical research consultant. He has published on State Finance. Paul Brand is Senior Research Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford. His publications include The Making of the Common Law (London, 1992). David Carpenter is Professor of Medieval History at King’s College, London. His most recent publication is The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066–1284 (London, 2003). David Crook is Head of Medieval Records within the Research and Editorial Services Department at The National Archives. His publications include Records of the General Eyre (PRO Handbook 20, 1982). Anthony Musson is Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Exeter. His publications include Medieval Law in Context: The Growth of Legal Consciousness from Magna Carta to the Peasants’ Revolt (Manchester, 2001). Nicholas Vincent is Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, and the author of several books, most recently The Holy Blood (Cambridge, 2001). Louise Wilkinson is a research fellow on the Calendar of Patent Rolls (Elizabeth I) Project, based at The National Archives and managed by the University of Reading. She has published on thirteenth-century women.

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ABBREVIATIONS

All works are published in London unless otherwise specified. Ann. Mon.

Annales Monastici, ed. H.R. Luard (RS, 1864–69)

BIHR

Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research

BL

British Library

Book of Fees

Liber Feodorum. The Book of Fees Commonly Called Testa de Neville, 3 vols (1920–31)

CChR

Calendar of the Charter Rolls, 1226–1516 (1903–27)

CCR

Calendar of Close Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, 1272–1341 (1895–1908)

CFR

Calendar of Fine Rolls, 1272–1307 (1911)

CIM

Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, 1219–1349 (1916)

Clanchy, Memory M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1993) CLR

Calendar of Liberate Rolls

CPR

Calendar of Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, 1232–1330 (1891–1908)

CR

Close Rolls of the Reign of Henry III Preserved in the Public Record Office, 1227–72 (1902–38)

CRR

Curia Regis Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, Richard I– (1922–, in progress)

DBM

Documents of the Baronial Movement of Reform and Rebellion, ed. R.F. Treharne and I.J. Sanders (Oxford, 1973)

EHR

English Historical Review

HEL

F. Pollock and F.W. Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1911)

PR

Pipe Roll

PRO

Public Record Office

PRS

Pipe Roll Society

Rec. Comm.

Record Commissioners

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Abbreviations

Red Book

The Red Book of the Exchequer, ed. H. Hall, 3 vols (RS, 1896)

RLC

Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum in Turri Londoniensi asservati, 1204–27, ed. T.D. Hardy (Rec. Comm., 1835)

RCH

Rotuli Chartarum in Turri Londinensi asservati, ed. T.D. Hardy (Rec. Comm., 1837)

RLP

Rotuli Litterarum Patentium in Turri Londoniensi asservati, 1201–16, ed. T.D. Hardy (Rec. Comm., 1835)

Rot. Hun.

Rotuli Hundredorum, ed. W. Illingworth, 2 vols (Rec. Comm., 1812–18)

Rot. de Oblatis et Finibus

Rotuli de Oblatis et Finium in Turri Londinensi asservati, ed. T.D. Hardy (Rec. Comm., 1835)

Rot. Parl.

Rotuli Parliamentorum (1783–1832)

RS

Rolls Series (Rerum Brittanicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores, 1858–96)

Ryley, Pleadings in Parliament

W. Ryley, Pleadings in Parliament with the judgments thereon, in the reign of Edward the first and Edward the Second, kings of England (1661)

ser.

series

Soc.

Society [of the]

Statutes of the Realm

Statutes of the Realm (Rec. Comm., 1810)

Tout, Chapters

T.F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England: The Wardrobe, the Chamber and the Small Seal, 6 vols (Manchester, 1920–33)

TCE i

Thirteenth Century England I: Proceedings of the Newcastle upon Tyne Conference, 1985, ed. P.R. Coss and S.D. Lloyd (Woodbridge, 1986)

TCE ii

Thirteenth Century England II: Proceedings of the Newcastle upon Tyne Conference, 1987, ed. P. Coss and S.D. Lloyd (Woodbridge, 1988)

TCE iv

Thirteenth Century England IV: Proceedings of the Newcastle upon Tyne Conference, 1991, ed. P.R. Coss and S.D. Lloyd (Woodbridge, 1992)

TCE v

Thirteenth Century England V: Proceedings of the Newcastle upon Tyne Conference, 1993, ed. P.R. Coss and S.D. Lloyd (Woodbridge, 1995)

TCE viii

Thirteenth Century England VIII, ed. M. Prestwich (Woodbridge, 2003)

TNA

The National Archives of the United Kingdom

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Abbreviations TRHS

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

TTS

Transactions of the Thoroton Society

xiii

Note on manuscript references: except where otherwise stated references are to manuscripts deposited in The National Archives of the United Kingdom (formerly the Public Record Office).

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INTRODUCTION

‘Administrative history only becomes possible when an organised administrative system has been established.’1 Since T.F. Tout first outlined this axiom in the 1920s, the study of administrative history has broadened. Much of this work has concentrated upon the thirteenth century, which was one of the most important and creative periods in the evolution of government and administration in English history. At the heart of the administration was a central bureaucracy that was organised around a series of departments, namely the chancery, exchequer and the curia regis.2 These departments were not recent innovations; many were already in existence when Richard I ascended the throne in 1189.3 Within a hundred years, however, they had been transformed in terms of size, professionalism and output. New administrative procedures were introduced as the government responded to changing needs and circumstances.4 Government became progressively more complex and bureaucratic, encouraging the emergence of an administrative caste of highly educated and professional administrators. The development of a more effective royal administration led to friction with those most directly disadvantaged by the growth of the crown’s power: the baronage. Two major civil wars and numerous political crises would temporarily disrupt the otherwise inexorable expansion of administrative government. Yet even these periods of political conflict could act as a spur to further growth, inspiring the reformation and overhaul of the administrative machinery. Sometimes a radical series of reforms were implemented, at other times the changes would be more gradual. After a century of expansion, the English government of Edward I’s reign was amongst the most bureaucratic and powerful systems then operating within Europe. Underlying this burgeoning governmental system was a plethora of routine administrative records. Documentation was not a new phenomenon: Anglo Saxon monarchs had issued written charters while writs can be traced back to the late eleventh century.5 Under the Norman monarchy, there had been an increase in the range of material created and used by government. The royal administration’s use of written documentation continued to expand throughout Henry II’s reign. It was King John’s reign, however, that marked the turning point in the use of written documentation by central government. Royal charters were enrolled on the newly instituted charter rolls while letters patent and letters close were entered upon the patent and close rolls respectively. Other rolls can also be traced to the first decade of the thirteenth century including the

1

Tout, Chapters, i. 2. Ibid., 10. See also S.B. Chrimes, An Introduction to the Administrative History of Medieval England (Oxford, 1952), 21, 45, 96. 3 Tout, Chapters, i. 93, 130. 4 M. Prestwich, ‘English Government Records, 1250–1330’, Pragmatic Literacy East and West, 1200–1330, ed. R. Britnell (Woodbridge, 1997), 95–106. 5 Clanchy, Memory, 26–32, 150. 2

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liberate and fine rolls.6 Accompanying this newly instituted practice of enrolment were the initial stages of a systematic retention of records, the documents now being stored for future possible consultation. There was a proliferation of the amount of documentation being produced by central government, a circumstance mirrored by the survival rates for documents increasing proportionately for each reign of the twelfth century. Such was the rate of growth that the weight of sealing wax used in the production of chancery documents rose by approximately 900% under Henry III!7 T.F. Tout was among the first historians to discuss the practice of record keeping, concentrating upon the experience of the royal household. Within the household, each department had its own place where documents could be safely deposited. Nevertheless, many of the collections from the wardrobe, chamber and privy seal office were ‘utterly dispersed’.8 Tout argued that the crown was much more indifferent to the custody of the household records than those of the permanent ‘offices of state and law’ such as the chancery or the exchequer.9 Tout advanced two reasons why so many household records have not survived. Outgoing officials often regarded records of ‘their period of activity as their personal property, taking them away with them when they gave up their offices’.10 Secondly, Tout believed there was a feeling that ‘the king’s business was secret, and that the recording of his personal acts might interfere with his future discretion’.11 Twenty years after Tout’s work, V.H. Galbraith revisited the question of archives and record keeping in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Since virtually no royal archives survived from the pre-Conquest period, Galbraith argued that the beginnings of the royal archives originated with the exchequer. This institution ‘anticipated by more than half a century that general application of written records to royal administration which the chancery was to bring about at the close of the [twelfth] century’.12 Galbraith stressed the importance of 1199 in the history of royal record keeping, a year which marked the production of a systematic series of records of the chancery’s activities. An extension of the practice of keeping duplicates, he argued that the practice allowed the chancery to ‘direct and control the administration better than ever before’.13 Galbraith also speculated that it was not only the chancery that had embarked upon this new practice of enrolment: the whole royal household was included in this exercise.14 Such was the impact of enrolment upon the royal administration, the systematic preservation of records quickly formed ‘the vertebrae’ of the public records.15 Moreover, the enrolment of documents stimulated, in turn, the rapid development of new financial and judicial records. It may even have stimulated the preservation of the old ones. Record preservation and the development of a royal archive were considered within a broader context in Michael Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record. The majority of the documents produced by central government were routine, created for a specific administrative purpose at the time they were made rather than intended for 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Ibid., 68–73; Chrimes, Administrative History, 74–7. Clanchy, Memory, 57–62. Tout, Chapters, i. 34. Ibid., 34–5. Ibid., 35. This belief was also held by the royal justices. Ibid. V.H. Galbraith, Studies in the Public Records (London, 1948), 37, 47–8. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 66. Ibid., 70–1.

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permanent preservation. Some earlier documents such as the Domesday Book had been preserved in the treasury, but the beginnings of an archive of documents that was regularly consulted by officials were the pipe rolls of Henry II.16 Not all of the exchequer’s records were, however, systematically preserved and many documentary forms discussed in the Dialogus de Scaccario have not survived. It was Hubert Walter who, Clanchy contended, ‘was principally responsible for making the royal government as a whole, not just the exchequer, begin keeping records as well as issuing documents’.17 While serving as chief justiciar between 1193 and 1198, Walter supervised the first systematic preservation of legal records in the form of plea rolls and feet of fines. After he became chancellor, the almost continuous sequences of chancery rolls began. Despite these developments, it was almost a century before the full potential of a royal archive was realised. When asserting his claim to overlordship in Scotland, Edward I ordered his clerks to search the surviving records for supporting evidence. Although it proved relatively unsuccessful, a ‘precedent had been established’ and Edward ordered a similar search in support of his case before Pope Boniface VIII.18 In 1302, Edward ordered that all the surviving records of the wardrobe be brought together for perpetual remembrance and be readily available. Twenty years later, Bishop Stapledon’s survey of the surviving royal documents marked the formal recognition that the crown’s ‘administrative documents were records for posterity’. For much of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the royal archives other than the exchequer did not have a permanent home. Their safekeeping depended upon the ‘reliability of archivists rather than repositories’.19 Documents were stored in portable chests that followed the court, a circumstance that explains why so few administrative documents from the twelfth century have survived. Eventually it became impracticable, Clanchy maintained, to continue carting these documents in their chests, so the older records were stored in a series of repositories including ‘the Tower of London, the New Temple in London, and stores off the cloister in Westminster abbey’ until their eventual consolidation at the Tower in 1320.20 In his contribution to this volume, Nicholas Vincent returns to the question of why, in 1199, the chancery took such ‘a quantum leap into enrolment’.21 Before explaining the importance of this date in a record keeping context, he undertakes an examination of the extent of record making and record preservation practised under the Plantagenet kings from 1154. While acknowledging the vast amounts of material being recorded on the chancery rolls after 1199, Vincent argues that the system itself, though prolific, was not that adept at record keeping: many items such as the myriad of judicial writs that were drafted by the chancery clerks were never recorded on the rolls. Vincent also compares the Anglo-Norman system to that of its French contemporary. Highlighting the difficulties involved in undertaking a search of the rolls, and the time needed to compile a single document, Vincent contends that it was, in fact, the Capetian registers that supplied ‘the model of administrative efficiency rather than the Plantagenet rolls’.22

16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Clanchy, Memory, 151. Ibid., 152. Ibid., 68–74, 152–3; CCR 1288–96, 245–6. Clanchy, Memory, 154, 164–5. Ibid., 165–6. See below, 21. See below, 25.

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The emergence of the system of government which produced such complex records was traced in Tout’s six-volume work Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England: The Wardrobe, the Chamber and the Small Seal. While some earlier scholars had examined individual institutions or branches of government, this was the first comprehensive study of the central administration.23 The purpose of his work was to ‘offer some contributions to the almost unwritten story of English administration’ and investigate ‘those ignored areas of the administration’.24 Tout identified the ‘exchequer, chancery and the executive departments of the [royal] household’ as the ‘chief instruments’ of government.25 Originally both the exchequer and chancery formed part of the king’s household. Gradually, however, they both acquired distinct identities during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries respectively as they separated from the household.26 Tout discussed the processes that subsequently led, on its administrative side, to the household devolving into individual departments. Two of these, the king’s chamber and his wardrobe, were to develop into important administrative offices of state in their own right. Indeed, the eventual importance of the king’s wardrobe was such that during Edward I’s reign it had become in essence the ‘third great department of state’.27 Against this background of administrative innovation and development, Tout attempted to identify the state purely in administrative terms, presenting the political intrigues of the thirteenth century as ultimately a struggle for control over the administrative machinery. This struggle for control was never more intense than in the position of the chancellor who, as the head of the chancery, was amongst the most influential royal officials. As the chancery devolved from the household, the office of chancellor rose in stature. By the end of the twelfth century, influential magnates and high status men such as Walter of Coutances held the office although, by the middle of Henry III’s reign, professional administrators such as William of Kilkenny were being appointed. Tout was the first historian to examine the rise of the chancellorship and the workings of the chancery. A functioning chancery could be first discerned during the reign of Edward the Confessor.28 Originally a writing department, it gradually developed into a much wider ranging institution. Control of the king’s seal was the responsibility of its chief officer, the chancellor, and its scribes were responsible for drafting the crown’s charters. By the thirteenth century, the chancellor had increased

23

Tout, Chapters; Chrimes, Administrative History, vi. An exhaustive list of these early works would be too long for inclusion in a bibliographical footnote. For the origins of the legal system see HEL. On the constitutional development and parliament see W. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England (9th edn, London, 1874–8). On the financial administration see T. Madox, The History and Antiquities of the Exchequer of the Kings of England, 2 vols (2nd edn, London, 1769). 24 Tout, Chapters, i. 1–2, 4–5. 25 Ibid., 10. 26 Ibid., 4, 96–7, 284. 27 Ibid., 4. 28 Ibid., 130. For recent discussions on the origins of the chancery, see P. Chaplais, ‘The Royal Anglo–Saxon “Chancery” of the Tenth Century Revisited’, Studies in Medieval History Presented to R.H.C. Davis, ed. H. Mayr-Harting and R.I. Moore (London, 1985); Facsimiles of English Royal Writs to A.D. 1100: Presented to Vivian Hunter Galbraith, ed. T.A.M. Bishop and P. Chaplais (Oxford, 1957); S. Keynes, ‘Royal Government and the Written Word in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe, ed. R. McKitterick (Cambridge, 1990) and the introduction of Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum. The Acta of William I, ed. D. Bates (Oxford, 1998).

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in influence and dignity. Imitating this rise was the chancery itself. By Henry II’s reign, it had grown into a ‘highly organised instrument of government’. Throughout the early years of the thirteenth century, it continued to grow in breadth and prestige. The turning point in the development of the chancery, and its relations with the other offices of government were the years 1234 to 1258: ‘one great feature in the administrative history of these five-and-twenty years is the beginnings of the chancery as a separate office’.29 Lesser individuals were being appointed to the office of chancellor and an increasingly close relationship developed between the chancery and the wardrobe. Indeed, Tout argues that ‘for the rest of his reign he [Henry] strove to assimilate the chancery to the wardrobe’.30 Bertie Wilkinson’s The Chancery under Edward III endorsed Tout’s contention that the chancery had achieved its independence from the royal household. Although concentrating upon its role and functions under Edward III, Wilkinson traced the development of the chancery from its eleventh century beginnings. He states that, by the reign of Henry II, ‘the office of chancery was already great, and was becoming more complex’. Such was the rapidity of its growth that ‘the importance of the chancery and the pre-eminence of the chancellors were both established facts by the beginning of the thirteenth century, and were to increase in the years that followed with the increasing importance of the office as the great source of “original” writs’.31 It is the introduction of a ‘continuous series of chancery records’, however, ‘that really marks the beginning of a new period’ in the history of the chancery.32 Wilkinson has argued that this material demonstrates that there was a ‘real break in the absolute continuity of the development of the chancery’ during the reign of Henry III.33 Observing the gradual decline in the chancery’s use of the great seal and the simultaneous growing utilisation of the privy seal as the king’s personal seal, Wilkinson contended that these relatively obscure developments indicated the beginnings of the long process of separation of the chancery from the king’s person. The explosion in the volume of chancery business under Henry III led, in turn, to further administrative innovations in the succeeding reign. New controls were imposed on the royal seal, a development that Wilkinson believed marked the beginning of ‘the distinction between the chancery as a secretariat and as an office of administration’.34 This theme of transition from being the core of the monarch’s administration to being a Westminster based office which had lost some of its responsibilities to the wardrobe, is addressed in David Carpenter’s essay. With the separation of the chancery from the royal person, new ways of expressing the king’s will were tested. Eventually the wardrobe replaced the chancery letters, issuing its own bills and letters under the privy seal. Carpenter argues that the chancery was reduced to simply issuing, on orders of the wardrobe and privy seal, the formal documentation that enabled the fourteenth century administration to function. His paper also considers the consequences of this transition and whether they could have been avoided. Inevitably, the transition led to delay and blurred departmental responsibility,

29 30 31 32 33 34

Tout, Chapters, i. 284. Ibid., 287. B. Wilkinson, The Chancery under Edward III (Manchester, 1929), 2, 5–6. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 9.

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Carpenter contending that although the separation was administratively flawed, ‘politically it was right’.35 The other great branch of the crown’s administration was the exchequer. Dating from the early years of Henry I’s reign, this institution had become, by the thirteenth century, ‘the finance ministry of the crown’.36 Exercising financial control over other household departments, it was responsible for auditing the crown’s revenue. Sheriffs would account for their county farms at its sessions, the chancellor’s clerk crossexamining them about shrieval expenditure and revenues. During the thirteenth century, the clerk grew in importance and acquired the title chancellor of the exchequer. The workings of the twelfth century exchequer are described in detail by the contemporary treatise Dialogus de Scaccario although, unfortunately, there is no equivalent for the thirteenth century.37 The eighteenth century historian Thomas Madox produced the first systematic study of the exchequer. Despite suffering from serious weaknesses in his discussion of it during the thirteenth century, his work served as a useful foundation for future scholars.38 William Stubbs was the next historian who examined the exchequer. Unfortunately, his preoccupation with constitutional and parliamentary history meant that, especially for the thirteenth century, he failed to discuss its machinery. J.H. Round analysed the process whereby the exchequer grew out from, and eventually absorbed, the treasury. It was left to Tout to undertake a detailed systematic study of the exchequer from its origins until the beginnings of the fifteenth century. Part of this study involved a detailed discussion of the range of materials that it produced such as the pipe rolls, memoranda rolls and receipt rolls.39 Tout argued that the exchequer had, by the end of Henry II’s reign, become the chief accounting branch of the ‘national financial system’ and was now physically separate from the curia regis.40 Sited in Westminster from as early as 1156, the exchequer held regular sessions at twice yearly intervals. A treasury remained at Winchester until the end of John’s reign although this was now under the jurisdiction of the exchequer.41 Following the absorption of the chief treasury into the exchequer, the remainder of Tout’s discussion is in relation to the wardrobe. He outlines how the wardrobe developed from the chamber during the reign of King John and its subsequent development under his son, Henry III. By 1307, Tout contends, the wardrobe became one of the major elements of government, in some ways subverting the traditional role of the exchequer in royal finance. Its prime importance manifested itself during Edward I’s many wars. Money was paid through it and led to the ‘virtual subordination of the exchequer to the wardrobe’.42 Shortly after Tout began publishing his Chapters, Mabel Mills furthered our understanding of exchequer practice by concentrating upon the adventus vicecomitis. A core segment of the memoranda rolls, the adventus documented those sheriffs who had attended the lower exchequer at both Easter and Michaelmas. It also 35

See below, 69. Tout, Chapters, i. 14. Dialogus de Scaccario, ed. C. Johnson, with corrections by F.E.L Carter and D.E. Greenway (Oxford, 1983). 38 Madox, History of the Exchequer. 39 Tout, Chapters, i. 38–42; J.H. Round, The Commune of London and other studies (Westminster, 1899), 62–96. 40 Tout, Chapters, i. 93, 101–2. 41 Ibid., 96–8. The two sessions were at Michaelmas and Easter. 42 Ibid., ii. 131. 36 37

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recorded in summary the payments made by individual sheriffs.43 Mills described in detail the procedures followed during the auditing of their accounts. Having established how the audit process functioned, she compared the summaries recorded on the memoranda rolls with those entered on the pipe rolls. The resultant data was used to compile tables that illustrate the actual amounts of the payments made by the sheriffs. Analysing these payments, Mills contended that these had fallen substantially during the Barons’ War and its immediate aftermath. Although there was a process of recovery, the payments were still failing to match their pre-war levels in 1278.44 Coinciding with this decline was a corresponding increase in outstanding debts, a development that impacted heavily upon the crown’s income. A series of reforms were introduced to reduce this encumbrance, the intention being to ‘free the pipe rolls from the overwhelming burden of debts which was their legacy from the Barons’ War’.45 Despite the reforms, however, the pipe roll would become a ‘roll of crown debtors rather than a roll of accountants’.46 While Mills undertook her detailed analysis of the audit process, there was a shift in emphasis from analytical studies of the exchequer’s mechanisms to an examination of the crown’s finances. The originator of this new movement was Sir James Ramsay, who argued that ‘the story of the royal income and national taxation has for the most part been left on one side’.47 Basing his figures on the amounts recorded in the pipe rolls, he calculated the annual revenues for the crown for Henry II’s reign. Since there was a plethora of data for succeeding reigns, Ramsay only supplied income totals for selected years, the intermediate years being provided with estimates. These annual totals were placed firmly in a political context, with a summation of the major events that had occurred during the course of the year.48 Ramsay also compiled tables for each reign, which detailed the amounts raised from individual sources of revenue such as subsidies and tallages.49 Over the next fifty years there were only occasional forays by historians into fiscal history before the American scholar Robert Stacey began reviving the study of the exchequer. Stacey analysed the state of the crown’s finances in the mid-thirteenth century and their political consequences.50 Concentrating upon the early period of Henry III’s reign, Stacey contended that his long minority had a disruptive effect upon the crown’s revenues. Laden with debts, the exchequer struggled to remain solvent after Henry reached maturity, a situation that was exacerbated both by the demands placed upon it by the continued distribution of royal patronage and his continental ambitions.51 In response, the king’s council undertook in 1236 a comprehensive investigation and rehabilitation of almost all the existing sources of income. Over the next eight years, crippling tallages were exacted from the Jewish community, exchequer clerks searched for long forgotten customary payments, increments were imposed above the county farm while detailed inquests were undertaken 43

M. Mills, ‘Adventus Vicecomitum, 1258–72’, EHR xxxvi (1921), 481. Ibid., 482, 494. Ibid., 496. 46 Ibid. 47 J.H. Ramsay, A History of the Revenues of the Kings of England, 1066–1399, 2 vols (Oxford, 1925), i. v. 48 Ibid., 295–6, 342–3. For example, 23 Henry III and 49 Henry III respectively. 49 Ibid., vi. 363–5. 50 R. Stacey, Politics, Policy, and Finance under Henry III 1216–1245 (Oxford, 1987). 51 Ibid., 43–4, 181–5, 237–43. 44 45

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on both the royal forests and earlier grants of the royal demesne.52 Yet even these unprecedented efforts at augmenting royal revenue were not successful at meeting the competing claims for resources. A ‘combination of Poitevin debts, compensatory fees to wartime supporters, ceremonial alms-giving, and public display would by itself have been enough to put crown finance under serious strain during 1243–44. New diplomatic and military expenses, however, compounded these problems’.53 Stacey argued that, by the end of 1245, Henry’s ‘financial affairs were thus firmly established on the hand-to-mouth footing which would continue to characterise them until the end of the reign’.54 Henry’s attempts to raise the crown’s income were to result, however, in political opposition which culminated in the 1244 ‘Paper Constitution’.55 Fundamentally new approaches were adopted in an effort to maximise the revenues available to the crown after 1245. Royal income began to recover until 1253–54, when Henry’s Gascon expedition initiated a series of financial crises that left him without the capacity to fulfil his Sicilian and Poitevin goals. Unfortunately, however, the crown’s fiscal policies ‘raised much more political annoyance than expendable cash’ and ultimately led to the baronial revolt of 1258.56 Within a few years of Stacey’s monograph W.M. Ormrod questioned the usefulness of the statistical data used in previous studies of royal finance during the thirteenth century. Historians had only expressed ‘royal financial data’ in ‘standard money of account’, he contended, ignoring the effects of inflation and fluctuations in the real value of money.57 Ormrod therefore devised a new statistical framework for the study of royal revenues, defining three sources of revenue. Firstly, he discussed ‘ordinary revenues of a regular nature’. Consisting of resources that provided the crown with income on a regular basis, these included the county farm, ancient customs and the coining of money. This form of revenue experienced a substantial increase, with higher profits from the coining of money and a shift from landed income to a greater reliance on customs.58 The crown’s second sources of income were ‘ordinary revenues of an occasional nature’. Comprising casual revenues such as regalian rights, feudal incidents and amercements, these sources of revenue had declined by the death of Edward I. Although the crown found other means to compensate for this deterioration in profitability, in ‘real terms’, the real monetary value from this source had actually declined.59 Ormrod’s final revenue category consisted of ‘extraordinary receipts, a definition which included time limited grants such as a subsidy on moveable property, or levies which had a degree of consent, for example a clerical tax imposed by the pope but collected by the king’.60 Analysing the real value of each of these forms of revenue, Ormrod concluded that despite the structural innovations introduced under Richard I and John, Edward’s I’s income was, in real value, higher than that of his predecessors. Furthermore, Ormrod contended, 52

Ibid., 43, 52–4, 104, 110–11, 158–9. Ibid., 243. 54 Ibid., 247. 55 Stacey, Politics, 251–2. For further details of the 1244 Paper Constitution see C.R. Cheney, ‘ “The Paper Constitution” Preserved by Matthew Paris’, EHR lxv (1950), 213–21. 56 Stacey, Politics, 258–9. 57 W.M. Ormrod, ‘Royal Finance in Thirteenth–Century England’ TCE v, 143. See also J.L. Bolton, ‘Inflation, Economics and Politics in Thirteenth-Century England’, TCE iv, 1–14. 58 Ormrod, ‘Royal Finance’, 145. 59 Ibid., 146–7. 60 Ibid., 148–9. 53

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royal revenue had been considerably shielded from the ‘worst effects of inflation’, allowing Edward I to achieve the most ‘effective mobilisation of the available tax base at any time between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries’.61 Nick Barratt’s contribution to this volume has combined both strands of exchequer research and blended them into a single entity. Tracing the evolution of the exchequer throughout the thirteenth century, he investigates how the role of the exchequer within the financial administration ‘rapidly changed’ from the heyday of the Dialogus de Scaccario to the ‘collapse in its authority in the crisis of 1258’. Barratt re-evaluates the revival of the exchequer as an institution, arguing that the beginnings of the process of recovery can be dated to February 1270. Having established the state of the exchequer under Edward I, Barratt also uses evidence of the extent of the level of indebtedness to reinterpret the operations of the exchequer before and after the political crisis of 1297. Within fifty years of the separation of the exchequer from the curia regis, the law courts were to experience a similar process of differentiation.62 Between 1154 and 1307, England’s legal administration underwent a series of radical and far-reaching developments. Many of its most distinctive features became crystallised, including the use of juries to ascertain facts and apportion guilt, standardised returnable writs to initiate suits involving land disputes and the evolution of a professional judiciary.63 These developments resulted in an explosion in the levels of litigation being undertaken in the royal courts, a circumstance which led, in turn, to further judicial innovations. Underpinning this rise in litigation was an increasingly sophisticated network of central and local courts. At its apex was the curia regis, the king’s ‘honour court’ that was centred upon his person.64 By the end of the twelfth century, a new sedentary court, the common bench, independent of the curia regis, had emerged.65 The beginnings of the king’s bench can also be discerned, the proceedings of which were held before the king in person (coram rege), although that became increasingly rare as the thirteenth century progressed. There was no clear differentiation in the business of both courts and, after 1234, there was a rough sharing of business. The common bench would deal with ‘pleas touching property rights’ that ‘needed formal and unhurried procedures’ while the king’s bench dealt with cases brought specifically before the king and reviewed cases from other courts.66 A new court entitled the general eyre was also instituted, its itinerant justices exercising a wide-ranging jurisdiction which, during the thirteenth century, made the eyre ‘an integral part of the administration of civil and criminal justice in the provinces’.67 By 1294, the amount of business was such that the eyre had ceased to function effectively and it

61

Ibid., 159–61. For a fuller discussion of revenues under Richard I and John see N. Barratt, ‘The Revenue of King John’, EHR cxi (1996); N. Barratt, ‘The English Revenue of Richard I’, EHR cxvi (2001). 62 Tout, Chapters, i. 178. 63 A. Harding, The Law Courts of Medieval England (London, 1972), 58, 62; P. Brand, ‘Edward I and the Transformation of the English Judiciary’, The Making of the Common Law (London, 1992), 135–68. See also P. Brand, The Origins of the English Legal Profession (Oxford, 1992). 64 Harding, Law Courts, 38. 65 Crown Pleas of the Wiltshire Eyre, 1249, ed. C.A.F. Meekings (Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Soc., Records Branch, xvi, 1949), 54; Tout, Chapters, i. 10–12. 66 Harding, Law Courts, 77. 67 Crown Pleas of the Wiltshire Eyre, 2.

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was suspended, being replaced by commissions of oyer and terminer, justices of the peace and the assize system.68 The procedures followed within these royal courts were the subject of two important legal treatises: Glanvill and Bracton’s De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Anglie.69 Both works describe how the royal courts dealt with civil and criminal pleas, Bracton’s using real cases to support his conclusions. Academic study of England’s medieval legal system has had a distinguished lineage, modern scholarship beginning with the late nineteenth century historian F.W. Maitland. His two-volume study, The History of English Law before the time of Edward I, traced the development of the English legal system from its AngloSaxon origins until Edward I’s accession. The History used the evidence of the surviving plea rolls to illustrate the procedures followed in both criminal and civil litigation. Maitland was primarily concerned, however, with the evolution of the ‘original’ writ, which was ‘to become the ground plan of all civil justice’.70 These were standardised with Henry II’s introduction of possesory assizes such as mort d’ancestor; each new action leading to differing procedures that were dependent on carefully worded formulas.71 The History likewise concentrated heavily upon those civil actions that resolved disputes over land tenure, new actions being introduced in response to individual points of law arising from particular cases.72 Henry III’s reign saw a significant increase in both the range of writs available to litigants and the actual numbers of writs being issued.73 Such was the growing complexity of the law, two legal treatises were produced explaining the customs and procedures in England’s royal courts.74 Maitland therefore defined the institutional context of legal growth in terms of the various courts and procedures. The History did, however, exaggerate somewhat the extent of development of the English legal system and its procedures. While demonstrating the Englishness of the common law, he did acknowledge its ‘continental borrowings’.75 Tout only briefly discussed England’s legal administration, concentrating mainly upon the development of the common bench as a court entirely independent from the curia regis.76 It was his contemporary, Lady Stenton, who advanced the academic study of the medieval legal system by building upon Maitland’s foundations. Editing a number of plea and eyre rolls for publication, she used the evidence of these documents to illustrate the machinery of both these courts during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Stenton’s edition of both the 1218–19 Lincolnshire and

68

Harding, Law Courts, 86–8, 92–8. Tractatus de legibus et consuetudinibus regni Anglie qui Glanvilla vocatur, ed. G.D.G. Hall (Oxford, first publ. 1965, repr. 1998); Bracton de Legibus et Consuetudinibus Anglie, ed. G.E. Woodbine, translated with revisions and notes by S.E. Thorne, 4 vols (1968–77). 70 HEL, i. 150. 71 Ibid. For a recent critique of Maitland’s analysis of judicial writs see J.C. Holt, ‘The Writs of Henry II’, The History of English Law. Centenary Essays on ‘Pollock and Maitland’, ed. J. Hudson (Oxford, 1996), 47–64. See also J. Hudson, The Formation of the Common Law: Law and Society in England from the Norman Conquest to Magna Carta (London, 1996). 72 HEL, i. 195–6. 73 Ibid. See also Harding, Law Courts, 86–8. 74 HEL, i. 163–6, 206–9. Recently, Maitland’s belief in the overall reliability of Bracton has been challenged. See P. Brand, ‘The Age of Bracton’, in Hudson, History of English Law, 83–7. 75 P.R. Hyams, ‘Maitland and the Rest of Us’, in Hudson, History of English Law, 218. 76 Tout, Chapters, i. 10–12. 69

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1221 Worcestershire eyres was of particular importance.77 She also attempted to use surviving writs to establish the development of the courts in the last decade of the twelfth century. Comparing the writs to those described in Glanvill, she notes some modifications in the wording used but asserts that, nevertheless, ‘at the turn of the century it was still safe to use Glanvill’s book as a general guide to the business which could be brought before the court’.78 An analysis of the essoins on the early thirteenth century plea rolls established, however, that considerable amounts of business came before the courts that left little or no information on the rolls of pleas.79 From the evidence highlighted by her research, Stenton concluded that King John had a ‘definite policy with regard to his courts of justice’, his own court forming a ‘core of expert judges to hear pleas which were summoned coram rege’. By allowing litigants ready access to his courts, ‘ameliorating the rigour of the law for the helpless’ and the creation of a stable court at Westminster, John ‘deserves credit rather than blame’ in the development of the English legal system.80 Lady Stenton had ‘illuminated the history of the central and itinerant royal courts of justice during the reigns of Henry II, Richard I and John and the very earliest years of the reign of Henry III’.81 It was C.A.F. Meekings, however, who scrutinised the records of Henry III’s reign, a period ‘of vital importance to the development of law and judicial administration’ in England.82 An assistant keeper at the Public Record Office, his writings were based upon a systematic and exhaustive examination of the surviving judicial records. Although Meekings wrote on a range of legal issues, it was the general eyre that he concentrated upon most. In the introduction to his edition of the Crown Pleas of the Wiltshire Eyre, 1249, Meekings described in consummate detail the workings of the crown pleas within the eyre. Using the cases that featured in the roll, he demonstrated the processes by which appeals were brought before the itinerant justices and how the system of bail and attachment functioned.83 It was Meekings’ introduction to the 1235 Surrey eyre, however, that contained his most comprehensive discussion of the general eyre. Having dealt with the procedures followed in both civil and crown litigation, he analysed the profits that were generated by a session of the eyre. Meekings’ interests extended to the justices themselves, with his providing biographies of some of those sitting in court such as Martin of Pateshall and William of Raleigh.84 The judiciary has also been the subject of research by Paul Brand, who has mainly focused upon both the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in his work. Tracing the career 77

Rolls of the Justices in Eyre being the rolls of pleas and assizes for Lincolnshire 1218–9 and Worcestershire 1221, ed. D.M. Stenton (Selden Soc., liii, 1934). See also D.M. Stenton, English Justice between the Norman Conquest and the Great Charter, 1066–1215 (Philadelphia, 1964). 78 Pleas before the King or his Justices 1198–1212, ed. D.M. Stenton, 4 vols (Selden Soc., lxvii–viii, lxxxiii–iv, 1948–67), i. 10, 22, 25. 79 Ibid., iii. xvi. 80 Stenton, English Justice, 97–9, 113–14. For John’s contribution to the development of the English legal system see also J.C. Holt, Magna Carta (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1992), chapter 5; R.V. Turner, ‘John and Justice’, in Church, King John: New Interpretations, 317–33. 81 C.A.F. Meekings, Studies in 13th Century Justice and Administration (London, 1981), xi. See also D.M. Stenton, ‘King John and the courts of justice: the Raleigh Lecture on History’, Proceedings of the British Academy 44 (1958). 82 Ibid., xi. 83 Crown Pleas of the Wiltshire Eyre, 46–51, 69–91. 84 The 1235 Surrey Eyre, ed. C.A.F. Meekings, 2 vols (Surrey Record. Soc., xxxi, 1979), i. 128–40; Meekings, Studies, 157–80.

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of Henry of Bracton, he argued that ‘from the very beginning’ there had been an even balance between clerics and laymen ‘within the ranks of the royal justices’. This remained the case through to the reign of Edward I.85 In his The Origins of the English Legal Profession, Brand argued that the ‘transformation of the English legal system’ had ‘brought into existence national courts manned by legal experts attracting large amounts of legal business’.86 He challenged Lady Stenton’s contention that professional attorneys, who were to appear in court in place of the litigant, can be identified as early as King John’s reign. Brand argued that although ‘protoprofessional’ attorneys can certainly be identified, it was during the following reign that the fully professional attorney could be detected in the records, his appearance being dated to the 1260s at the latest.87 Coinciding with the rise of the skilled attorney was the advent of a rather different legal representative: the serjeant. An experienced ‘pleader’ who would speak on the behalf of the litigant, the professional serjeant can first be discerned in common bench during the 1230s.88 The emergence of professional lawyers was engendered, Brand contended, by a combination of factors that included the heightened importance of specialist pleading in court, the law’s increasing complexity and the removal of the necessity to appear in court in person.89 Under Edward I, fuelled by ever increasing levels of legal business, there developed a core of thirty full-time professional serjeants. The legal system within which these ‘lawyers’ operated was the subject of Brand’s volume of collected essays, The Making of the Common Law. This work attempted to place the development of the common law into a wider social context by addressing a range of issues. Highlighting the institutional changes which created a single national legal system, Brand asserted that ‘it was only these changes which made possible the emergence of a genuinely national Common Law in England’.90 These same changes also led, during the second half of the thirteenth century, to the emergence of a ‘career professional judiciary’, a development that coincided with the growth of an English legal profession.91 Believing that legal history involves ‘the reconstitution of the wider legal systems within which legal ideas and rules developed and through which they were applied’, Brand considered how legislation was drafted, focusing upon the 1279 statute of Mortmain.92 It is the licensing system instituted to enforce this statute which is also the subject of Brand’s contribution to this volume. Before 1279, such controls as were exercised over the granting of land and other types of property to the church had been exercised directly by the lords by whom such property was held. The statute prohibited all future grants to the church on pain of forfeiture. Within months, however, it became clear that the intention was not to stop all future grants but to make them subject to the requirement of a royal licence. Within a few years an elaborate licensing system had been created. Using

85

Brand, ‘The Age of Bracton’, 87–9. For the development of the judiciary under Edward I see Brand, ‘Edward I and the Transformation of the English Judiciary’, 135–68. 86 Brand, Origins, 158–9. 87 Ibid., 50, 65; Pleas before the King or his Justices, iii. xxxvi. 88 Brand, Origins, 54–65. 89 Ibid., 68–9. 90 P. Brand, ‘The Origins of English Land Law: Milsom and After’, Making of the Common Law, x, 203–26. 91 Brand, ‘Transformation of the English Judiciary’, xi, 135–68. 92 Ibid., ix, 233–44.

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the surviving governmental records in the Public Record Office, Brand looks at the evidence for the working and elaboration of that licensing system down to 1307. The implementation of the Angevin legal reforms and the dispensation of justice by the central courts were reliant upon the active participation of the knights of the shire. Dominating local office, they served as coroners, under-sheriffs and forest officials.93 Knights also played an active role in judicial proceedings, most especially in the grand assize. Four knights of the county were instructed by the sheriff to elect another twelve knights who would ‘declare which party had the greater right to the land’ that was in dispute.94 Theoretically, only knights could act as grand assize jurors: on occasions when there were insufficient knights, ‘grand assizes simply were not held’.95 This reliance upon the local knightly elite is the focus of Anthony Musson’s essay. For much of the thirteenth century the responsibility of the general eyre for hearing possessory assizes and trying prisoners through gaol delivery was supplemented by special commissions under what has become known as the ‘four knights’ system. Compared with the fourteenth century there are fewer records of proceedings under these commissions, but the enrolled commissions do survive to give an indication of the personnel staffing them. Musson argues that whilst the name ‘four knights’ is misleading because justices from the central courts often served on them, the commissions still provided valuable judicial experience for a group of men within each county and reveal something about the overlap between central and local justice. This overlap was replicated in an administrative context, the central institutions being underpinned by a wider layer of local government based primarily upon the chief organisational unit: the county. At the apex of the shrieval administration was the sheriff. Functioning as the conduit between central and local government, he was the king’s principal representative in the shires. Historical analysis of the office of sheriff and its inherent responsibilities originated with the American historian, W.A. Morris.96 Earlier historians such as Tout and Maitland briefly discussed the role of the sheriff but it was Morris who charted the evolution of the office of sheriff from its Anglo-Saxon beginnings until the end of the thirteenth century. Although its functions, status and powers were to alter substantially during this period, some core features had been preserved. Morris suggested that the most crucial function of the office was its financial role. Sheriffs were responsible for the collection of the county farm and, twice annually, accounted for it at the exchequer.97 Outstanding royal debts were collected by the sheriff using their power of distraint while being accountable for the revenues from judicial fines and oblata.98 In addition to the fiscal responsibilities inherent in the office, the sheriff exercised a judicial function. 93

P.R. Coss, ‘Knighthood and the Early Thirteenth-Century County Court’, TCE ii, 45–58; D.A. Carpenter, ‘Was There a Crisis of the Knightly Class in the Thirteenth Century? The Oxfordshire Evidence’, The Reign of Henry III (London, 1996), 350. For a comprehensive discussion of the role of the coroner see R.F. Hunnisett, The Medieval Coroner (Cambridge, 1961). 94 Glanvill, 30–1; S.F.C. Milsom, Historical Foundations of the Common Law (2nd edn, London, 1981), 130. 95 J. Quick, ‘The Number and Distribution of Knights in Thirteenth Century England: The Evidence of the Grand Assize Lists’, TCE i, 114–15. 96 W.A. Morris, The Medieval English Sheriff to 1300 (Manchester, 1927). 97 Ibid., 147, 242. See also W.A. Morris, ‘The Sheriffs and the Administrative System of Henry I’, EHR xxxvii (1922). 98 Morris, Medieval Sheriff, 148, 246–7.

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The ‘bulk of judicial writs’ were served and executed by the sheriff in his capacity as the chief administrative official of the shire.99 Presiding over the proceedings of both the county court and the twice-yearly tourns, he would supervise the election of the county coroners and knights of the shire.100 He had authority to attach defendants, and apprehend and imprison criminals, as well as authorising the release of prisoners upon the receipt of a royal writ.101 Control of the prison itself was determined by his custody of a royal castle.102 The castellanship of a royal fortress would also reinforce the sheriff’s military role. In times of war he would summon the crown’s tenants-in-chief in readiness for military service. Often the crown requested him to provide transport, supplies and messengers for its various campaigns.103 By the end of the thirteenth century, however, Morris suggested that this military function had essentially disappeared.104 This decline in military importance was mirrored by a fall in the status of the sheriff himself. Morris demonstrated that the office ‘once conferred upon great officers of state’ had become, by the beginning of the fourteenth century, the preserve of ‘members of local families’.105 David Carpenter considered the reasons for such a transformation in greater detail in the 1970s. He asserted that the ‘thirteenth century witnessed a great decline in the political status of the sheriff, and the end of the office as it had existed since the early Norman period’.106 Throughout the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, many counties had been assigned to trusted agents and councillors – curiales – of the king. Men such as Hubert de Burgh and William de Cantilupe, King John’s justiciar and household steward respectively, enjoyed his confidence and provided the localities with a direct link to the court.107 Yet by Edward’s reign, they were primarily selected from amongst the important county families or the pool of professional administrators.108 This reduction in the eminence of the office coincided with changes in the nature of the office itself.109 Carpenter established that there was a diminution in its independence that resulted from the introduction of the justices in eyre and the office of coroner. Newly imposed increments, a fixed annual payment above the farm payable to the exchequer, drastically reduced the private profits that the sheriff was able to generate. Combined with an increase in the routine responsibilities and duties of the sheriff, it was little wonder that ‘the curiales bade farewell to the shires’.110 Our understanding of the office of the sheriff has been further enhanced with the recent publication of Richard Gorski’s volume on fourteenth-century sheriffs.111

99

Ibid., 146. For a more detailed description of the legal functions of the sheriff in relation to the royal courts see Harding, Law Courts, 36–7. 100 Morris, Sheriff, 192, 200–3. 101 Ibid., 146, 149–51. 102 Ibid., 151. 103 Ibid., 151, 234, 237. See also B.E. Harris, ‘The English Sheriff in the Reign of King John’, (unpublished University of Nottingham M.A. thesis, 1961). 104 Morris, Sheriff, 234. 105 Ibid., 167. 106 D.A. Carpenter, ‘The decline of the curial sheriff in England 1194–1258’, EHR xci (1976), 1. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid., 1, 24. See also H.M. Cam, ‘Cambridgeshire Sheriffs in the Thirteenth Century’, Liberties and Communities in Medieval England, (2nd edn., London, 1963), 27–48. 109 Carpenter, ‘Decline of the Curial Sheriff’, 31. 110 Ibid., 2, 21–4. 111 R. Gorski, The Fourteenth-Century Sheriff: English Local Administration in the Late Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2003).

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In a study of the careers of over 1200 sheriffs, he investigates a range of themes including the place of local administration in the lives of knights and esquires and their social and political suitability to the crown. In her essay, Louise Wilkinson highlights another neglected facet of the office of sheriff: its semi-hereditary nature and identification with particular families. Focusing upon two noble women, Nicholaa de la Haye and Ela countess of Salisbury who served as sheriffs of Lincolnshire and Wiltshire respectively, she investigates the reasons that underlay their appointments. Both enjoyed close ancestral associations with their counties, successive generations having served in a shrieval capacity while actively establishing strong tenurial relationships with the county elite. Wilkinson demonstrates that the strength of these traditional ties was such that they could even transcend gender. Using a combination of ancestral traditions of royal service, their position as wealthy heiresses and forceful personalities, both women successfully discharged their shrieval duties in what was otherwise a male only preserve. With the degree of overlap between the centre and local administration, there was ample opportunity for tensions to develop. This is demonstrated most clearly in the tensions that were placed upon the crown by its role as monarch and manorial lord. Royal administration depended upon a core of officials who could ensure that the crown’s will was obeyed in the most distant parts of the realm. At the apex of the system, acting as the final place of resort in disputes between tenants and overlords was the monarch. Yet the king himself held land directly in demesne. This created a tension in the role of the king as a manorial lord and as monarch which proved a dilemma for the crown and its tenants. If a tenant was in dispute with the crown, how could they obtain effective redress when the defendant was also the ‘fount of justice’. David Crook’s article discusses these tensions in detail and how royal tenants defended their rights against the crown and its officials. Concentrating upon royal lands in central Nottinghamshire, he demonstrates the differences in the king’s relationship with his tenants in the thirteenth century and in the periods immediately before and after. The papers in this volume cover a range of subjects. Yet they all have one theme in common: structural change and development. A period of administrative innovation, the thirteenth century was crucial in the development of England’s government. On occasion these innovations were experimental, modifications being introduced in light of practical experience. New procedures and processes were often created in response to a perceived problem or requirement. In other instances, the transformation was more measured, a process of evolution rather than revolution. Such were the actions of an administratively precocious, bureaucratic system of government that manifested its growth in records and ‘red tape’. Our understanding of England’s administration has expanded substantially since Tout’s pioneering work. In a world of changing historical trends, these conference proceedings demonstrate that the study of administrative history is still alive and well. Adrian Jobson

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Why 1199? Bureaucracy and Enrolment under John and his Contemporaries* Nicholas Vincent

‘In the twenty-third year of the reign of King Henry II, as I was sitting at a turret window overlooking the Thames, I was addressed by someone who said, very earnestly, “Master . . . Why do you not teach others that knowledge of the king’s chancery for which you are famous?” ’1

It is one of the greater misfortunes of English medieval history that the words quoted above have had to be invented. Historians of the Plantagenet realm can call upon an extraordinary range of administrative, financial and literary records. From the year 1199 onwards, this wealth of documentary evidence swells into a positive embarrassment of riches. After 1199, the documentary floodgates burst, and we are swiftly overwhelmed by a torrent of rolls, registers, schedules and other such wonders. The royal chancery was the source from which much of this deluge flowed. But although we have a Dialogue of the Exchequer, we pine in vain for a Dialogue of the Chancery. In what follows, I make no claim to have made good this lapse. Much of what I shall have to say has been said with far greater acuity by previous scholars: Madox, R.L. Poole, Tout, Maxwell-Lyte, Galbraith, Richardson and Chaplais, who between them have brought most of the relevant evidence into commission.2 More recently, Michael Clanchy has widened the scope of enquiry, to comprehend the broader issue of record keeping and written record as aspects of the social, not merely the administrative, history of twelfth and thirteenth century England.3 Here, I intend to address only three basic questions. What was the extent of record making and record keeping under the early Plantagenet kings, before 1199? Why should it * For discussion of various of the points raised below, I am chiefly indebted to David Carpenter, Michael Clanchy, Jean Dufour, Olivier Guyotjeannin, Michel Nortier, and to the teaching of Pierre Chaplais. A French version of this paper was read to the École des Chartes in Paris, in May 2002. The paper itself I dedicate to Michel Nortier, a great and a most generous scholar. 1 Adapted from The Course of the Exchequer by Richard Son of Nigel, ed. C. Johnson (London, 1950) (henceforth Dialogus), 5, where, of course, it was the exchequer rather than the chancery whose secrets Richard was bidden to disclose. 2 For twelfth and thirteenth-century diplomatic and administration the standard authorities remain, in chronological order, T. Madox, The History and Antiquities of the Exchequer of the Kings of England, 2 vols (2nd edn, London, 1769); R.L. Poole, The Exchequer in the Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1912); Tout, Chapters; H.C. Maxwell-Lyte, Historical Notes on the Use of the Great Seal (London, 1926); H.G. Richardson, ‘Introduction’ to The Memoranda Roll for the Michaelmas Term of the First Year of the Reign of King John (1199–1200) (henceforth Memoranda Roll 1 John) (PRS, new ser., 21), xi–xcviii; V.H. Galbraith, Studies in the Public Records (London, 1948); P. Chaplais, English Royal Documents King John–Henry VI 1199–1461 (Oxford, 1971). 3 Clanchy, Memory.

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have been in 1199 that the record keeping of the royal chancery took the quantum leap into enrolment? And how does the record keeping of the Plantagenet kings compare with that of other European rulers, and in particular with that of the Plantagenets’ chief rivals, the Capetian kings of France? Most of my evidence will be drawn from the period 1154 to 1216, with only an occasional forwards glance towards the ever greater mountains of parchment heaped up under Henry III and his successors. Nonetheless, in the process, I hope to pose one or two broader questions about English record keeping and its influence upon the writing of English history. New advances in record making and record preservation, as Michael Clanchy reminds us, were common to most parts of twelfth century Europe, and were by no means a phenomenon unique to England.4 From a very early date, the popes had maintained registers of their letters, now surviving in only a few fragments from before 1198, but nonetheless only one part of the massive bureaucratic enterprise by which the papacy communicated with and endeavoured to shape the destiny of Christendom.5 Cartularies and charter collections survive in far larger numbers for Francia and other parts of early medieval Europe than they do for Anglo-Saxon or even Anglo-Norman England.6 To this extent, the loud complaints of French historians about the feeble rate of survival of eleventh-century charters, seen as a symptom of some wider ‘crisis of feudalism’, can strike historians on this side of the Channel as more than a little outrageous.7 Nor were the Plantagenet kings the only rulers in twelfth century Europe to maintain sophisticated archives and written accounts. Fiscal accounts survive for Catalonia, Capetian France and Flanders from only a few decades after their first appearance in England.8 The French kings began keeping 4 For the proliferation of records in England, see Clanchy, Memory, chapter 2. For the European and international context, see various of the essays edited by R. Britnell, Pragmatic Literacy East and West 1200–1330 (Woodbridge, 1997), especially Britnell’s own introduction (3–24). 5 For enrolment in the papal chancery, the survey by R.L. Poole, Lectures on the History of the Papal Chancery Down to the Time of Innocent III (Cambridge, 1915), 27–36, 123–35 remains one of the best short introductions in English, although there is a wealth of more detailed studies in German, for an introduction to which, see O. Hageneder, ‘Die päpstlichen Register des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts’, Annali della scuola speciale per archivisti e bibliotecarii dell’Università di Roma, yr.12 (Turin, 1973), 45–76. 6 See here the remarks of Patrick Geary, Jean-Philippe Genet and George Beech in Les Cartulaires. Actes de la table ronde organisé par l’Ecole Nationale des Chartes . . . (Paris, 5–7 décembre 1991), ed. O. Guyotjeannin, L. Morelle and M. Parisse (Paris, 1993), 13–26, 343–61, esp. the discussion at 359–61. The standard list of English cartularies remains that by G.R.C. Davis, Medieval Cartularies of Great Britain. A Short Catalogue (London, 1958), with additions and corrections published in the annual Monastic Studies Bulletin (Borthwick Institute York, 1996–). For the most famous, and possibly unique example of a surviving Anglo-Saxon cartulary, see N.R. Ker, ‘Hemming’s Cartulary: A Description of the Two Worcester Cartularies in Cotton Tiberius A.xiii’, Studies in Medieval History presented to Frederick Maurice Powicke, ed. R.W. Hunt, W.A. Pantin and R.W. Southern (Oxford, 1948), 49–75. 7 For the debate here, chiefly between the followers of the late Georges Duby, and Dominique Barthélemy, currently a leading issue in French historical studies, see Barthélemy, La Mutation de l’an mil a t’elle eu Lieu? Servage et chevalerie dans la France des Xe et XIe siècles (Paris, 1997), esp. chapter 2, ‘ “De la charte à la notice”, à Saint-Aubin d’Angers’, 29–56. 8 For an overview, see B. Lyon and A.E. Verhulst, Medieval Finance. A Comparison of Financial Institutions in Northwestern Europe (Providence, 1967). The earliest French, Flemish and Catalan accounts are published respectively as Le Premier budget de la monarchie française. Le comte général de 1202–1203, ed. F. Lot and R. Fawtier (Paris, 1932); Le Compte général de 1187 connu sous le nom de ‘Gros Brief’, ed. A. Verhulst and M. Gysseling (Brussels, 1962); Fiscal Accounts of Catalonia under the Early Count-Kings (1151–1213), 2 vols (Berkeley, 1984). For France, see also T.N. Bisson, ‘Les comptes des domaines au temps de Philippe-Auguste: essai comparatif’, La France de Philippe Auguste. Le temps des mutations. Actes du colloque international organisé par le C.N.R.S. (Paris, 29 septembre – 4 octobre 1980), ed. R.-H. Bautier (Paris, 1982), 521–38.

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registers of outgoing letters only a few years, perhaps only a few months, after the first experiments in enrolment at the Plantagenet chancery.9 Michel Nortier, indeed, has suggested that the very earliest chancery register of Philip Augustus, now lost, opened with a copy of the treaty negotiated in May 1200 between Philip and the Plantagenet King John.10 The Hohenstaufen rulers of Sicily began registering outgoing letters at least as early as the 1230s, and in due course, by the end of the thirteenth century, we find most western rulers, from Scotland, via Flanders to Spain, compiling cartularies or registers, and engaged in the deliberate preservation of governmental archives.11 What is extraordinary about the Plantagenet chancery enrolments is the fact that they are preserved from an earlier date than the registers and cartularies of neighbouring powers, and with a comprehensiveness unrivalled anywhere else in medieval Europe. On the one hand they are symptomatic of a European-wide drive for the preservation of written records. On the other, they remind us that the Plantagenet court, as early as the 1160s or 70s, stood apart from those of other European lay rulers, not only in terms of its administrative sophistication, but in the extraordinary way that learning, literary discourse and administrative efficiency were all made to serve the same master, the Plantagenet king. One explanation for this may lie with the Plantagenet inheritance from the AngloSaxon past: the possession by the Anglo-Saxon kings of an instrument, the sealed writ, and of a system of accountancy and monetary control far in advance of those of Normandy before 1066, let alone of other parts of Europe.12 Eleventh century Europe boasts many fiscal surveys, but nothing to rival the Domesday inquest.13

9

See here the lively debate between Michel Nortier and Robert-Henri Bautier, decided in favour of Nortier’s supposition that there was once a register dating from 1200: M. Nortier, ‘Les Actes de Philippe Auguste: notes critiques sur les sources diplomatiques du règne’, La France de Philippe Auguste, ed. R.-H. Bautier, 435–8, 452–3; R.-H. Bautier, ‘Cartulaires de chancellerie et recueils d’actes des autorités laïques et ecclésiastiques’, Les Cartulaires, 363–6, 377. For an attempt to re-edit the earliest material from the surviving royal registers, see Les Registres de Philippe Auguste, i, ed. J.W. Baldwin and M. Nortier (Paris, 1992). 10 Nortier, ‘Les Actes de Philippe Auguste’, 438. 11 For a survey, see Bautier, ‘Cartulaires de chancellerie’, 363–7, with particular studies by, for example, J. Richard, ‘Les Archives et les archivistes des ducs de Bourgogne dans le ressort de la chambre des comptes de Dijon’, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 105 (1944), 123–69; T. Evergates, ‘The Chancery Archives of the Counts of Champagne: Codicology and History of the Cartulary-Registers’, Viator 16 (1985), 159–79. For an illuminating account of the 1239–40 register of Frederick II (published by C. Carcani, Constitutiones regum regni utriusque Siciliae, Naples, 1786), see D. Abulafia, Frederick II, A Medieval Emperor (London, 1988), 321–7 (a passage perhaps not surprisingly omitted from the German translation of Abulafia’s book). For attempts to reconstruct the later Angevin registers of Sicily, most of which were destroyed by the Germans in 1943, see I Registri della Cancellaria Angioina, ed. R. Filangieri, 31 vols (Naples, 1950–), with a survey of the lost archive by P. Durrieu, Les archives angevines de Naples, 2 vols (Paris, 1886–88). For Spain, see, for example, R.I. Burns, Society and Documentation in Crusader Valencia, Diplomatarium of the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia i (Princeton, 1985). For registration in Scotland after 1314, see The Acts of Robert I King of Scots 1306–1329, ed. A.A.M. Duncan, Regesta Regum Scottorum v (Edinburgh, 1988), 215–57. 12 See here the remarks of David Bates, ‘The Earliest Norman Writs’, EHR 100 (1985), 266–84; S. Keynes, ‘Regenbald the Chancellor (sic)’, Anglo-Norman Studies 10 (1988), 185–222. In general, see the classic studies by James Campbell, ‘Observations on English Government from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century’, TRHS 5th ser., 25 (1975), 39–54; ‘Some Agents and Agencies of the Late Anglo-Saxon State’, Domesday Studies, ed. J.C. Holt (Woodbridge, 1987), 201–18. 13 See here the comparative study by R.H.C. Davis, ‘Domesday Book: Continental Parallels’, Domesday Studies, ed. Holt, 15–39, reprinted with minor corrections in Davis, From Alfred the Great to Stephen (London, 1991), 141–65.

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Another explanation lies in the extraordinary strains placed upon kings whose lands stretched for several hundred miles from north to south, being divided from one another by language, custom and by the physical barrier of the sea. Even so, the German emperors ruled a far greater and a far more diverse assembly of lands without developing records or an administrative machinery to rival that of the Plantagenets. Perhaps, the costs and the administrative strain placed upon the Plantagenets, in waging near constant warfare against neighbouring rulers in France, Wales, Scotland and eventually Ireland, provided the spur to greater efficiency. Amongst those of almost unlimited wealth, be it the medieval German emperors or the sheiks of modern Arabia, only the most miserly spend their days in the counting house. The Plantagenets, by contrast, had to work far harder to keep the fiscal ball rolling. In these circumstances – historical, geographical and financial – necessity became the mother of administrative invention. Henry II and his sons not only presided over a sophisticated financial system, but fostered at their courts a quite exceptional range of administrative talents. A court that at one time or another was served by John of Salisbury, Richard fitz Nigel, Walter Map, Stephen of Fougères and Peter of Blois, not to mention a whole host of lesser figures, all of them authors as well as administrators engaged in the work of chancery or exchequer, is a court quite out of the ordinary run of twelfth century experience.14 It is surely no coincidence that the wider court circle of the Plantagenets, responsible for such letter collections as those of John of Salisbury, Gilbert Foliot, Alan of Tewkesbury and Peter of Blois, or the collections of papal decretals assembled so much more avidly in twelfth century England and Normandy than in other parts of Europe, should have been the same environment from which the first systematic enrolment of royal letters emerged since the fall of Rome.15 I shall return in due course to some rather different, and perhaps less flattering comparisons between the Plantagenet administration and its European rivals. For the moment, however, let us begin with what we know of the records of England’s twelfth century kings. Here, our principal point of departure must be the exchequer rather than the royal chancery. The English exchequer, as is well known, was by the 1130s producing annual records known as pipe rolls, which survive to us today in the form of an isolated roll for the year 1130, followed by a more or less unbroken series of such rolls from 1156 onwards.16 Again as is well known, the earliest surviving pipe roll, 14

See the remarks of M. Aurell, ‘La Cour Plantagenêt (1154–1204): entourage, savoir et civilité‘, La Cour Plantagenêt (1154–1204): Actes du colloque tenu à Thouars du 30 avril au 2 mai 1999, ed. M. Aurell (Poitiers, 2000), 9–46, following in the footsteps of the classic study by C.H. Haskins, ‘Henry II as a Patron of Literature’, Essays in Medieval History Presented to T.F. Tout, ed. A.G. Little and F.M. Powicke (Manchester, 1925), 71–7. For illuminating comparisons with France, see also J.W. Baldwin, ‘Studium et Regnum: The Penetration of University Personnel into French and English Administration at the Turn of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, Revue des Etudes Islamiques 44 (1976), 199–215, concluding (210) that ‘at the level of political administration . . . the English monarchy was almost a century in advance of the French’. 15 Most of the ecclesiastical letter-collections of Plantagenet England are considered in the introduction to the magnificent new edition of The Correspondence of Thomas Becket Archbishop of Canterbury 1162–1170, ed. A.J. Duggan, 2 vols (Oxford, 2000). For English decretal making, see C. Duggan, TwelfthCentury Decretal Collections and Their Importance in English History (London, 1963), and the particularly apposite remarks of M.G. Cheney, Roger of Worcester 1164–1179 (Oxford, 1980), chapter 5, esp. 208–12. 16 For the 1130 pipe roll, published as Magnum Rotuli Scaccarii . . . de anno tricesimo-primo regni Henrici primi, ed. J. Hunter (London, 1833), see commentary by J.A. Green, ‘ “Praeclarum et Magnificum

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for 1130, was neither the first nor the only such roll compiled under King Henry I. We know this, not only from the 1130 roll itself, but because Richard fitz Nigel, the author of the Dialogue of the Exchequer, written in the late 1170s, tells us that in his day rolls from the reign of Henry I, not just a single roll, were stored and could be consulted at the exchequer.17 Quite why the 1130 roll survives when the others are lost remains a mystery. One explanation would be that it had been taken out of, or was stored apart from, the main series when the other early rolls were destroyed, at some time between the 1170s and 1300, almost certainly earlier rather than later within this period. Together with the early rolls, at least one other was lost: the Pipe Roll 1 Henry II, for the year 1154–55, which still existed, either as an original roll or in some sort of abstract, at the time that Alexander of Swerford made excerpts from the early pipe rolls in the 1230s, but which disappeared shortly thereafter.18 Whether and in what form annual accounts of the exchequer were maintained under King Stephen, between 1135 and 1154, remains uncertain.19 For present purposes, what matters is that, under both Henry I and Henry II, pipe rolls were compiled on an annual basis in the exchequer and thereafter stored in the treasury as part of a well-established process of financial account. By 1180, another series of pipe rolls was being written in the exchequer of Normandy.20 When the Norman exchequer and its archives were evacuated to England in 1203, at the time of the Capetian conquest, the 1180 Norman pipe roll survived as part of a much more extensive series of which, today, only a small fraction remains. The Norman pipe rolls were organised on a different basis, and testified to a rather different system of accounting from that of their English counterparts.21 Nonetheless, like the English rolls, they reveal the extent to which the two exchequers, both in England and in Normandy, were already by the end of the twelfth century not only compiling but preserving sophisticated documentary evidences. Quite how sophisticated is revealed both by the rolls themselves, and by Richard fitz Nigel’s great treatise, the Dialogue of the Exchequer.

Antiquitatis Monumentum”: the Earliest Surviving Pipe Roll’, BIHR 55 (1982), 1–17. With the exception of the pipe rolls 2–4 Henry II and 1 Richard I, which were published for the Rec. Comm. in editions by Joseph Hunter (both London 1844), all subsequent rolls, to date as far as pipe roll 6 Henry III (for 1222), have been published by the PRS, and are cited below merely by regnal year. 17 Dialogus, 42, in veteribus annalibus rotulis regis (Henrici primi), with commentary by Green, ‘Praeclarum et Magnificum Antiquitatis Monumentum’, 2; Green, The Government of England under Henry I (Cambridge, 1986), 53–4. 18 For abstracts from the pipe roll 1 Henry II, see Red Book, ii. 648–58, with commentary by E. Amt, The Accession of Henry II in England, Royal Government Restored 1149–1159 (Woodbridge, 1993), 119–24. 19 See here Amt, The Accession of Henry II, 118–19; K. Yoshitake, ‘The Exchequer in the Reign of King Stephen’, EHR 103 (1988), 950–9; D. Crouch, The Reign of King Stephen 1135–1154 (London, 2000), 327–9. 20 The principal Norman pipe rolls were published by T. Stapleton, Magni Rotuli Scaccarii Normanniae sub regibus Angliae, ed. T. Stapleton, 2 vols (London, 1840). Further fragments from the TNA:PRO were published as Miscellaneous Records of the Norman Exchequer 1199–1204, ed. S.R. Packard, Smith College Studies in History xii nos. 1–4 (Northampton, Mass., 1926–27), with a fragment of the 1184 roll that has found its way into the French national archives published by L. Delisle, Recueil des Actes de Henri II roi d’Angleterre et duc de Normandie concernant les provinces françaises et les affaires de France, vol. 1, Introduction (Paris, 1909), 334–44. 21 For general remarks here, see V. Moss, ‘Normandy and England in 1180: The Pipe Roll Evidence’, England and Normandy in the Middle Ages, ed. D. Bates and A. Curry (London, 1994), 185–95, pending Dr Moss’s publication of a new edition and commentary on the entire series of Norman pipe rolls.

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It is the Dialogue that tells us much of what we know of twelfth century English record keeping. It describes in deliberate detail the process by which the English pipe roll was compiled, in duplicate or, for a period, even in triplicate, by a group of clerks ranged around the exchequer table at the Michaelmas account.22 Fitz Nigel also tells us that the pipe roll was itself merely the culmination of a process of account that involved the drawing up of numerous other written records. For example, to make up the pipe roll, it was necessary that, each year, the exchequer have sent to it from the itinerant royal chancery a list of new fines for which payment was due.23 Such lists provide us with the origin of the chancery fine and oblata rolls which first survive from 1199, but which clearly existed in some form at an earlier date, certainly from the 1170s, and which in turn were used by the chancery to compile originalia rolls, abstracting the various fines and offerings to the king into a list of specific debts for use by the exchequer.24 Beyond this, other sorts of rolls were produced in the exchequer itself. At the view of the sheriffs’ accounts taken at Easter each year, and at the main Michaelmas account, the lower exchequer compiled lists of receipts and issues. These survive in an isolated example from the 1180s, and thereafter haphazardly from the second decade of the thirteenth century.25 For a period before 1176, the exchequer attempted to compile a roll in which the individual summonses sent out to the sheriffs, listing debts owing at the next account, were copied out in detail. This was abandoned as too time-consuming.26 Nonetheless, other records, of memoranda taken at the Easter view, and no doubt at the Michaelmas exchequer, were compiled, and were to result eventually in the drawing up of fully fledged exchequer memoranda rolls, surviving first for the years 1 John,

22 For those in attendance, see Dialogus, 15ff. For duplication, and, with the advent of Master Thomas Brown, triplication of the pipe roll, see Dialogus 17–19. Before the year 9 Henry II (1162–63), the only pipe rolls to survive are those of the treasurer (E 372/1–8). From 1163 onwards, these are joined by rolls made for the chancellor (E 352/1, corresponding to the treasurer’s roll E 372/9). This, however, is more likely to reflect the haphazard survival of the chancellor’s rolls, rather than any major change in the way that the rolls themselves were drawn up. 23 Such lists or rolls are not referred to directly in the Dialogus, although as pointed out by Richardson (introduction to Memoranda Roll 1 John, xvii–xxxiii, esp. xxii–iii) their existence can be inferred from the entry of new fines, after 1180 known as noua oblata, but already recorded haphazardly from 1130, and in greater detail from 1175, on the surviving pipe rolls. 24 For the earliest fine rolls, produced and apparently stored in the chancery archive, see Rot. de Oblatis et Finibus, 1–75, headed de recepta and covering England and Ireland during the first year of John’s reign (1199–1200), with various Norman and other memoranda entered on the dorse. That there was also once an equivalent fine roll 1 John for Normandy is suggested by the survival of a Norman fine roll for the year 2 John (1200–01), headed rotulus Norm(anniae) inceptus die ascensionis domini de oblat(is) recept(is), covering the same period as the equivalent English fine roll 2 John, itself headed rotulus oblatorum receptorum: Rotuli Normanniae, ed. T.D. Hardy (London, 1835), 37–44; Rot. de Oblatis et Finibus, 76–143. The earliest surviving fragment of an originalia roll, drawn up in the chancery but apparently stored in the exchequer, dates from the year 7 Richard (1195–96): Richardson, introduction to Memoranda Roll 1 John, xxi, 85–8, from E 163/1/3. 25 Dialogus, 8–9, 32, 62, with reference to issue rolls at 62. For the earliest surviving receipt roll, see The Receipt Roll of the Exchequer for Michaelmas Term XXXI. Henry II AD.1185, ed. H. Hall and others (London, 1899). Subsequent rolls, with a detailed discussion of the process of their making, are printed as Receipt and Issue Rolls for the Twenty-Sixth Year of the Reign of King Henry III (1241–2), ed. R.C. Stacey (PRS, new ser., 49). An edition of further rolls from the early years of Henry III is currently in press for the PRS, edited by Nick Barratt. 26 Dialogus, 27, 74, an innovation attributed to Richard of Ilchester as archdeacon of Poitiers (1162/3–1172), but said to have been abandoned by the time that Richard fitz Nigel was writing in 1175–76.

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10 John, and thereafter, in more or less unbroken series from the reign of Henry III onwards.27 A quittance of danegeld issued to the subdean of Lincoln as early as Lent 1162 refers to what may well be a precursor of the memoranda roll, apparently recording business of the Easter term, rather than merely the chief Michaelmas account set out in the pipe rolls.28 Fitz Nigel also refers to a master list of farms owing from the counties and custodies, known as the exactory roll.29 Just as the fine and originalia rolls were needed to provide details of sums owing from the crown’s debtors, so, from at least the 1160s, Fitz Nigel confirms that plea rolls of the king’s justices were called in to the exchequer, to supply a record of the profits of justice and of fines owing to the king from legal actions.30 Beyond this, the exchequer generated a mass of other documents. For example, as part of the process of account, each sheriff, each year, was expected to deliver up a carefully arranged file of writs that had been received from the king or his officers, authorising expenditure from the sheriff’s own receipts.31 Since the exchequer insisted that such writs conform to particular norms, and above all that they specify an exact sum to be allowed rather than a general license to spend, the exchequer itself took responsibility for rewriting a large number of the writs of liberate and computate first issued by the king, now rephrased in proper form, written out by scribes working in the exchequer, and reissued under the exchequer seal for filing purposes only.32 Other royal letters were drawn in to the exchequer from time to time, from the king himself to authorise pardons and releases, and from those who claimed special pensions or allowances from the county farms.33 Fitz Nigel suggests that each recipient of land awarded from the county farms was expected to attend in person at the exchequer to show the king’s writ or charter authorising his award. The sheriff’s testimony that such an award had been made was not sufficient evidence in itself.34 To ensure that the sheriffs and others did not appear at the exchequer with fraudulent writs, or claim sums in excess of those referred to in their writs from the king, Fitz Nigel tells us that the itinerant royal court supplied the exchequer with 27

According to the Dialogus (p.72), hardly anything of the Easter view was recorded in writing, although the treasurer’s clerk maintained memoranda. Attempts have been made to identify the later memoranda rolls with the roll said to have been kept in the 1170s by Master Thomas Brown, in which (Dialogus, 35) were written ‘the laws of the realm and the secrets of the king’ (rotulum in quo regni iura regsique secreta conscribat). However, elsewhere (p.18) the Dialogus leaves little doubt that Brown’s roll was a third copy of the pipe roll. In general, see Richardson, introduction to Memoranda Roll 1 John, xviii–ix. For later memoranda rolls, see those published for the years 10 John and 14 Henry III (PRS, new ser., 11, 31), and Memoranda Rolls 16–17 Henry III, ed. R.A. Brown (London, 1991); Calendar of Memoranda Rolls . . . Michaelmas 1326–Michaelmas 1327 (London, 1968). 28 The Registrum Antiquissimum of the Cathedral Church of Lincoln, vol. 1, ed. C.W. Foster (Lincoln Record Soc., 27, 1931), 72–3 no.120: in Quadragesima ad scaccarium apud Lundonia, et scripta fuit quietancia in rollo, not noticed by Richardson. The quittance in question is duly noted in the PR 8 Henry II, 19, drawn up at Michaelmas 1162. However, the Lincoln memorandum appears quite explicitly to refer to a roll written in the exchequer in Lent 1162. 29 Dialogus, 62, 65: rotulus qui exactoribus dicitur quem quidem nominant breue de firmis. 30 Ibid., 70 (minores quique perambulantium iudicum rotuli), 77–8 (rotuli errantium), and cf. Richardson, introduction to Memoranda Roll 1 John, xxiii, xxxii. 31 Ibid., 87. 32 Ibid., 89–90. 33 Ibid., 32–4, 51. 34 Ibid., 85–6, apparently covering only the first year in which such allowances were to be made, although for the obligation of other pensioners to attend each year in person with their writs and charters see 39–40, 51.

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contrabrevia: copies of writs issued by the king, which could be checked off against the writs that the sheriffs themselves brought to account.35 Presumably, if a writ was presented by the sheriff that was not identical to that set out in the contrabrevia, the writ in question could be investigated and, if fraudulent, disallowed. Whether or not the contrabrevia were maintained as rolls or merely as files of copies of writs produced by the king’s chancery, they already by the 1170s represent an embryonic form of enrolment: the preservation in the exchequer, in theory at least, of copies of all outgoing financial writs issued by the itinerant chancery, as a means of controlling the accounts rendered by sheriffs and other royal officers. It is from these contrabrevia that the earliest of the so-called ‘liberate rolls’, surviving from 1199, can be considered to have developed, if indeed the earliest such rolls are not in fact merely the first survivors of a series that was originally maintained from at least as early as the 1170s or indeed from the very beginnings of exchequer practice much earlier in the twelfth century.36 As an illustration of the sheer quantity of written record that exchequer practice could generate, we have a famous letter from Master David of London, written in 1170, detailing the various royal letters that he had been obliged to obtain in order to receive a small annual payment from the county farm of Surrey, which in turn had involved slight alterations to another county farm. As proof of his £20 pension, Master David lists two distinct charters from Henry II setting out the original award: letters close sent to Henry the Young King requesting confirmation; three writs ordering the keeper of the Surrey hundred, the bishop of London and the sheriff of Middlesex to ensure the requisite payments, and a further writ of computate sent to the barons of the exchequer: in all two charters, and at least five writs to govern only one amongst many thousands of such awards made during Henry II’s reign.37 Even without the mild complexity of Master David’s case, the very simplest such

35

Ibid., 32–4, where the contrabreuia or rescripta referred to are for the most part copies kept by the chancellor’s clerks of writs drawn up in the exchequer. However at 34, Fitz Nigel refers explicitly to the duty of the constable’s clerk to bring before the exchequer contrabreuia made in the king’s itinerant court: clericus constabularie . . . destinatur autem a rege ad scaccarium cum contrabreuibus ad terminos scaccarii de hiis tantum que ad curiam fiunt. 36 As noted correctly by Richardson, introduction to Memoranda Roll 1 John, xxxiii–v. For the earliest surviving enrolments of such writs, one roll covering England and Ireland (2 John, 1200–01), without contemporary heading, the other Normandy (2 John, 1200–01), this latter specifically entitled a rotulus de contrabreuibus ann(i) ii. in Norm(annia), see Rotuli de Liberate ac de Misis et Prestitis regnante Iohanne, ed. T.D. Hardy (London, 1844), 1–11 (55 entries); Rotuli Normanniae, 22–37 (95 entries). David Carpenter has suggested to me that similar rolls to these, themselves the forerunners in many respects of the later rolls of letters close, must have been maintained from the earliest days of the exchequer, and that their non-survival from before 1200 may have resulted from their deposit at the time of the deaths of kings Henry II and Richard I in locations after 1203 lost to the French. Whilst accepting that contrabreuia were an important element of the exchequer accounts in both England and Normandy, I am inclined to doubt whether fully-fledged enrolment of such writs was an essential element from their origin. Moreover, since the contrabreuia were specifically made for dispatch to the two exchequers, the loss of rolls previous to those for 2 John must be ascribed to the two exchequers rather than to the Capetian conquest. In any event, the contrabreuia lend no support to Carpenter’s further contention that there was enrolment of many other royal letters under Henry II and Richard, the evidence for which, he assures me, perished with John’s loss of Rouen and Chinon after 1203. One might, I would suggest, as usefully ponder the habits of the giant pink sea snail as speculate over precisely what was lost from the royal archives in 1203. 37 Master David’s letter listing these writs is published in full from Vatican Library MS Latin 6024 (Letter Book of David of London) fo.144r, by F. Liverani, Spicilegium Liberianum (Florence, 1863), 617,

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transaction would have involved at least three distinct written records: a charter or notification to the beneficiary, a writ to ensure payment by the local officer, and a writ of computate to the exchequer. Behind this great haemorrhage of parchment from court and exchequer lay the desire to maintain control over the king’s finances. As Richard fitz Nigel reminds us, the process of account at the exchequer was seen very much as a battle between the sheriff – keen to conceal sources of income that would otherwise go to the crown, and to exaggerate his expenses and the extent of unrecovered debt in order to hoard profits for himself – and the exchequer officials, determined to extract the king’s receipts to the very last penny. Only through its control of written records could the exchequer hope to gain the upper hand in this battle.38 Without the exchequer’s archive of rolls, writs, or contrabrevia, there was an all too obvious temptation for unscrupulous sheriffs to alter or rewrite their sheaf of writs and summonses, to conceal debts that had been paid, to boost the sums that they were allowed in pardons and acquittances for the king’s work, and generally to play havoc with the account. It was for this reason too that, as Fitz Nigel tells us, the exchequer was rigorous in disallowing writs or records that had in any way been tampered with or from which words or letters had been erased. Most writing in the exchequer was done from dictation; all was supposed to be carefully scrutinised and checked. If corrections had to be made, either the entire writ had to be recopied, or else, as with records such as the pipe rolls, where recopying would have taken many days, no erasures were to be made, but all corrections to be inserted above the original letters and figures so as to be plain for all to see.39 This model of efficiency was honoured as much in the breach as in the observance. We have, for example, a number of original letters issued in the name of Henry II, which appear to be authentic but which nonetheless include either glaring mistakes – the omission of Anjou from the king’s title, for example – or simple corrections to spelling and grammar.40 Nonetheless, the ‘myth of administrative efficiency’, as W.L. Warren so aptly describes it, was as much a feature of Plantagenet as of Anglo-Norman England.41 whence Z.N. Brooke, ‘The Register of Master David of London and the Part he Played in the Becket Crisis’, Essays in History Presented to Reginald Lane Poole, ed. H.W.C. Davis (Oxford, 1927), 240, with extracts in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. J.C. Robertson and J.B. Sheppard, 7 vols (RS, 1875–85), vi. 617–18, and a full abstract by Richardson in his introduction to Memoranda Roll 1 John, lxxi n., lxxx. 38 Dialogus, 7 (sic in hoc inter duos principaliter conflictus est et pugna committitur, thesaurarium scilicet et vicecomitem). 39 Ibid., 31, 74, esp. 31: Cauendum autem est scriptori ne aliquid motu animi sui scribat in rotulo nisi quod thesaurario dictante didicerit . . . Habet enim rotuli scriptura hoc commune cum cartis et aliis scriptis patentibus, quod abradi non debet et ob hac cautum est ut de pellibus ouibus fiant, quia non facile nisi manifesto vitio rasure cedunt. 40 See here, for example, C 148/168, an apparently genuine writ of Henry II in favour of Thomas fitz Rocelin of Malmesbury (1154 x 1158), in which the words ‘count of Anjou’ are missing from the king’s title. For erasures and corrections, see the several minor alterations to Caen, Archives départementales du Calvados 2D14, a charter of Henry II written in an unidentified hand but apparently genuine, in favour of St-Barbe-en-Auge (1185 x 1189), printed (without notice of the corrections) in Recueil des Actes de Henri II roi d’Angleterre et duc de Normandie concernant les provinces françaises et les affaires de France, ed. L. Delisle and E. Berger, 3 vols (Paris, 1916–27), ii. 402–8 no.756. An apparently genuine charter of Henry II to Bullington Priory, BL MS Harley Charter 43.C.19, contains an obvious erasure of the Christian name Ala(nus), replaced by the name William (Bechet) as the first of the priory’s beneficiaries. 41 W.L. Warren, ‘The Myth of Anglo-Norman Administrative Efficiency’, TRHS 5th ser., 34 (1984), 113–32.

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As a model of bureaucratic process, if not of administrative perfection, the exchequer has few rivals in twelfth century Europe. In 1066, whatever system of accountancy had been inherited from the Anglo-Saxon kings, there was no exchequer. A mere hundred years later, Richard fitz Nigel could write of the exchequer as an office whose traditions were hallowed by time immemorial, and whose methods were many of them already obscure, even to those who carried them out.42 Once established, bureaucracy has a tendency very swiftly to enfold itself in the comforting cloak of tradition. To students of Max Weber, it may seem presumptuous to describe any aspect of twelfth century government as truly bureaucratic.43 The exchequer existed to serve the king. Richard fitz Nigel, like his successors for many centuries to come, was a crown appointee, removable at the king’s own will. The king’s rolls were precisely that: rolls that served the private and personal interest of the king, not public records.44 Even as late as the seventeenth century it is questionable whether England had anything approaching the sort of governmental structure that Weberian purists would insist upon as a definition of true bureaucracy. Reality, as always, tends to confound the social scientists. The pipe rolls supply a telling example here. To historians, particularly to historians working in other countries who have no practical experience of the rolls themselves, the pipe rolls represent a uniquely significant marvel: unrivalled since the fall of Rome as a means of access to the secrets of public finance. In reality, as anyone will know who has used them, the pipe rolls were already, by the 1170s, extremely inconvenient as a means of calculating the king’s income. A modern bank statement that omitted most expenditure, much income, and which never arrived at a final balance, would be considered a less than perfect resource. Attempts to use the pipe rolls to calculate the king’s income have to be conducted with as many incantations as a shaman’s prayer.45 Even in Richard fitz Nigel’s day, when the king wanted to establish how much money was in the treasury, he had to do so by a process of general audit, entirely distinct from the process by which the pipe rolls were compiled.46 Whatever the pipe rolls may reveal to us, they tell us nothing whatsoever of general audits, at least until the 1230s.47 Thereafter, the occasional glimpses that we receive of attempts to audit the king’s finances suggest that the pipe rolls were more or less useless as a means of calculating

42

For example, see Dialogus, 14, 40, where Fitz Nigel confesses his ignorance of the origins of much exchequer practice, and in particular of the process of the assay. 43 For the Weberian model, see E. Kamenka, Bureaucracy (Oxford, 1989), esp. chapter 3. 44 For the first stirrings of the idea that the king’s records were a public resource, under Edward III, see Galbraith, Studies in the Public Records, 84–8. These developments were to some extent foreshadowed by the use of the Domesday book, from the twelfth century onwards, as the ultimate record of appeal, for which see Herefordshire Domesday circa 1160–1170, ed. V.H. Galbraith and J. Tait (PRS, new ser., 25), xxiv–xxxii; E.M. Hallam, Domesday Book Through Nine Centuries (London, 1986), chapters 2–4. 45 See here, for example, the attempts made by modern historians to calculate the revenues of King John, in revision of figures first calculated by Sir James Ramsay, A History of the Revenues of the Kings of England 1066–1399, 2 vols (Oxford, 1925): J.C. Holt, ‘The Loss of Normandy and Royal Finance’, War and Government in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of J.O. Prestwich, ed. J. Gillingham and J.C. Holt (Woodbridge, 1984), 92–105; N. Barratt, ‘The Revenue of King John’, EHR 111 (1996), 835–55; N. Barratt, ‘The Revenues of John and Philip Augustus Revisited’, and V. Moss, ‘The Norman Exchequer Rolls of King John’, King John: New Interpretations, ed. S. Church (Woodbridge, 1999), 75–99, 101–16. 46 Dialogus, 24–5. 47 For attempts to audit the treasury following the fall of the treasurer Walter Mauclerk in 1233, see N. Vincent, Peter des Roches, An Alien in English Politics 1205–1238 (Cambridge, 1996), 332–3.

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overall income and expenditure.48 Nonetheless, hallowed by time, and protected by their symbiotic significance to a whole host of sinecure-holders and place-men, the pipe rolls continued to be compiled long into the nineteenth century.49 Patent rolls, first surviving from 1201, continue to be drawn up even today.50 Richard fitz Nigel admitted that he did not fully understand certain of the exchequer’s processes, just as modern scholars, entering the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, may wonder at the arcane manipulations they are required to perform using blue, green and orange plaques. Such mysteries, however, went as unchallenged in twelfth century Westminster, as they do in twenty-first century France. Bureaucracy and ritual are close cousins. Both are the eager servants of authority, and both can comfort as well as stifle or infuriate. The records of the exchequer, then, and in particular the incomparable Dialogue, tell us much both of the origins of bureaucracy, and of the production of writing at the Plantagenet court. They tell us something, too, of the haphazard nature of twelfth century archive-keeping. The great disparity between our knowledge of twelfth, as opposed to thirteenth century royal administration is a result not so much of record making as of record keeping. Many records were made in the twelfth century exchequer. They were, however, only haphazardly preserved. Fitz Nigel tells us that in the 1170s the exchequer, or more correctly the treasury, which served as the depository for exchequer documents, was filled to bursting with rolls and records. Besides Domesday Book, and the pipe, receipt and exactory rolls, these included ‘a great multitude of privileges’, writs and other records.51 It was presumably the treasury that is implied in 1164 when we are told that a third copy of the cyrograph recording the Constitutions of Clarendon was deposited ‘in the archives of the kings’ (in regum archivis).52 On drawing up his will in 1182, we are told that Henry II once again insisted that three copies be made: one to be deposited in the monastic archive at Canterbury, another in his own baggage (in cofris suis), and a third in the treasury at Winchester.53 It was upon the treasury’s archives that Richard fitz Nigel claims to have relied in compiling his lost work, the Tricolumnis, in which a history of the reign of Henry II was ranged in columns alongside copies of papal letters and

48

For attempts to draw up a full budget of income and expenditure, see M.H. Mills, ‘Exchequer Agenda and Estimates of Revenue, Easter Term 1284, EHR 40 (1925), 229–34. For thirteenth-century exchequer practice in general, see the invaluable studies by R.C. Stacey, Politics, Policy and Finance under Henry III 1216–1245 (Oxford, 1987), esp. chapters 2, 6–7; The Pipe Roll for 1295, Surrey Membrane, ed. M.H. Mills (Surrey Rec. Soc., 21, 1924), i–lxxii. 49 The last pipe rolls to be compiled were the treasurer and chancellor’s rolls for the year 2 William IV (1831–32), the year of the Great Reform Act: E 352/612; E 372/676. 50 At the time of writing, the most recent patent roll deposited in the TNA:PRO is that for the year 46 Elizabeth II (1997–98):C 66/5590, kindly checked for me by Adrian Jobson. Almost the last entry on this roll is the patent conferring knighthood upon the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, dated 28 January 1998. Seven hundred and ninety-seven years before, the very first entry on the first patent roll of King John (C 66/1 m.9), dated 23 September 1201, commands the transfer of a castle in Poitou to Robert of Thurnham. From King John to the space-age, the patent rolls stand testimony to the extraordinary tenacity of bureaucratic process once initiated. 51 Dialogus, 62. 52 Becket Materials, iii. 288, as noticed by Clanchy, Memory, 69. 53 The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols (RS, 1879–80), i. 298–80, in tribus locis regni sui principalibus iussit hoc scriptum cum sigillis appositis diligentius reseruari: videlicet in ecclesia Cantuarie, in cofris suis, et in thesauro Wintonie. A single sheet copy of the will was still in the treasury in 1323, as noted in The Antient Kalendars and Inventories of the Exchequer,

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significant royal charters and treaties.54 Other state papers were obtained by, or deliberately distributed to, chroniclers such as Howden and Diceto, working in the shadow of the court.55 ‘Spin-doctoring’, that most loathsome and overused of clichés, was a feature of the Plantagenet court many centuries before the birth of New Labour, and depended, as it had done in the Athens of Thucydides, upon the deliberate leakage or broadcast of letters of state. Working in the 1230s, Alexander of Swerford clearly had access to whatever survived of the early treasury archive. What is perhaps most surprising about Swerford is how little, as opposed to how much, twelfth century evidence he appears to have seen, or at least to have recorded. Swerford’s most notable work was done amongst the returns to Henry II’s enquiry into English knights’ fees. At the time of this enquiry, in 1166, the exchequer had deliberately commanded ‘hutches’ in which the so-called Carte Baronum could be stored.56 Today only one original return to the 1166 inquest survives, but, in the 1230s, the Carte were still to be found in large numbers: over two hundred of them were copied by Swerford into his ‘Red Book’.57 Besides this, Swerford saw the early pipe rolls, including the now lost Pipe Roll 1 Henry II, and fragments of a return to an inquest into Norman knights’ fees launched in 1172.58 For the rest, however, he and his contemporary, responsible for compiling the exchequer ‘Black Book’, transcribed a surprisingly small number of twelfth century documents: treaties with Flanders made in 1100 and 1163, the coronation charter and two further constitutions of Henry I, the 1153 treaty of Winchester/ Westminster, Henry II’s charter to London and his will, a writ of Richard I on tournaments, and the treaties made with William of Scotland in 1174 and 1189, are more or less the only such ‘state papers’ copied into either the Red or the Black books.59 Of course, it is possible, indeed highly likely, that there were many other early documents still in the treasury in the 1230s that Swerford simply ignored. But here again, if we turn to the later attempts to compile official registers, cartularies or listings of early state papers – the Gascon Calendar and Register A, for example, or the Exchequer Registers A and B, all of them written at the end of the thirteenth or beginning of the fourteenth century60 – it is apparent that by 1300 the royal archive contained a surprisingly small number of early charters and treaties: far fewer, it

ed. F. Palgrave (London, 1836), i. 1–3, and it was presumably from this that, in the 1230s, the copy was made for the Exchequer Black Book, E 164/12 fo.1r–v. 54 Dialogus, 27, 77. 55 See here the remarks of John Gillingham, ‘Royal Newsletters, Forgeries and English Historians: Some Links Between Court and History in the Reign of Richard I’, La Cour Plantagenêt, ed. Aurell, 171–86. 56 PR 12 Henry II, 72, as noted as part of a wider discussion of the 1166 enquiry, by T.K. Keefe, Feudal Assessments and the Political Community under Henry II and his Sons (Berkeley, 1983), 12. 57 For the original return, that of the bishop of Chichester (E 198/1/3), see The Acta of the Bishops of Chichester 1075–1207, ed. H. Mayr-Harting (Canterbury and York Soc., 1964), 97–8 no.35, with facsimile in W.L. Warren, Henry II (London, 1973), plate 17. For those copied into later exchequer surveys, see Red Book, i. 186ff, with some, but not all, copied into the contemporary Exchequer Black Book, Liber Niger Scaccarii, ed. T. Hearne (Oxford, 1728). 58 For the excerpts from the lost pipe roll 1 Henry II, see above. For the Norman inquest of 1172, see Red Book, ii. 624–47, with analysis by J. Boussard, ‘L’Enquête de 1172 sur les services de chevalier en Normandie’, Recueil des travaux offert à M. Clovis Brunel (Paris, 1955), 193–208. 59 See here the abstracts of the unpublished portions of the Red Book, in Red Book, i. xcii–iii, xcvi–ix, cii, nos.103–4, 107, 115–24, 134. The contents of the Black Book are published in full by Hearne, Liber Niger. 60 For the Gascon register and calendar, see Gascon Register A (Series of 1318–19), ed. G.P. Cuttino, 3 vols (Oxford, 1975); The Gascon Calendar of 1322, ed. C.P. Cuttino (Camden Soc., 3rd Ser., lxx, 1949).

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would appear, than were preserved in the royal archives of France, or indeed in the almost equally impressive archives of Champagne, Burgundy or Flanders, copied into cartularies at much the same time that the English exchequer registers were being compiled. The great glories of the Gascon Register, or the registers of the exchequer, lie in the documents that they preserve from after, not before 1200. The vast majority of writs and charters at one time kept in the twelfth century treasury were destroyed, either by accident, or more likely by a deliberate process of ‘weeding.’ This must surely have been the fate of the many thousands of writs collected from sheriffs accounting at the exchequer, which were judged to have only a limited shelf-life. From the pipe rolls, it is clear that in any one year of account, there were several hundred, perhaps several thousand, writs of perdono, liberate and computate delivered to the exchequer, and there filed away in pouches and purses: almost 300 such writs are implied even as early as the pipe roll of 1130.61 Yet of the once great blizzard of such writs issued under Henry II, there survive today, allowing both for originals and for later copies, only two writs of liberate, and a single writ each of computate and perdono.62 Only two further writs survive addressed directly by Henry II to the exchequer, one of these as a duplicate original.63 In short, of the many thousands of financial writs that were sent during Henry II’s thirty-five year reign, only six survive. As with the finance commission of Song China, which in the late eleventh century occupied 1080 compartments of rooms filled with files, most of which were quite deliberately destroyed once their utility had passed, the twelfth century English treasury must have been almost as adept at destroying as at preserving written records.64 As a centre of record storage rather than record production, the twelfth century treasury was less impressive, and certainly less indiscriminate than is sometimes supposed. Domesday

For the unpublished Exchequer Registers Liber A and B, see E 36/274–5. Various of the entries in Liber A are nonetheless calendared in Littere Wallie Preserved in Liber A in the Public Record Office, ed. J. Goronwy Edwards (Cardiff, 1940). 61 As cited by T.A.M. Bishop, Scriptores Regis (Oxford, 1961), 32, whence, with further commentary, Clanchy, Memory, 58. 62 For the writ of computate (1155 x 1158), see Registrum Antiquissimum of Lincoln, i. 104 no.162. For the writs of liberate (1186 x 1188, and 1164 x 1166), including an original E 404/1/1, see Madox, Exchequer, i. 390n.; Reading Abbey Cartularies, ed. B.R. Kemp, 2 vols (Camden Soc., 4th Ser., xxxi, xxxiii, 1986–87), 321 no.396. For the writ of perdono issued at Westminster ‘at the exchequer’ (1175 x 1179), see Recueil, ed. Delisle and Berger, ii. 118 no.542. This last writ (Recueil, no.542), apparently associated with an exchequer order of 1178 recorded by Richard fitz Nigel (Dialogus, 51), is the only one to conform to the norms set out by Fitz Nigel (Dialogus, 32–3) for the issue of writs in the king’s absence from the exchequer, which according to the Dialogus had to be witnessed ad scaccarium not only by the presiding officer in the exchequer but by at least one other exchequer baron. 63 Cartularium . . . de Colecestria, ed. S.A. Moore, 2 vols, Roxburghe Club (1897), i. 19 (1155 x 1158), and a notification on behalf of the nuns of Fontevraud, surviving as duplicate originals at Angers, Archives départementales 242H1 nos.11–12 (1154 x 1166), whence Recueil, ed. Delisle and Berger, i. 385–6 no.238. See also the further writs, both apparently witnessed by John Marshal, issued at the exchequer: The Cartulary of Cirencester Abbey, ed. C.D. Ross, 3 vols (London, 1964), i. 54 no.68; ‘The Wiltshire, Devonshire and Dorsetshire portions of the Lewes Chartulary, with London and Essex documents from the Surrey portion’, ed. W. Budgen and L.F. Salzman, The Chartulary of Lewes Priory: the portions relating to counties other than Sussex (Sussex Record Soc., 1943), 30 no.54. Both of these writs, to be dated before 1166, are witnessed by John Marshal and may well have been sent under the exchequer seal rather than the king’s ambulatory great seal. 64 R. Britnell, in Pragmatic Literacy East and West, 187, and cf. 185–8, 217–34 for some idea of the almost unimaginable scale of the archival losses from China.

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Book, the pipe rolls, and Swerford’s copies of the Cartae Baronum together make up a uniquely rich series of administrative records, unrivalled by any other European polity, up to and including the archive of the popes. In terms of its more mundane twelfth century records, however – writs, charters and treaties – the English royal archive was surprisingly ill-kept. For an explanation of this we need to turn now from the exchequer to that other great office of twelfth century English government: the royal chancery. The chancery did not exist to serve the exchequer, any more than the exchequer existed to serve the chancery. Only a small part of the chancery’s work was taken up with compiling lists of fines or originalia rolls, directly inspired by exchequer practice. Likewise, the writs and contrabrevia sent from the itinerant chancery to the exchequer represented only a small proportion of the chancery’s much wider responsibilities as an agency for issuing charters and writs. Writs of liberate would have been needed to authorise expenditure, whether or not the exchequer had existed to subject them to a sophisticated process of account. The exchequer’s procedures are meticulously recorded by Richard fitz Nigel. The chancery, by contrast, remains an enigma. Historians of the English royal chancery lament the lack of anything by way of a treatise or general guidance on chancery practice, even as late as the fifteenth century.65 For the twelfth century our knowledge of its workings is that much more obscure. In theory, the chancery was the office of royal government responsible for issuing letters from the king. In practice, it is very difficult to establish how such letters were drafted, copied out, sealed and dispatched. Much recent work, both in England and on the continent, has emphasised the extent to which the very term ‘chancery’ is an anachronism when applied to the twelfth century, inadequate in describing the complicated process by which petitioners, or even the king himself obtained the written records that they sought.66 Even as late as the reign of Henry II in England, or Philip Augustus in France, the number of chancery clerks and scribes directly or permanently employed by the king needs to be offset against the number, sometimes a very high number, of such clerks and scribes who worked only occasionally for the king, but who were otherwise attached to the service of monasteries, churchmen, or who worked, as we would now put it, freelance.67 In England, it is the reign of Henry II that appears to mark the watershed between a preponderance of royal documents drafted according to royal forms but produced outside any official royal chancery, and a preponderance of royal documents drafted and written by the king’s own clerks and scribes. But even here, doubts remain.

65

See here the remarks on the earliest surviving chancery ordinances, the ‘Ordinationes cancellarie’, which first survive in a version of 1417: M. Richardson, The Medieval Chancery under Henry V (List and Index Soc., Special Ser., 30, 1999), 9–11. For earlier descriptions of the chancery establishment, the earliest inserted into the legal treatise Fleta, see Chaplais, English Royal Documents, 20–3. 66 O. Guyotjeannin, ‘Ecrire en chancellerie’, Auctor et auctoritas: invention et conformisme dans l’écriture médiévale. Actes du colloque tenu a l’Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (14–16 juin 1999), ed. M. Zimmermann (Paris, 2001), 17–35. 67 For the chancery of Henry II, the classic study remains that by Bishop, Scriptores Regis, with a summary of Bishop’s findings by Clanchy, Memory, 57–8. For questions over the size of the chancery staff under Philip Augustus, even as late as the 1220s, see J. Dufour, ‘Peut-on parler d’une organisation de la chancellerie de Philippe Auguste?’, Archiv für Diplomatik 41 (1995), 249–61, suggesting that a large number of the documents issued in the name of the king of France, as late as the 1220s, continued to be written outside the embryonic royal chancery.

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Amongst the five hundred or so original letters of Henry II that survive, most are written according to established formulae and using a fairly standardised script and layout, but only a relatively small proportion of these can be assigned to the work of identifiable scribes known to have written two or more royal letters. In other words, either there were many scribes attached to the court, most of whose work is now lost, or there were only a handful of royal scribes whose work was supplemented by that of a large number of others only occasionally called upon to write letters in the king’s name.68 Of these two possibilities, the first is easily the more attractive, since it is clear that the surviving evidence represents only a tiny fraction of the total number of charters and writs that were originally composed. With only one original writ surviving from the many thousands of lost writs of liberate and computate sent to the exchequer under Henry II, we cannot even begin to guess the proportion of such writs written by royal, as opposed to ‘unofficial’ scribes. Even so, if we allow that the surviving evidence conceals the fact that the writers of many royal letters were more regularly employed by the king than it is possible to prove; there are many other documents issued in Henry II’s name that were clearly written by scribes attached to the beneficiary rather than to the king. Some of these are forgeries. Others, however, suggest that the king’s seal was regularly appended to letters written by scribes not permanently employed at court.69 Beneficiaries, as has become apparent in recent years, were well-versed at drafting, or in employing others who knew how to draft, documents that conformed to the expected standard, whether of royal, episcopal or even papal letters.70 When we ask ourselves even so simple a question as what was the royal chancery in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, we end up with an answer reminiscent of Walter Map’s attempt to describe the protean nature of the Plantagenet court. After much beating about the bush, and echoing Porphyry, Map defined the court as

68

For the surviving original charters of Henry II, see Acta of Henry II and Richard I: Handlist of Documents Surviving in the Original, 2 vols, ed. J.C. Holt, R. Mortimer and N. Vincent (List and Index Soc., Special Ser., 21, 27, 1986–96). 69 All told, we know of something over 500 original charters of Henry II to have been preserved into the twentieth century. Of these, at least 320 can be attributed to one or other of the twenty-eight scribes whose work Bishop associated with Henry II’s chancery. 126 charters were identified by Bishop as being written in non-chancery hands, to which a further sixty of the newly discovered charters can probably be added, making for a total of 186. Forty-four charters recorded in modern times were either destroyed in World War II, mostly in the archives départementales at St-Lô, or have not been traced. In short, something between 60 and 70% of the surviving originals of Henry II were produced by ‘chancery’ scribes, something between 30 and 40% by beneficiaries or by scribes working outside the ‘chancery’. These figures can usefully be compared to the much lower figures for ‘chancery’ production recorded for twelfth and thirteenth century lay magnates such as the earls of Chester and Gloucester (see here T. Webber, ‘The Scribes and Handwriting of the Original Charters’, The Earldom of Chester and its Charters: A Tribute to Geoffrey Barraclough, ed. A.T. Thacker, Journal of the Chester Archaeological Soc., 71 (1991), 137–51), or the quite remarkable statistics furnished by The Original Acta of St. Peter’s Abbey, Gloucester c. 1122 to 1263, edited by Robert B. Patterson, Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Soc., Gloucestershire Record Ser., 11 (1998), suggesting that despite the identification of nineteen scribes working for the monks of Gloucester between the 1120s and the 1260s, these nineteen scribes wrote only seventy-one of the 393, or less than 18% of the total of, surviving originals for Gloucester. 70 See here the remarks of Guyotjeannin, ‘Ecrire en chancellerie’, 29–31. For the ‘forgery’ or ‘improvement’ of papal letters in thirteenth century England, for the most part by scribes who had a clear idea of the norms that they were expected to follow, see J.E. Sayers, Original Papal Documents in England and Wales from the Accession of Pope Innocent III to the Death of Pope Benedict XI (1198–1304) (Oxford, 1999), lxxiv–vi.

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‘a number of objects bearing a certain relation to one principle’.71 The principle of the royal chancery was the king’s great seal, yet even here, as early as the 1170s, the pre-eminence of the great seal was fast becoming an administrative fiction. Under Henry II, as under his successors, vast numbers of letters were issued in the king’s name, without either the king or the great seal coming anywhere near them. Many financial writs, as the Dialogue makes plain, were rewritten or first composed in the exchequer, using the exchequer copy of the great seal.72 Fitz Nigel tells us that summonses to the sheriffs were sent out each year ‘from the side of’ the exchequer seal, perhaps an early reference to the practice of applying only the foot of the seal to the wax.73 Vast numbers of routine legal writs were issued each year by the king’s justiciar, again under the exchequer seal. Many of these maintain the fiction that they were issued by the king himself. To begin with, it had indeed been the king with whom the issue of such writs was negotiated. Between 1158 and 1163, for example, when Richard of Anstey was pursuing his claim to his uncle’s inheritance, he or his attornies had to approach Henry II in person, travelling as far as Normandy or Toulouse, and there waiting for days or even months for a personal audience with the king, before they could obtain the half dozen or more writs that they sought.74 Later, however, and certainly by the 1180s, routine writs of justice could be obtained from the chancery or from the justiciar in England, without the need for any personal interview with the king: a reflection, of course, of the sheer number of cases that were now being drawn before the king’s courts as a result of Henry II’s legal reforms. Even as early as 1160, John of Salisbury could write to the king’s chancellor, for a pair of routine writs, apparently without any need to approach the king in person.75 A similar ease of access to writs, albeit implying that much money and favours had to be distributed to oil the wheels of the chancery, is implied by Walter Map.76 The rate at which royal writs was produced can only be guessed at for the 1180s and 90s. Some indication is nonetheless provided by a file of seventy-seven miscellaneous original judicial writs preserved from the Michaelmas term of 1199, and by a roll, entitled the rotulus de illis qui posuerunt se in magnam assisam domini regis post coronationem domini Regis Ricardi, which Richardson identified as a roll produced in 1190–91 by the justiciar’s chancery, listing 136 cases which must each have involved the issue of at least one routine writ of peace.77 Most judicial writs were issued de cursu, copied out by fairly junior scribes, and requiring little or no discussion. Where a writ had to be adapted to suit the requirements of a particular 71 Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles, ed. M.R. James, C.N.L. Brooke and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1983), 2–3: multitudinem quodammodo se habentem ad unum principium. 72 For the uses of the exchequer seal, see Dialogus, 14, 16, 18–21, 26, 32–4, 62, 70–1, 73–4, 78–9, 89–90. For its appearance and subsequent history, see Tout, Chapters, i. 140–50; Chaplais, English Royal Documents, 46–8. 73 Dialogus, 21: summonitions . . . a latore sigilli regii signatas. For the use of the foot of the great seal, the pes sigilli, see Maxwell-Lyte, Great Seal, 305–9; Chaplais, English Royal Documents, 10, 48, 62 no.9c. 74 P.M. Barnes, ‘The Anstey Case’, A Medieval Miscellany for Doris Mary Stenton, ed. P.M. Barnes and C. Slade (PRS, new ser., 36), 1–23, where the issue of at least seven royal writs is implied. 75 The Letters of John of Salisbury I: The Early Letters (1153–1161), ed. W.J. Millor, S.J. and H.E. Butler and C.N.L. Brooke (London, 1955), 223 no.128. 76 Map, De Nugis Curialium, 486–7, a story analysed further by N. Vincent, The Lucys of Charlecote: The Invention of a Warwickshire Family 1170–1302, Dugdale Soc., Occasional Papers 42 (2002), 6. 77 Richardson, introduction to Memoranda Roll 1 John, lii–iv, discussing KB 26/12, printed in CRR, i, 1–14. For other court rolls of Richard I, and their printing, see the brief note in CRR, i, viii. For the writs

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case, it was necessary to purchase what Bracton described as brevia magistralia, otherwise known as writs of grace, drafted by one of the more senior chancery clerks, probably those same clerks known by the mid-thirteenth century as the clerici de precepto.78 By the early fourteenth century, it has been estimated that the royal chancery was issuing more than a hundred routine legal writs on most days, and sometimes as many as two or three hundred.79 For another class of writs of which we know even less than we do of writs of justice or finance, we need only look to the Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal. Here we are told that in one night, in 1188, the future King Richard I dispatched more than two hundred writs, summoning his knights to war.80 Two hundred writs in a single night may include some element of poetic license. Even so, of the frantic activity that war produced amongst the chanceries of England’s twelfth-century kings, we have today only one single writ of military summons. Its survival, as a copy later cut up to make parchment seal tags, must be accounted little short of miraculous.81 Most writs of summons were ephemeral, destroyed almost as soon as they were received. Most legal and financial writs were returnable, intended to be delivered up to the king’s sheriff, justices or exchequer, filed away, and, in the vast majority of cases, sooner or later destroyed. The royal letters that survive to us from the twelfth century are most of them letters patent, or charters, preserved because they remained with their beneficiaries who then copied them into cartularies or had them recited and confirmed in charters of inspeximus issued by later kings. Our evidence for twelfth century government is therefore hopelessly inadequate as an expression of the extent of documentary production. Piecing together the letters, or mentions of letters, preserved as originals or as later copies, historians have unearthed something over 1600 letters of Henry I; 1050 for King Stephen and his Angevin rivals; 3100 for Henry II, and perhaps as many as 1200 for Richard I: a grand total of 6950 for the entire twelfth century, or roughly seventy royal letters per year.82 As we would expect, the survival rate, and we must assume the rate of production, was much higher at the end of the twelfth century, roughly 120 letters a year, than under Henry I, whose yearly average was nearer fifty. Again as we should expect, the surviving charters tend to cluster towards the beginning of each

produced by the justiciar in 1199, now KB 136/1/1, see Pleas Before the King or His Justices, ed. D.M. Stenton, 4 vols (Selden Soc., lxvii–viii, lxxxiii–iv, 1948–67), i. 350–416; iii. xi–xii, with other early examples of justiciars’ writs and a discussion of the justiciar’s chancery printed by Richardson, introduction to Memoranda Roll 1 John, lxiii–lxxxvii. For other early files of judicial writs, the earliest from 1218, see the list in The Roll and Writ File of the Berkshire Eyre of 1248, ed. M.T. Clanchy (Selden Soc., xc, 1973), xci–ii. 78 See here the discussion by A.E. Stamp, ‘Some Notes on the Court and Chancery of Henry III’, Historical Essays in Honour of James Tait, ed. J.G. Edwards and others (Manchester, 1933), 305–11. 79 For some figures here, see Maxwell-Lyte, Great Seal, 296; Richardson, Medieval Chancery under Henry V, 19; Clanchy, Memory, 57–62. 80 L’Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, ed. P. Meyer, 3 vols, Société de l’Histoire de France (Paris, 1891–1901), i. 296–8, lines 8217–54, esp. 8248–9, as retold by S. Painter, William Marshal, KnightErrant, Baron and Regent of England (Baltimore, 1933), 65–6. 81 N. Vincent, ‘William Marshal, King Henry II and the Honour of Châteauroux’, Archives 25 (2000), 1–15. 82 These figures are based, before 1154, upon the charters published in the Regesta Regum AngloNormannorum 1066–1154, 4 vols, ed. H.W.C. Davis, C. Johnson, H.A. Cronne and R.H.C. Davis (Oxford, 1913–69) (henceforth Regesta), and thereafter upon the editions of the charters of Henry II and Richard I which I am preparing for the British Academy.

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reign, when many privileges were brought before the new king for confirmation and reissue. Even under Henry I, however, the number of letters that survives is impressive, at least when compared to those from other twelfth century European kings.83 Like most statistics, it is also highly misleading. Many of the 6950 royal letters that survive between 1100 and 1199 are forgeries, whilst the figure of 6950 excludes the vast numbers of legal and financial writs implied by pipe rolls and the records of royal justice. Nonetheless, as the very roughest of guides they must be allowed to serve. As is well known, the chancery began enrolling its evidences, or at least the chancery rolls themselves survive, from 1199 onwards, beginning with a series of charter rolls, and thereafter continuing from 1200 with a series of rolls of writs of liberate, at first kept separately for Normandy and for England, later to develop into rolls of letters close.84 Richardson suggested that the division between Norman and English liberate rolls was determined by their intended destination, sent to either the Norman or the English exchequers.85 In fact, this is a less than satisfactory explanation, since Irish writs were also included in the English roll, whereas Irish accounts were not rendered at Westminster, but by the middle of John’s reign, at the latest, at the Irish exchequer in Dublin.86 Likewise, a number of writs to Anjou and Poitou were entered on the Norman liberate roll, when we know that Angevin and southern accounts were not rendered in the Norman exchequer, but in some other way, as yet 83

Compare, for example, the total of 457 acts recorded for Louis VI of France (of which more than 100 are merely references to written acts now lost), with the nearly 1600 charters and writs of Louis’ close contemporary, Henry I of England (1100–35), recorded in Regesta, vol. ii: Recueil des actes de Louis VI roi de France (1108–1137), ed. J. Dufour, 4 vols (Paris, 1992–93), esp. vol. iii. (Introduction), 9–10. The total for Henry I is likely to increase markedly once all additions are assembled in the projected new edition by Richard Sharpe and Judith Green. For Louis VI’s successors, Louis VII (c. 1000 surviving letters and charters) and Philip Augustus (c. 1900), see Nortier, ‘Les Actes de Philippe-Auguste’, 430. For the relatively feeble surviving output of the twelfth century papal chancery, see J.E. Sayers, Papal Government and England during the Pontificate of Honorius III (1216–1227) (Cambridge, 1984), 50. 84 The earliest charter rolls, the first fragment of which records charters issued on the 17 and 18 June 1199, are published as RCH, esp. xxxix–xl. A roll for Normandy, recording business before the Norman exchequer including large numbers of non-royal charters, for the year 2 John, is printed in Rot. Normanniae, 1–22. For the earliest surviving English and Norman liberate rolls, see above n.36, continuing thereafter with two English ‘liberate’ rolls headed rotulus breuium de liberate (3 John, 1201–02) and rotulus terrarum et denariorum liberatarum in Anglia (5 John, 1203–04), and two Norman ‘liberate’ rolls, the first headed rotulus terrarum liberatarum et contrabreuium de Norm(annia), Andeg(auia) et Pict(auia) (4 John, 1202–03), the second without contemporary heading for the year 5 John (1203–04): Rot. Liberate, 11–33, 34–108; Rot. Normanniae, 45–98, 98–122. For the earliest surviving rolls of letters close, the first headed rotulus terrarum datarum et commissarum et denar(iorum) et quietationum, for the sixth year of John’s reign (May 1204–05), see RLC. 85 Richardson, introduction to Memoranda Roll 1 John, xxxiii–iv, noting, however, that by no means all the writs so enrolled were financial writs, and that in certain cases financial writs were enrolled not on the liberate rolls but on the charter roll, perhaps because, at the time of enrolment, the charter roll lay easier to hand. 86 See, for example, a writ to the Irish justiciar, reporting the non-payment of a fine in the king’s chamber at Rouen, nonetheless entered on the ‘English’ liberate roll 5 John (1203–04): Rot. Liberate, 71, and for other Irish writs, various of them unrelated to finance, see Ibid., 22, 48, 59, 67, 70, 83, 105–6, esp. 13 for a direct reference in 1201 to a fine to be deleted from an Irish roll. Another financial writ to the Irish justiciar is enrolled in the Norman liberate roll for the year 4 John (1203–04), with a note that it should be transferred to the English roll (itself now lost): Rot. Normanniae, 77. The Irish exchequer is first explicitly mentioned in 1200: RCH, 61b. For its development and its records after 1200, see A.J. OtwayRuthven, A History of Medieval Ireland (2nd edn, London, 1980), 152–3; The Irish Pipe Roll of 14 John, 1211–1212, ed. O. Davies and D.B. Quinn (Belfast, 1941), 2–4.

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entirely obscure.87 The earliest liberate rolls would both have had to be sifted and reduced into originalia rolls to serve the needs of the various exchequers. In other words, they tell us more of the Plantagenets’ perception of their cross-Channel dominion than they do of exchequer practice. Finally, from 1201 the chancery began keeping a separate roll of letters patent, recording commissions as distinct from the more solemn privileges already enrolled in the charter rolls.88 The sixth year of King John, running from June 1204, is the first for which all three rolls – charter, patent and close – survive in anything like the form that they were to take thereafter. If we make a crude count of the letters thus preserved, we find 116 entries on the charter roll, roughly 280 letters or mentions of letters entered on the patent roll, and at least 917 writs entered on the close roll, in this year entitled the rotulus terrarum datarum et commissarum et denariorum et quietationum and for the first time covering all parts of the Plantaganet dominion from Ireland to Gascony.89 The same year also produced surviving fine and pipe rolls, and a set of plea rolls running to over 200 pages of printed text, besides, of course, the ongoing files of feet of fines preserved since 1195 as a permanent record of settlements made in the royal courts.90 The pleas recorded in 1204–05 imply the issue of several hundred judicial writs, virtually none of which were enrolled. Likewise, many of the financial writs recorded in the pipe roll are not to be found amongst those copied in the roll of letters close.91 Even so, and allowing for the fact that the charter, patent and close rolls for 1204–05 are incomplete, and that they exclude virtually all judicial writs as well as large numbers of charters, letters and writs that were never copied, either through administrative incompetence or deliberate choice; we still arrive at a figure of more than 1300 letters and writs enrolled for just one regnal year. The true total was almost certainly in excess, perhaps considerably in excess of 2000. Crude as these figures may be, they provide at least some indication of the vast change that overcomes the recording, and hence the modern writing of English history under King John. We have almost as many surviving letters from just one year of John’s reign as we do for the entire thirty-five-year reign of Henry I. It would take a dedicated masochist to pursue the count of John’s enrolled letters through to some more sensible figures, and even then we could hope for no definitive statistics. Nonetheless, from 1199, the vast base of the iceberg begins to loom into view, of which previously we have glimpsed only the puniest of peaks. Only in respect to the survival rate of royal charters, the documents for which beneficiaries paid the highest price, and hence those which they were most anxious to copy into cartularies or to preserve, can we claim to possess anything even approaching a significant

87

Note, for example, that the liberate roll 4 John (1202–03) is explicitly described as a roll relating to Normandy, Anjou and Poitou: Rot. Normanniae, 45. For the financial system and the ‘exchequers’ of Anjou and Poitou, see F.M. Powicke, The Loss of Normandy 1189–1204 (2nd edn, Manchester, 1961), 31, 236. 88 RLP, the earliest surviving roll being that for the year 3 John (1201–02). 89 RCH, 134b–50; RLP, 42–55b; RLC, i. 1–33. 90 Rot. Oblatis et Finibus, 197–286; CRR, iii, 121–347; PR 6 John, and in addition see the detailed valuation of the lands of the Normans in England for the same year, 6 John, printed in Rot. Normanniae, 122–43. Various of the feet of fines for the year are published in Fines sive Pedes Finium, 2 vols, ed. J. Hunter (London, 1835–44), with others, on a county by county basis, published by various of the English county record societies. 91 Writs referred to in the pipe roll are haphazardly indexed in PR 6 John, 341, sub breue.

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proportion of the letters originally issued by England’s twelfth century kings. The yearly average of 120 surviving letters for Richard I, for example, suggests a survival rate of considerably less than ten per cent when compared to the number of enrolled letters surviving under King John. This, of course, prompts an obvious question. When did enrolment actually begin in the Plantagenet chancery? Was it already a feature of the government of Henry II and Richard I, or was it newly minted in 1199? The most detailed, and still the best attempt to supply an answer to these questions was made by H.G. Richardson in 1943: the date is significant, since Richardson was writing in the midst of war, at a time when the rolls themselves could not be consulted in the original. Advancing a thesis which has since been widely accepted, Richardson argued that enrolment of chancery letters was the natural extension of the process by which, since at least the 1170s, the chancery had grown accustomed to supply the exchequer with rolls of fines and with contrabrevia, either in files or rolls, necessary to the annual exchequer account.92 Building upon earlier remarks by J.H. Round, and here again without exciting controversy, Richardson suggested that already by the 1180s the exchequer was keeping enrolled copies of earlier royal charters, known today as the cartae antiquae rolls, which predated the development of a fully-fledged charter roll by many years.93 As to the chancery rolls of John’s reign, Richardson concluded that there was no way of proving that they were an innovation after 1199, but that most of the evidence pointed in this direction.94 Here, however, and in an attempt to demonstrate that financial considerations lay behind the origin of the rolls of John’s reign, as behind the earlier drawing up of fine rolls and contrabrevia, Richardson advanced what even he admitted was a ‘temerarious judgment’.95 Noting an ordinance over fees for sealing royal letters, issued on 7 June 1199, and stated specifically to have been the first royal charter issued under John’s newly-struck seal, almost a fortnight after his coronation on 27 May, Richardson suggested that the chancery rolls were created in direct response to the sealing ordinance, to enable the chancery clerks to calculate the fees owing from beneficiaries for the drafting, writing and sealing of royal charters. Charters were copied in full onto the rolls, only because the scribes employed to copy them were mere automota, of no great skill or competence and incapable of constructing an intelligent précis.96 Here Richardson was undoubtedly in error, as a whole host of critics were only too keen to point out. To cite only the most obvious criticisms, many of the charters copied onto the rolls were in favour of beneficiaries who would not normally have been expected to pay a fee. The rolls are not marked up in any way for the calculation of fees, and the collection of fees was, in any case, the responsibility, at first of the chancellor for his own private profit, and later of an office known as the hanaper.97 Finally, even had the scribes of the rolls been mere automata it surely made no sense to set them to copy entire documents, when the barest of notes or listings would have 92

Richardson, introduction to Memoranda Roll 1 John, xxxv–vi, accepted in its general outline by Chaplais, English Royal Documents, 3–4. 93 Richardson, introduction to Memoranda Roll 1 John, liv–v, citing J.H. Round, The Commune of London and Other Studies (Westminster, 1899), 85–9. 94 Richardson, introduction to Memoranda Roll 1 John, xlviii–ix. 95 Ibid., xliii. 96 Ibid., xxxv–xliv. 97 See here the review of Richardson by A.L. Poole, EHR 61 (1946), 260–1, with a more accurate account of the role of the hanaper by Chaplais, English Royal Documents, 22–3.

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sufficed.98 V.H. Galbraith, in his Ford Lectures of 1948, politely nailed Richardon’s thesis into the coffin in which it rightfully belongs.99 In the pencilled notes to his copy of Richardson – which I myself bought together with Galbraith’s entire run of the pipe rolls, from a university library which should be ashamed of selling so generous and so significant a bequest – Galbraith is distinctly less polite: a warning to us all to take care when making marginal notes, and above all not to bequeath our books to philistines. Meanwhile, however, the fuss over Richardson’s theory of the charter rolls as ‘fee books’ has tended to divert attention away from other aspects of his thesis which are equally in need of correction. Above all, Richardson appears to have erred in assuming that the so-called cartae antiquae rolls – a name which they acquired only in early modern times – were necessarily an invention of the reign of Henry II. Here he merely followed Round, who in the 1890s had discovered an entry in a cartulary of Holy Trinity London, recording a plea held before the exchequer barons in 1180, in which ‘following inspection of the king’s roll in which the charter of the aforesaid King (Henry II) was set out’, the claims of Holy Trinity to an allowance from the city farm of Exeter were vindicated. This, Round suggested, proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the cartae antiquae rolls were already in existence by 1180, the particular roll in question being the roll now known as cartae antiquae N, which does indeed begin with a recital of more than twenty charters of Holy Trinity Priory.100 Round knew of the cartulary entry only from a sixteenth or seventeenth century copy.101 In fact, the cartulary itself survives, written throughout in a fifteenth century hand, long after the events which it purports to describe. The relevant passage records what may well be a genuine list of exchequer barons of the early 1180s, suggesting that there was indeed dispute over the priory’s allowances. However, the accompanying notes, which contain the all-important reference to the king’s roll, were written in the fifteenth century, and are intended to link a copy of a writ of Henry II – here dated 1180 but in reality of the 1150s – to a writ of Richard of Cornwall issued in 1256.102 The cartulary entry proves merely that in the fifteenth century it was assumed that the cartae antiquae rolls, or something like them, had existed since as long ago as the 1180s: a claim that, in itself, deserves to command little or no respect. Elsewhere, Round pointed to a reference in the life of Abbot Samson of Bury, in which Samson had a verdict of 1187/8 enrolled (verumdictum . . . inrollaverunt) by the king’s justices, in itself proof merely of what we already know: that the justices of the 1180s and 90s kept plea rolls, some of which, indeed, still survive.103 Lionel Landon, a later defender of the antiquity of the cartae antiquae rolls, merely followed Round in claiming that

98

Richardson, introduction to Memoranda Roll 1 John, xliii, ‘clerks of no great skill and of no great competence, copying clerks . . . who might find it difficult to construct an intelligent and intelligible précis’. 99 Galbraith, Studies in the Public Records, 68–71, at 69 describing Richardson’s theory as ‘frivolous’. 100 Round, Commune of London, 86–8, and for Cartae Antiquae roll N (C52/13) see The Cartae Antiquae Rolls 11–20, ed. J. Conway Davies (PRS, new ser., 33), 60–81 nos.385–435, suggesting that none of the entries on this roll can with any certainty be dated before the early years of the thirteenth century. 101 BL MS Landsdowne 114 fo.55r. 102 BL MS Lansdowne 448 (listed as Davis, Medieval Cartularies, 69 no.611), esp. fo.3r–v (4r–v, 13r–v). The original of Henry II’s charter, of unimpeachable authenticity, survives as E 40/10796. 103 Round, Commune of London, 89, and cf. The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond Concerning the Acts of Samson Abbot of the Monastery of St Edmund, ed. H.E. Butler (London, 1949), 65, iusticiarii autem assidentes verumdictum illorum inrollauerunt.

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the cartae antiquae predated the charter rolls. Landon’s only new argument was his suggestion that, since the cartae antiquae preserve copies of two charters of Richard I to Boxley abbey issued under the king’s first seal, rather than the renovation of these charters issued under the second seal, in use from 1198, the Boxley charters must have been copied into the cartae antiquae early in the 1190s: a feeble theory this, since it is clear that beneficiaries continued to press for the renewal of charters issued under Richard’s first seal, whether or not they also possessed charters issued under the second seal.104 Here it is worth remarking a feature of English diplomatic that continues to plague the study not only of the cartae antiquae rolls, but all the other chancery enrolments. Palaeographers, who would slit their own throats rather than pass up the opportunity to explain the mysteries of Domesday Book, have shown more or less complete disdain for the administrative records of John and his successors. Competent palaeographical analysis might settle the date of the cartae antiquae rolls once and for all. In the meantime, I know of not one solid piece of evidence to prove that the cartae antiquae rolls were begun under Henry II. The earliest clear proof of their existence comes in 1194, when a fine by the men of Beverley to have their charters enrolled in the exchequer is matched by the survival of four of the Beverley town charters in the so-called cartae antiquae roll ‘R’, suggesting that the cartae antiquae rolls were originally exchequer productions, solicited by the individual beneficiaries of royal charters rather than part of any wider or ‘official’ attempt by the royal chancery to enrol outgoing letters.105 Their origins may have something to do with the uneasiness felt by beneficiaries over charters issued under Richard I’s first seal, after the loss and recovery of that seal on the third crusade, and after the king’s release from his captivity in Germany. Under Henry II, by contrast, enrolment or rolls are mentioned in only two of the 3000 or more of the king’s surviving letters. A mandate to the barons of the exchequer, issued before 1158, demands that a quittance to Colchester abbey be accounted to the sheriff of Essex ‘and the same amount be deducted from the sum of my rolls’, either the English pipe roll, or the exchequer exactory roll.106 A writ to the justices of Normandy, probably of the late 1160s, likewise refers to what is clearly a Norman exchequer roll, in demanding that the fiscal obligations and privileges of the men of Fécamp be observed ‘according to what is recognised and written in my roll’ (secundum quod recognitum est et in rotulo meo scriptum).107 The use of the possessive pronoun, ‘my’ roll, is significant in both cases, reminding us once again that the exchequer rolls were not yet public records,

104

The Cartae Antiquae Rolls 1–10, ed. L. Landon (PRS, new ser., 17), xi–xv. Richardson, introduction to Memoranda Roll 1 John, lv, lvii, and Landon, introduction to Cartae Antiquae Rolls 1–10, xv, suggest that the enrolments referred to in such entries as PR 31 Henry II, 55; PR 34 Henry II, 28, 66, and especially PR 6 Richard I, 162, for the enrolment of charters in the king’s ‘great roll’ or at the exchequer, are in fact references not to enrolment in the pipe roll but in the cartae antiquae rolls, assumed already to have been in existence by the late 1180s. In fact, only the reference to a fine of 15 marks offered by the men of Beverley in 1194 for the enrolment of their charters in the exchequer (ut carte quas habent de domino r(ege) inrotulentur ad scaccarium), in PR 6 Richard I, 162, is unambiguous enough to support such an interpretation, being almost certainly related to the enrolment of four early Beverley town charters, the latest issued by Richard I at Worms on 30 September 1193, in C 52/17 (cartae antiquae roll R) m.4 nos.15–18, whence Cartae Antiquae Rolls 11–20, 130–2 nos.517–20. 106 Cartularium . . . de Colecestria, i. 19, also in Cartae Antiquae Rolls 11–20, 188 no.608, et tantumdem detrahatur de summa rotulorum meorum. 107 Recueil, ed. Delisle and Berger, i. 482–3 no.338. 105

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but remained the private possession and utility of the king. Fines to have private charters copied onto the English pipe roll were a development of the 1180s and 1190s, and even then mark only the first tentative step towards the use of the king’s rolls as a public utility, a use that was still far from settled as late as the reign of Edward III.108 For the rest, under Henry II as under Richard I, whenever the king came to confirm royal charters, it was the original charters or beneficiary-produced copies that were presented for confirmation, without any indication that the king could call upon official copies to test the authenticity even of his own awards. This, surely, is the entire point of the stories preserved in the Battle Chronicle, or the Gesta Abbatum of St Albans, in which Henry II is to be found pondering the authenticity of unsealed Saxon diplomas, or writs of Henry I, and in one case confirming a charter of St Albans by laying his hand upon it and attaching to it a thread from his cloak.109 No matter that the Battle Chronicle may itself be part of a wider history of forgery, or that the Gesta of St Albans survive to us only from a version written down in the 1250s: their failure to mention enrolment is deafening.110 A letter to the monks of Canterbury, written in February 1189, records how Henry II agreed to confirm the monks’ privileges in the face of attack from Archbishop Baldwin.111 The king, then established at Le Mans, summoned the archbishop into his presence, and meanwhile ordered Hubert Walter, dean of York, and Roger, the royal almoner, to write to the monks. Hubert then dictated or drafted (dictavit) the required letters in the presence of the monks’ proctor, who himself took them to be sealed. When the archbishop arrived he wished to inspect the letters, and dispatched Hubert Walter and Peter of Blois to the chancery (ad cancellariam) to recover them. Hubert and Peter broke the king’s seal, and despite protests from the monks’ proctor, the archbishop then retired to a private chamber (thalamum) where he added three new clauses (capitula), ordering that two sets of letters be made, one of which was given to the proctor whilst the second the archbishop retained. This story is significant in several respects. It includes, for example, what may well be the first recorded use of the word cancellaria to describe the king’s writing office.112 It supplies important proof that it was the beneficiary of royal letters who was responsible for taking them to be sealed. Its reference to drafting hints strongly at a system in

108

For enrolment of charters in the pipe rolls, apparently first practised in 1182, see Richardson, introduction to Memoranda Roll 1 John, lv, lvii–viii, citing PR 28 Henry II, 107–8, where it is worth noting that the private individual who fined half a mark for enrolment of his final concord was Oger fitz Oger, son of the former steward of Richard de Lucy, Henry II’s justiciar. For Oger, see English Episcopal Acta IX: Winchester 1205–1238, ed. N. Vincent (Oxford, 1994), 173–5 no.11. 109 The Chronicle of Battle Abbey, ed. E. Searle (Oxford, 1980), passim, esp. 214–17; Gesta Abbatum Monasterii Sancti Albani, ed. H.T. Riley, 3 vols (RS, 1867–69), i. 150–8, esp. 156, cui etiam rex manum apposuit, nam laqueum pallii sui pro testimonio apposuit. Presumably the thread was to be used for the attachment of a seal. 110 For forgery in the Battle Chronicle, see N. Vincent, ‘King Henry II and the Monks of Battle: The Battle Chronicle Unmasked’, Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to Henry MayrHarting, ed. R. Gameson and H. Leyser (Oxford, 2001), 264–86. 111 Epistolae Cantuarienses, ed. W. Stubbs (RS, 1865), 281–3 no.297, whence the abbreviated account, which also preserves the form of the royal letters as authorised by the archbishop, in The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols (RS, 1879–80), i. 439–40. 112 See Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, Fascicule II: C, ed. R.E. Latham (Oxford, 1981), 254, where the present use is not cited, and where otherwise, before 1220, the only citation supplied is to the mention by the Dialogus (p.17) of the scribe of the chancellor’s copy of the pipe roll, the scriptor rotuli de cancellaria.

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which the king’s scribes often worked to dictation – a fact confirmed elsewhere, for example in Peter of Blois’ boast that he was writing one letter whilst simultaneously dictating to no less than four scribes, and made apparent by the very considerable difference between the spellings of place and proper names of charters that survive as originals, as opposed to the versions of such charters copied into the later chancery and cartae antiquae rolls.113 The cartae antiquae, and at least some of the chancery rolls, were almost certainly drawn up by scribes working to dictation, who recorded a reliable version of standard Latin words, but who were left to make what sense they could in spelling out names which were dictated to them but which they did not see. Anyone who has experience of dictating reading-lists to students will be aware of the muddle that can arise when proper names are heard but not seen, even when such names are dictated laboriously letter by letter. For present purposes what is most significant is that the letters of 1189 were drafted, written out and sealed, with no mention of any process of enrolment. The archbishop kept one original for himself, intending to have it sent to the monks should their proctor refuse to deliver the other engrossed original. If enrolment were already a feature of chancery practice, why should the archbishop have taken such elaborate precautions in duplicating the original engrossment? The ‘chancery’, if we may call it such, under Henry II and Richard I was a place of frequent novelties. Occasionally, it made sudden and significant leaps forwards. One such is apparent in the introduction of the Dei gratia clause as a standard feature of Henry II’s letters after 1172.114 Shortly afterwards, in the immediate aftermath of the great rebellion of 1173–74, the king’s courts began issuing a newly standardised record of legal settlements, drawn up as a bipartite cyrograph opening with the words Hec est finalis concordia, and thereafter proceeding in more or less regular order, including a date, at first recorded by reference to memorable historical events, but swiftly taking on its permanent form, as a date calculated according to the king’s regnal year.115 It is probably no coincidence that our first proof that the 113

For Peter of Blois’ boasts, see Peter, ‘Epistola’ 92, in Petri Blesensis Bathoniensis Archidiaconi Opera Omnia, ed. J.A. Giles, 4 vols (Oxford, 1846–47), i. 287, Vidit quandoque dominus Cantuariensis et vos ipse cum eo multique alii, me de diuersis materiis tribus dictare scriptoribus, et uniuscuiusque calamo festinanti satisfacere, meque, quod de solo Iulio Caesare scribitur, quartam epistolam dictare et scribere, with commentary by R.W. Southern, Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (Oxford, 1970), 119–20, where Southern suggests that the boasting may have been intended more so that Peter could lay claim to the legendary competence of Caesar than as a realistic description of his working practice. Note that in any event Peter was describing work carried out for the archbishop of Canterbury’s chancery, rather than for that of the king. For detailed comparison of the spellings of personal and place names between copies preserved in the charter and the cartae antiquae rolls, see the many examples supplied in my forthcoming edition of the charters of Henry II. 114 The classic study here remains that by L. Delisle, ‘Mémoire sur la chronologie des chartes de Henri II’, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 67 (1906), 361–401, still valid despite the criticisms of J.H. Round, ‘The Chronology of Henry II’s Charters’, Archaeological Journal 64 (1907), 63–79, although subjected to further refinement by R.L. Poole, ‘The Dates of Henry II’s Charters’, EHR 20 (1908), 79–83, and H. Prentout, ‘De l’origine de la formule “Dei Gratia” dans les chartes de Henri II’, Mémoires de l’Académie Nationale des Sciences, Arts et Belles-Lettres de Caen (1918–20), 341–93. An attempt by Richardson (introduction to Memoranda Roll 1 John, xii n., whence Chaplais, English Royal Documents, 13) to date the change to the months April/May 1172, founders on the fact that the crucial charter of Henry II cited in proof (E 40/6455) is almost certainly a forgery. A full discussion of this problem awaits the appearance of my edition of the charters of Henry II. 115 J.H. Round, ‘The First Known Fine (1175)’, in Round, Feudal England (London, 1895), 509–18. Earlier final concords, unknown to Round, made at the exchequer in 1173/4, survive as BL MSS Cotton

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chancery was sending regular lists of fines and offerings to be entered on the royal pipe roll can be dated to precisely this same period, in the mid-1170s.116 Again, from 1174 or 1175, we have proof of the invention by the king, or perhaps by his seal-keeper Walter of Coutances, of a new form of confirmation charter, including the verb inspexi: a major step towards the development of the full-blown inspeximus charter that was to become so important a feature of the thirteenth century royal chancery.117 Similar leaps forward were to be made under Richard I, immediately after the king’s accession in 1189, for example, when for the first time all royal letters began to be phrased in the first person plural and to be supplied with a date as well as a place of issue: a development clearly influenced by changes to the form of the date introduced only a few months earlier to the papal chancery.118 In 1195, and as is well known at the direct prompting of the justiciar, Hubert Walter, the system of bipartite cyrographs was extended to include a third copy of final concords, thereafter permanently preserved in the royal archive as ‘feet of fines’.119 Even after the muddle of the crusade and of Richard’s captivity, during which the regular forms of the itinerant chancery to some extent broke down, order was sufficiently restored by 1198 for the king to contemplate renewing every single charter that he had issued since 1189 under his second seal: an initiative that was almost certainly intended to extract fines for resealing.120 The resealing of royal charters after 1198 was followed by, and to some extent must have served as a foretaste of, events after 1199, when John succeeded to the throne, and when beneficiaries in far larger numbers than in 1198 began petitioning the king for the renewal of their royal charters under the new king’s seal. John issued no coronation charter, unlike his father and his Anglo-Norman predecessors. Even the sealing ordinance of June 1199, which was phrased in the most solemn of language and which suggests a considerable input from the church, appears not to have been widely distributed: our sole copy survives in a cartulary of the archbishops of Canterbury, preserved we must assume by Hubert Walter, now promoted both as archbishop and as royal chancellor, and the man at whose insistence the ordinance is said to have been made.121 However, at some time in June or July 1199, Otho D iii (St Albans cartulary) fo.73v (before 6 October 1174, perhaps before 1 May 1173); Lansdowne 415 (Garendon cartulary) fo.22v (Easter, 8 April 1173); Chelmsford, Essex Record Office MS D/DEx M25 (Goldingham cartulary) fo.9v no.48 (16 October 1174). Other examples await the appearance of an edition of early final concords, planned in continuation of the edition of Henry II’s charters. Note that the innovations here were not so much a chancery initiative but the work of the king’s justices and the exchequer. 116 Richardson, introduction to Memoranda Roll 1 John, xxiii, xxxii–iii, associating the introduction of fine rolls with the appointment of Ralph de Varneville as chancellor in 1173. 117 V.H. Galbraith, ‘A New Charter of Henry II to Battle Abbey’, EHR 52 (1937), 67–73; N. Vincent, ‘The Charters of King Henry II: The Introduction of the Royal Inspeximus Revisited’, Dating Undated Medieval Charters, ed. M. Gervers (Woodbridge, 2000), 97–120. 118 Richardson, introduction to Memoranda Roll 1 John, lx–i; Chaplais, English Royal Documents, 12–15, and in general, see C. Fagnen, ‘Le vocabulaire du pouvoir dans les actes de Richard Coeur de Lion, duc de Normandie 1189–1199’, Actes du 105ème congrès national des sociétés savantes, Caen 1980, Section de Philologie (Paris, 1984), 79–93. 119 Clanchy, Memory, 68–9. 120 For resealing after 1198, and its fiscal motives, see The Itinerary of King Richard I, ed. L. Landon (PRS, new ser., 13), 173–82; Richardson, introduction to Memoranda Roll 1 John, xxxvi–vii. For the events of the crusade, see H.E. Mayer, ‘Die Kanzlei Richards I. von England auf dem Dritten Kreuzzug’, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Osterreichische Geschichtsforschung 85 (1977), 22–35. 121 Foedera, ed. T. Rymer, new edn vol. 1 part i, ed. A. Clark and F. Holbrooke (London, 1816), 75–6, from Lambeth Palace Library MS 1212 (Archbishopric of Canterbury cartulary) fo.8r, written in distinctively ecclesiastical rather than royal language, including an elaborate arenga and an anathema clause.

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we may assume, either Hubert or the king himself suggested that the chancery clerks begin to maintain a roll recording copies of all newly issued charters. The form selected – the roll – has in many ways proved inconvenient to later historians. Rolls are far less easy to search than registers or books, and in the case of the chancery rolls are made all the more inconvenient by the adoption of a form of roll, distinct from that of the exchequer, in which each individual membrane is sown head to tail, by the late thirteenth century producing documents that have to be laboriously unrolled, and which, as experience teaches those who have worked with them, have a tendency to spill out of the hand and to unroll themselves for several feet or even yards across the floor.122 The one obvious advantage of rolls over books is their lack of binding, which in turn can greatly reduce their weight. If we assume, as seems plausible, that the chancery travelled with a number of such rolls in its baggage, weight alone may have dictated their form. As late as the 1280s, Bishop Oliver Sutton of Lincoln travelled his diocese with his entire archive of registers and rolls.123 Under King John, the sheer quantity of documents in the itinerant chancery ensured that records had regularly to be sent away for safekeeping. Galbraith, for example, pointed to the existence of a man named William Cuckespill, serving as early as 1213 as keeper of a resident chancery archive.124 The sheer clutter of the itinerant royal chancery, and the palaver of moving its attendant army of rolls, seal matrices, sealing presses, wax and parchment, may explain one noticeable feature of the more solemn charters of Henry II and his successors: the fact that the majority of them appear to have been drawn up only when the court was resident in an established administrative centre. Writs, as the chancery enrolments demonstrate, could be issued as the king travelled his realm, in any byway or minor stopping place: hence the utility of the writ rolls as a means of plotting the king’s itinerary. Charters, by contrast, tend to cluster around particular moments in time and around particular locations. In themselves, the charter rolls would supply only a limited picture of the king’s daily movements.125 Be that as it may, and once adopted, the roll format of the chancery swiftly became as hallowed a tradition as the bureaucratic mysteries of the exchequer. It is surely no coincidence that the only other European polity to adopt the roll format for the registration of letters, and that only briefly, should have been the county of Savoy. Peter of Savoy, uncle of King Henry III of England and long accustomed to the workings of English government, introduced cartulary rolls to his administration of Vaud and Geneva at some time in the 1260s.126

122

For the adoption of the roll, perhaps in imitation of Jewish Old Testament practice, see Clanchy, Memory, 135–44. 123 R. Hill, ‘Bishop Sutton and his Archives: A Study in the Keeping of Records in the Thirteenth Century’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 2 (1951), 43–53. 124 Galbraith, Studies in the Public Records, 80. 125 For some statistics here, pending the publication of the edition of the charters of Henry II, see N. Vincent, ‘Les Normands de l’entourage d’Henri II Plantagenêt’, Angleterre et Normandie au Moyen Age, ed. V. Gazeau (Caen, forthcoming). 126 See here the remarks of Bautier, ‘Cartulaires de chancellerie’, 370, and, for tax rolls also maintained under Peter, see G. Castelnuovo and C. Guilleré, ‘Les finances et l’administration de la maison de Savoie au XIIIe siècle’, Pierre II de Savoie, ‘Le Petit Charlemagne’ (+1268). Colloque international Lausanne, 30–31 mai 1997, ed. B. Andenmatten, A. Paravicini and E. Pibiri (Lausanne, 2000), 37–52. The cartulary rolls are now amongst the archives of the house of Savoy at Turin, Archivio di Stato, Vaud, busta 1 nos.4–5.

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Whether it was the chancellor Hubert Walter, or King John, who determined upon the enrolment of charters we shall never know. Both have equal right to be considered the system’s authors. Hubert, with his thirty years of experience at court, had earlier been responsible for the introduction of the tripartite cyrograph as a means of drawing up final concords. John, as every schoolboy used to know, had a suspicious mind and a genius for taking pains. The delight that the king took in devising pass words, and in framing letters with a hidden subtext, is permanently recorded in the enrolments themselves, where cunning and the tendency for the fine roll to develop into a clubland wagers’ book is only too apparent.127 By enrolling royal charters, the chancery supplied the king with a means of testing the authenticity of the privileges claimed from him by his subjects. This was surely the primary purpose of the rolls, and was first mooted at the start of the reign, when an unusually large number of privileges and charters could be expected to be delivered for confirmation. Early in the reign, the king was approached by several petitioners, including the men of Ilchester, the men of Kingston-upon-Thames, and a number of private individuals, all of whom claimed that they had once received charters from his father, Henry II, but that these charters had since been burned. Clearly, there was no enrolment from which such claims could be checked.128 Under John and his successors, however, the chancery rolls served as a test, albeit a test that was recognised as less than infallible, of the validity of claims to charters and privileges. Very swiftly after 1199, the system was expanded, to encompass copies of more ancient charters, now preserved in the cartae antiquae rolls, and to include not only charters but letters patent and letters close issued by the itinerant chancery. Through administrative overload, more than for any other reason, not every charter, let alone every letter, was enrolled. For a period from 1208 to 1212, chancery enrolment either ceased, as a result of the shortage of competent scribes at court brought on by the papal interdict, or the rolls that were made were lost.129 Thereafter, however, it was to become as accepted a feature of English government as the grinding routine of the royal exchequer. Quite how the rolls were made, why certain letters were included and others excluded, and why charters that survive as original engrossments often differ in important respects from the version enrolled, especially in respect to witnesses and dating clause, are questions that cannot yet be answered in full. Only when a proper attempt has been made to reassemble all the scattered originals and later copies of John’s letters, will we be in a position to apply the sort of palaeographical and 127

For John’s suspicious nature, see S. Painter, The Reign of King John (Baltimore, 1949), 106–10, 228–32; N. Vincent, ‘Hugh de Neville and his Prisoners’, Archives 20 (1992), 190–7. 128 For the claim by the men of Ilchester, see RCH, 130b; Rot. Hun., ii. 126. For the claim by the men of Kingston, first raised in 1194 under Richard I, resulting in a charter eventually issued by John in April 1200, see Rotuli Curiae Regis, ed. F. Palgrave, 2 vols (London, 1835), i. 15; RCH, 52b, both claims being related to attempts to limit or reduce the annual farms of these towns. In neither case is there any evidence from the pipe rolls of Henry II’s reign that the men of Ilchester or Kingston had accounted independently for their farms, suggesting that in both cases the claim to lost charters was mendacious and was predicated upon the king’s inability to check awards supposedly made by his ancestors. For a later claim by the men of Carlisle to have possessed a charter of Henry II, supposedly destroyed by fire before 1251, but again with no real evidence that the men of the vill had ever accounted independently for their farm under Henry II, see K. Smith, ‘The Dating of Carlisle’s First Charter’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Soc., new ser., 54 (1954), 272–3. 129 See here Painter, Reign of King John, 106. Apart from the pipe and court rolls for these years, our knowledge of the king’s movements from 1209 to 1212 is based upon the scattered survival of letters and charters in later royal or in beneficiary archives.

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comparative tests to originals and enrolments that to date has been so sorely neglected.130 In the meantime, the most likely explanation remains that the enrolments were made, at least to begin with, not from the engrossment sent out to the beneficiary of any particular charter or letter, but from some sort of intermediate draft, that having been copied was then deliberately destroyed.131 There is ample proof that such a system operated in the French royal chancery, where the occasional survival of uncompleted drafts, and the differences between originals and registered copies have been subjected to recent and telling analysis by Michel Nortier.132 The Plantagenet chancery was clearly awash with scrap parchment, including drafts and half-written royal letters. Occasionally, under Henry II, we find such items being cannibalised, most frequently to make parchment seal tags.133 At least one original charter of Henry II is written out on the same piece of parchment as an abandoned draft, with the parchment itself being turned upside down and the draft folded into the plica.134 Mention of the French royal practice carries us on to two final points. It is often remarked, and more often assumed, that English record making and record preservation were hugely in advance of those of the Capetian kings. Indeed, it used to be thought that whatever signs of innovation were shown in Capetian administration after the 1150s could in some measure be attributed to deliberate imitation of Plantagenet precedent.135 This is a misconception that deserves to be roundly refuted. To begin with, we need to bear in mind that the Capetian realm comprised an area less than a quarter the size of that ruled by the Plantagenets. A simple comparison between the numbers of surviving charters issued by the Plantagenet kings, compared to the far smaller number recorded for Louis VII and Philip Augustus, therefore serves very little purpose. If anything it suggests the far greater efficiency of French archive-keeping and cartulary-making when compared to the situation in either Normandy or England. Secondly, whilst it is undoubtedly true that the sealed writ was an Anglo-Norman phenomenon unknown in Capetian France, the Capetian rulers had other forms of written mandate, which, although they survive in feeble numbers, were clearly a vital tool of government. We have only seven surviving mandates addressed to royal agents by Louis VI, and barely 100 for Philip

130

At present there exists only an outline survey, in the unpublished thesis by J.B. Edwards, ‘The English Royal Chamber and Chancery in the Reign of King John’ (Cambridge University Ph.D., 1974). For some recently discovered diplomatic oddities, see D. Power, ‘The End of Angevin Normandy: The Revolt at Alençon (1203)’, Historical Research 74 (2001), 444–64. 131 See Richardson, introduction to Memoranda Roll 1 John, xxx, xliv–vi, and especially xlix–li; Chaplais, English Royal Documents, 3, citing rare examples of the survival or mention of such drafts (known as forme, note or transcripta). 132 Nortier, ‘Les Actes de Philippe Auguste’, 438–42, 452–3; M. Nortier, ‘Etat préparatoire d’un acte de Saint Louis diplôme pour la Maison-Dieu de Compiègne, Juillet 1260’, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 159 (2001), 251–61. 133 See, for example, Shrewsbury, Shropshire Record Office MS 322/3, noted by Bishop, Scriptores Regis, 72–3 nos.749–50. 134 Paris, Archives Nationales K25 no.3/8, whence Vincent, Acta of Henry II and Richard I, 104–5 no.112; Bishop, Scriptores Regis, 67 no.629. 135 See here Y. Renouard, ‘Essai sur le rôle de l’empire angevin dans la formation de la France et de la civilisation française au XIIe et XIIIe siècles’, Revue Historique 195 (1945), 289–304 (the date of publication being highly relevant to Renouard’s thesis), and more recently the refutation of such ideas by J.W. Baldwin, ‘Qu’est-ce que les Capétians ont appris des Plantagenêt?’, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 29 (1986), 3–8.

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Augustus.136 But these figures no more reflect the number that were originally issued than the six surviving exchequer writs of Henry II of England provide an adequate reflection of the activities of the English exchequer. The Capetians, of course, had nothing quite like the exchequer. But even if no exchequer had existed for the Plantagenets, Henry II and his sons would have needed to send out large numbers of mandates equivalent to the writ of liberate, authorising payments and expenditure on the king’s behalf. Furthermore, as we have seen, exchequer procedure in England was fast becoming ritualised and bureaucratic, hindering rather than improving fiscal efficiency. From the reign of John onwards, and arguably from an even earlier date, the Plantagenets themselves were establishing provincial treasures and diverting an increasing amount of financial business away from the exchequer, to the less rigid and less hidebound royal chamber.137 The feeble survival of Capetian mandates, like the feeble survival of Plantagenet writs of justice, finance and military summons, tells us more of archive-keeping than it does of record-making. Even so, and as I have already suggested, the Capetian royal archive may in some respects have been better kept for the twelfth century than its Plantagenet equivalent. It is surely no coincidence, for example, that the Capetian copy of the Treaty of Le Goulet, made in 1200, still survives in the layettes of the Trésor des chartes, when the counterpart retained by King John has long since been lost.138 Shortly after 1199, at much the same time that the Plantagenet chancery was moving towards an ever more indiscriminate enrolment of outgoing letters, the clerks of Philip Augustus embarked upon their first recorded attempt to compile a register of royal letters. Whether this was actually the first such attempt is difficult to determine, since the post-1200 registers were themselves a response to the loss of Philip’s archive as a result of the capture of his baggage train at Fréteval in 1194.139 From the reign of Louis VII we already have a register of letters compiled at St Victor in Paris, reciting a great number of French royal letters, and Michel Nortier has recently suggested that as early as the 1140s, when Louis VII was on crusade, Abbot Suger may have maintained a register of both incoming and outgoing correspondence, seen by Duchesne in the seventeenth century but since mislaid.140 Both Suger’s and the Victorine register were far more than simple formularies. They constitute records of

136

Recueil des Actes de Louis VI, ed. Dufour, iii. 10, 30; Nortier, ‘Les Actes de Philippe Auguste’, 449–50. 137 For attempts to use the chamber to bypass the dilatory methods of the exchequer under John, see J.E.A. Jolliffe, ‘The Chamber and the Castle Treasures under King John’, Studies in Medieval History Presented to F.M. Powicke, ed. R.W. Hunt and others (Oxford, 1948), 117–42; R.A. Brown, ‘The Treasury in the Later Twelfth Century’, Studies Presented to Sir Hilary Jenkinson, ed. J. Conway Davies (London, 1957), 35–49. 138 For the various surviving copies of the treaty, including the original preserved in the layettes (Paris, Archives Nationales J628 no.1), set against the late fourteenth century copy preserved in London (E 30/6), noting nonetheless that an original sealed by Philip Augustus appears to have survived in the English royal archives as late as 1322, see Diplomatic Documents Preserved in the Public Record Office, Volume 1: 1101–1272, ed. P. Chaplais (London, 1964), 20–3 no.9. 139 The St Victor register, now in the Vatican (MS Reg. Latin 179), partly printed in Historiae Francorum Scriptores Coaetani, ed. A. Duchesne, 5 vols (Paris, 1636–49), iv. 557–762, is discussed in detail by F. Gasparri, ‘La Chancellerie du roi Louis VII et ses rapports avec le scriptorium de l’abbaye de Saint-Victor de Paris’, Palaeographica diplomatica et archivistica: Studi in onore di Giulio Battelli, 2 vols, Storia e Letteratura Raccolta di Studi e Testi 139–40 (Rome, 1979), ii. 151–8; G. Teske, Die Briefsammlungen des 12. Jahrhunderts in St. Viktor Paris, Studien und Dokumente zur Gallia Pontificia 2 (Bonn, 1993), 48–68. 140 Nortier, discussion appended to Bautier, ‘Cartulaires de chancellerie’, 377.

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historical significance for which, until 1199, we are hard put to find a Plantagenet equivalent. The earliest English register of writs passes under the name of Ranulf Glanville, and is followed by the register of writs known as ‘Hib’, traditionally said to have been sent to Ireland in 1227, but, as Paul Brand has shown, almost certainly composed in 1210.141 Like subsequent English writ-registers, both Glanville and ‘Hib’ omit virtually all proper names and most historical details. To this extent they are in some respects more akin to the dictamenal formularies, such as those circulated in late twelfth century France which (despite their variable contents) pass collectively under the name of Bernard de Meung, than they are to the registers of Suger or St Victor.142 The loss of Suger’s register should serve to remind us that the French royal archives have suffered more serious losses from accident, fire and warfare than the English public records.143 This in turn has affected the survival rate of twelfth century Capetian charters and significantly distorted our image of Capetian administration. The Trésor des chartes, with its originals arranged in layettes and its highly selective registers, has suffered relatively few losses since the Middle Ages. By the thirteenth century, however, the Trésor des chartes was only one, and by no means the most prolific or the most powerful, of the Capetian offices of state.144 Finance, and the registration of fiscal privileges, were deputed to the chambre des comptes, the vast majority of whose records were destroyed by fire in 1737.145 Justice was the responsibility of the French parlement, whose records were burned as long ago as 1618.146 But for the loss of Philip Augustus’ baggage in 1194, and but for the subsequent fires of 1618 and 1731, our image of Capetian administrative efficiency would be very different.

141

The Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Realm of England Commonly Called Glanvill, ed. G.D.G. Hall, revised edn by M.T. Clanchy (Oxford, 1993); Early Registers of Writs, ed. E. de Haas and G.D.G. Hall (Selden Soc., 87, 1970), 1–17; P.A. Brand, ‘Ireland and the Literature of the Early Common Law’, Irish Jurist, new ser., 14 (1979), 95–113, reprinted in Brand, The Making of the Common Law (London, 1992), 445–72. For a discussion of writ registers subsequent to Glanvill, see also H.G. Richardson, ‘Glanville Continued’, Law Quarterly Review 54 (1938), 381–99. 142 For the treatise of ‘Bernard’, see H. Koller, ‘Zwei Pariser Briefsammlungen’, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Osterreichische Geschichtsforschung 59 (1951), 299–327; F.-J. Schmale, ‘Der Briefsteller Bernhards von Meung’, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Osterreichische Geschichtsforschung 66 (1958), 1–28; M. Camargo, ‘The English Manuscripts of Bernard of Meung’s “Flores Dictaminum” ’, Viator 12 (1981), 197–219; M. Klaes, ‘Die “Summa” des Magister Bernardus’, Frümittelalterliche Studien 24 (1990), 198–234. For one such formularly, BL Add MS 18382, see C. Vulliez, ‘Un témoin de l’ “ars dictaminis” français du XIIe siècle’, Bulletin de la Société Nationale des Antiquaires de France (1990), 218–31. For various of these references, and for a detailed discussion of the problems raised by these formularies, I am indebted to Michel Nortier. Nortier and I agree, after a detailed examination, that none of the various letters of Henry II, Richard I, Louis VII or Philip Augustus copied into these registers can be considered genuine productions of the English or French royal chanceries. Instead, they appear to be literary exercises, albeit modelled upon genuine chancery forms. 143 See here the overview by O. Guyotjeannin, ‘French Manuscript Sources, 1250–1330’, Pragmatic Literacy, ed. Britnell, 51–71. 144 O. Guyotjeannin, ‘Les méthodes de travail des archivistes du roi de France (XIIIe–début XVIe siècle)’, Archiv für Diplomatik 42 (1996), 295–372. 145 Guyotjeannin, ‘French Manuscript Sources’, 66–9. For attempts to reassemble and to reconstruct parts of the lost archive, most notably the lost registers, see J. Petit and others, Essai de restitution des plus anciens mémoriaux de la Chambre des Comptes de Paris (Paris, 1899); C.-V. Langlois, ‘Registres perdus des archives de la Chambre des Comptes de Paris’, Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque nationale 40 (1917), 33–398; M. Nortier, ‘Le sort des archives dispersées de la Chambre des Comptes de Paris’, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 123 (1965), 460–537. 146 Guyotjeannin, ‘French Manuscript Sources’, 65–6.

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Beyond the accidents of fire and war, one other difference between French and English archive-keeping merits consideration. As has already been noted, the vast majority of twelfth century royal letters that survive both for the Capetian and the Plantagenet realms are charters or major patents. Nonetheless, in England a significant number of writs survive, preserved in the archives of their beneficiaries. Quite why some beneficiary cartularies preserve such writs, when others entirely ignore them, is an interesting and as yet unanswered question. Some English monastic cartularies draw upon collections of twelfth century writs that suggest that writs were preserved in large numbers in monastic archives as late as the fifteenth century. More than thirty writs of Henry II, for example, are copied into the late thirteenth century cartulary of the abbey of St Benet of Hulme in Norfolk, whereas the contemporary cartulary of Walsingham, in many ways a more important house than Hulme, preserved only a single charter of the king.147 At St Augustine’s Canterbury, the makers of the thirteenth century cartularies omitted at least two writs of Henry II that were clearly still preserved in their archive and which were only much later copied into the History composed by Thomas of Elmham in 1410.148 For present purposes, what is significant here is that by no means were all twelfth century writs returnable, and that having been solicited by a monastery or an individual, and having been shown to the sheriff of the local officer to whom they were addressed, they were retained by the beneficiary and at a later date were available to be copied into cartularies. In France, by contrast, royal charters and patents found their way into monastic cartularies, whereas simple precepts and administrative mandates were seldom if ever copied, either into beneficiary cartularies, or later into the French royal registers that survive after 1300. If we ask ourselves why, it is worth remarking that we know virtually nothing of the archives of the royal baillis and prévôts of Capetian France. Not a single such archive survives, although, in the absence of any tradition of returnable writs, it was amongst precisely such local administrative archives that we must assume that the vast majority of Capetian mandates came to rest. Most of the Plantagenet writs that survive do so because they were restored by sheriffs to monasteries and then copied into monastic cartularies. In France they seem to have remained with the king’s officers, and have therefore been lost.149

147

Compare the many writs of Henry II printed in St Benet of Holme, 1020–1210. The Eleventh and Twelfth Century Sections of Cott. ms. Galba E.ii, The Register of the Abbey of St Benet of Holme, ed. J.R. West, 2 vols (Norfolk Rec. Soc., 2–3, 1932), with the single charter of Henry II preserved in the Walsingham cartulary, BL MS Cotton Nero E vii fo.8v no.5. 148 Of the writs of Henry II preserved in various of the St Augustine’s cartularies (listed by Davis, Medieval Cartularies, 22–4 nos.190–206), two are found only in Thomas of Elmham, Historia Monasterii S. Augustini Cantuariensis, ed. C. Hardwick (RS, 1858), 449 no.79, 462 no.92. 149 Olivier Guyotjeannin has confirmed to me that, with the exception of fragments from the Languedoc, virtually nothing survives from any of the archives of the French royal baillis or prévôts. For some idea of what might have been the feeble survival rate of writs in England were we forced to depend upon the archives of the chief local officers, the sheriffs, see the nugatory shrieval archives discussed by C.H. Jenkinson and M.H. Mills, ‘Rolls From a Sheriff’s Office of the Fourteenth Century’, EHR 43 (1928), 21–32; Rolls From the Office of the Sheriff of Beds and Bucks. 1332–34, ed. G.H. Fowler (Bedfordshire Historical Record Soc., Quarto Memoirs 3, 1929); M.H. Mills, ‘The Medieval Shire House’, Studies Presented to Sir Hilary Jenkinson, 254–71; M.M. Condon, ‘A Wiltshire Sheriff’s Notebook, 1464–5’, Medieval Legal Records Edited in Memory of C.A.F. Meekings, ed. R.F. Hunnisett and J.B. Post (London, 1978), 409–28; Berkshire Eyre of 1248, ed. Clanchy, xlvi, cv–vii; Clanchy, Memory, 166, 171. I am grateful to Michael Clanchy for several of these references.

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Even if we compare the English enrolments made after 1199 with the Capetian cartularies and registers, it is the Capetian registers which supply the model of administrative efficiency rather than the Plantagenet rolls. The rolls were time-consuming to write and even today are difficult to search. The French registers enabled kings and their ministers to see, virtually at a glance, those documents that had been considered worthy of copying, either by the king himself, or by beneficiaries prepared to pay for registration. Like the registers of the popes, they could be indexed for future reference. Selectivity was the key to their efficiency.150 Historians can now glory in the indiscriminate nature of the English archives, just as they may deplore the selectivity of the French. The historian’s gain, however, was the administrator’s loss. Only now that they are published and indexed in book form, have the close and patent rolls for the first time been opened to proper scrutiny. The medieval clerks forced to compile and to search them may have felt far less affection for the rolls than has since become the vogue amongst medieval historians. My intention here has been to point out the richness of the English royal archives at the same time as suggesting their complexity and the many still unanswered questions that they raise. I would like to end on a further note of caution. Just as we would be wrong to assume that the making of many records is necessarily a function of administrative efficiency, so we would do well as scholars to remember that it is the quality rather than the quantity of our sources that counts. English historians, at least in the eyes of our continental colleagues, stand convicted of allowing fact to take precedence over ideas. This in itself may be no bad thing: a proud boast, rather than a shameful slur. Nonetheless, the very richness of English medieval sources can on occasion induce a kind of rolls-blindness: a tendency to pile up a fact-saturated narrative, with about as much intellectual purpose as a page torn from the telephone directory. There was much more to medieval English kingship than just the making of rolls.151 The exchequer and the chancery remained servants of the court, and the court itself is a phenomenon which is still inadequately known and about which the rolls tells us far less than we might wish.152 Before we reach too eagerly for our pocket calculators and prosopographical tables, to summon up a yet richer diet of patent rolls and fines, pipe rolls and estreats, we should take pause for thought. The rolls were servants of the king. We ourselves should beware of becoming blind servants of the rolls.

150

For registration in the Capetian chancery after 1300, the best short introduction remains that by G. Tessier, ‘L’enregistrement à la chancellerie royale française’, Le Moyen Age 62 (1956), 39–62. It is precisely because they were indexed and tabulated that it has proved possible to use later transcripts to reconstruct various of the lost registers of the chambre des comptes, as for example in the work of Langlois, ‘Registres perdus’, 33–398; R. Hubert, ‘Le Livre de Marie d’Espagne’, Le Pays Bas-Normand, 49e année (1956), and O. Canteaut, ‘Une première expérience d’enregistrement des actes royaux sous Philippe le Bel: Le livre rouge de la Chambre des Comptes’, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 160 (2002), 53–78. 151 For further remarks here, see N. Vincent, ‘Conclusion’, Noblesses de l’espace Plantagenêt (1154–1204), ed. M. Aurell (Poitiers, 2001), 207–14. 152 See here the highly pertinent remarks of Björn Weiler, ‘Symbolism and Politics in the Reign of Henry III’, TCE viii, 15–41.

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The English Royal Chancery in the Thirteenth Century* David Carpenter

The English royal chancery was the greatest of all the medieval chanceries and the thirteenth century its greatest age. English royal government was ‘document driven’. The chancery in the thirteenth century wrote, and authenticated with the great seal, the instruments through which the king spent and controlled his revenues, dispensed justice, distributed patronage and expressed in myriad other ways his personal will. No wonder control over the chancery was a major ambition of the reformers in 1258.1 For the chancery the thirteenth century stands as a peak between the valleys of the twelfth and fourteenth centuries either side. Compared to the twelfth century, its work had vastly increased. First, it steadily produced more documents. Michael Clanchy has ingeniously revealed one index of that, namely the amount of wax used by the chancery to seal its documents. In the late 1220s, a little over 3lbs of wax each week was needed; in the twelfth century the figure was almost certainly much smaller; but by the late 1260s the requirement had reached over 30lbs a week.2 Second, from the 1200s onwards, the chancery began to record the charters and letters which it issued on a series of rolls. For the thirteenth century nearly all these rolls are in print.3 Between 1200 and 1307 they fill some forty-six volumes, containing around 23,000 pages. Even that, however, gives but a partial impression of chancery activity because only twenty-one of the volumes printed the rolls in extenso. In nearly all the rest they were reduced to an English calendar, sometimes with important omissions. Moreover, the rolls themselves only reveal part of the

* This paper was originally published in Écrit et pouvoir dans les chancelleries médiévales: Espace Français, espace anglais, actes du colloque international de Montréal, 7–9 septembre 1995, ed. K. Fianu and DeLloyd J. Guth (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1997) and has been reproduced here with the original publisher’s permission. 1 DBM, 102–3, 106–7, 260–3. There is no single systematic study of the English medieval chancery but H.C. Maxwell-Lyte, Historical Notes on the Use of the Great Seal of England (London, 1926), contains a fund of information culled from primary sources. There is also a great deal about the chancery in Tout, Chapters; P. Chaplais, English Royal Documents: King John–Henry VI, 1199–1461 (Oxford, 1971), is likewise invaluable. I have written short studies of two thirteenth century chancellors: D.A. Carpenter, ‘St Thomas Cantilupe: his Political Career’, St Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford: Essays in his Honour, ed. M. Jancey (Hereford, 1982), 57–72; and ‘Chancellor Ralph de Neville and Plans of Political Reform, 1215–1258,’ TCE ii, 69–80. These are now reprinted as chapters 4 and 16 of D.A. Carpenter, The Reign of Henry III (London, 1996). 2 Clanchy, Memory, 43–4. 3 The liberate rolls are not in print after 1272.

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chancery’s labours since large numbers of documents, most notably the routine writs de cursu (‘of course’), which originated legal actions, were never enrolled.4 In the thirteenth century the chancery was at the centre of the king’s personal rule. In the fourteenth century it was not. The essential reason for the change was the way the chancery became separated from the king or, as historians sometimes put it, ‘went out of court’. From having been almost permanently together, from the late thirteenth century onwards king and chancery spent increasing time apart. Ultimately, in the fourteenth century, the chancery took up near permanent residence at Westminster.5 Inevitably, therefore, the king looked for other ways to express his personal will and found them in letters written by his household clerks and authenticated with a seal which still followed his person: the privy seal. Another department which followed the king, namely the wardrobe, likewise replaced chancery letters with letters and bills of its own.6 In part, the chancery was reduced to simply issuing, on orders from the privy seal and the wardrobe, the formal documentation for the dispensing of money, the making of appointments and the giving of patronage. The great seal was becoming a very grand rubber stamp. This essay will try to illustrate and explain some features of this transition. It will also consider their consequences and whether they could have been avoided. One theme of this colloque, as Michel Hébert has put it, is the way the central Middle Ages saw the development of administrative institutions ‘qui toutes recourent largement à l’écrit pour le bon fonctionnement’. That is obviously right. Yet we also need to consider whether writing, or at least too much writing, could lead to delay, unnecessary duplication and general inefficiency, could lead, in short, not to ‘bon fonctionnement’ but to ‘mal fonctionnement’. Was that indeed the fate of the English chancery, at least in some areas of its activity, in the later Middle Ages? In the reign of King John at the start of the thirteenth century five main sets of rolls emerged to record the chancery’s business. Charters were enrolled on the charter rolls; letters patent on the patent rolls and letters close on the close rolls.7 In addition, the chancery, from an earlier date, had kept fine rolls, which recorded the fines or financial proffers made by individuals and institutions to the crown in return for a whole variety of concessions and favours. The chancery informed the exchequer of the money it thus needed to levy by sending it copies of the fine rolls, known as originalia rolls, usually in several instalments each year.8 On the close rolls a high proportion of the letters dealt with royal expenditure and eventually, in 1226, these letters were hived off and recorded on a separate series of rolls, known as the liberate 4 The increase in the de cursu writ business would not be reflected in Clanchy’s sealing wax test: see below, n.36. 5 For this process, see B. Wilkinson, The Chancery under Edward III (Manchester, 1929), 95–7. 6 For the privy seal, see Tout, Chapters, i. 151–7, 289–90; ii. 78–82; Wilkinson, Chancery, 13–14. The king had possessed a privy seal since at least the 1200s but used it comparatively rarely before the last part of the century because the great seal was under his direct control. For wardrobe bills and letters, see below, n.50. 7 RCH; RLP. The earliest of the series of close rolls are to be found in Rotuli de Liberate ac de Misis et Praestitis, ed. T.D. Hardy (Rec. Comm., 1844), 1–108, and Memoranda Roll . . . King John, ed. H.G. Richardson (PRS, new ser., xxi), 88–97. For the close rolls from 1204: RLC. A large proportion of the writs on the first rolls were those of liberate and computate, and these rolls have thus sometimes been described as liberate rolls. However, they should in fact be seen, to quote Richardson, ibid., 89, xxxiii, as ‘the precursors or, strictly speaking, the earliest members, of the series of close rolls’. The beginnings of the liberate rolls are discussed below. 8 Memoranda Roll 1 John, 85–8; Rot. de Oblatis et Finibus.

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rolls.9 From 1226, therefore, the chancery was drawing up charter, patent, close, fine, originalia and liberate rolls, beginning a new set with the start of each new regnal year. We will commence our discussion by looking at the liberate rolls since it is there that one sees most clearly the absolutely central role played by the chancery in controlling the financial administration of the country and expressing the royal will. It is likewise by examining the liberate rolls of the early fourteenth century that one sees most clearly the way the chancery had left the centre stage and how its letters, which once galvanised the finances of the country, had become peripheral. The great institution responsible for exacting and storing the king’s revenues and auditing the accounts was, of course, the exchequer. Yet in the thirteenth century it was through the chancery that the exchequer was controlled by the king. In the first place the exchequer could not spend its monies unless ordered to do so by chancery writs of liberate. These were letters close, that is letters folded and with the great seal or a portion of it applied over the fold, which ordered the treasurer and chamberlains of the exchequer to dispense (liberate) money.10 For example: Rex thesaurario & camerariis suis salutem. Liberate de thesauro nostro quinque milia marcarum ad operaciones nostras Westm’ ita quod pecunia illa liberetur citra festum Natalis Domini. Teste rege apud Geudef’ xx die Junii [1256].11 Likewise expenditure by local officials was authorised by letters close of computate, which were also enrolled on the liberate rolls. These instructed the official to spend money on some specified purpose and promised that the sum involved would be allowed him (computabitur tibi) when he came to account at the exchequer. For example: Rex vicecomiti Ebor’ salutem. Precipimus tibi quod pontem et domos castri nostri Ebor’ et breccas palicii eiusdem castri sine dilacione reperari et emendari facias, et custum quod ad hoc posueritis per visum et testimonium legalium hominum computabitur tibi ad scaccarium. Teste rege apud Wudestok, xi die Septembris, anno etc nono [1225]. contrabreve.12 The note contrabreve after the letter indicated that a copy of the writ was to be sent to the exchequer so that it would know independently what expenditure the sheriff of Yorkshire had been authorised to carry out. When the sheriff came to

9

CLR 1226–40 (London, 1916), v–vi; Memoranda Roll 1 John, xxxiv. For the way writs were folded, see Maxwell-Lyte, The Great Seal, front piece and 303; Pleas Before the King or his Justices 1198–1212, ed. D.M. Stenton, 4 vols (Selden Soc., lxvii, lxviii, lxxxiii, lxxxiv; 1948–67), i. 28–9; Chaplais, English Royal Documents, plate 25d and 10; The Roll and Writ File of the Berkshire Eyre of 1248, ed. M.T. Clanchy (Selden Soc., xc, 1973), lxiii. 11 Building Accounts of King Henry III, ed. H.M. Colvin (Oxford, 1971), 194–5; and CLR 1251–60, 305. This writ (and those subsequently quoted) was recorded in summary form. The original would have been in the first person beginning Henricus rex Anglie with the king’s full titles and ending Teste me ipso. 12 RLC, ii. 61b. The term computate was gradually replaced by that of allocate and the writs became know as writs of allocate. 10

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account he would produce his writ of computate, the exchequer would check it against its copy and grant the appropriate allowance.13 Alongside the exchequer the other centre of financial activity was the king’s household, and in particular the wardrobe which was responsible for funding the king’s day to day living expenses and much else besides. Indeed it frequently took over the whole running of military campaigns. A good proportion of the debts the wardrobe ran up, for example to merchants and soldiers, the king ordered the exchequer to discharge by issuing writs of liberate in favour of the individuals concerned. But the wardrobe also spent a great deal of money itself. The ‘getting’ of this money was again controlled by writs of liberate and computate. The former were sent to the exchequer ordering it to send money, while the latter were used to secure money from local officials. For example: Rex E. thesaurario et camerariis salutem, Liberate de thesauro nostro Waltero de Kirkeham at Waltero de Brackel’ [clerks of the wardrobe] CCC libras ad expensas nostras acquietendas. Teste rege apud Novum Templum, xxv die Februarii [1225].14 Rex Waleramo Teutonico salutem. Mandamus vobis quod centum marcas quas nobis debetis de termino Beati Petri ad Vincula anno regni nostri vi de stagnaria nostra Devon’, liberetis Godefrido de Craucumb [steward of the royal household] nobis deferendas ad expensas nostras acquietendas et computabitur vobis ad scaccarium. Teste H. de Burgo etc apud Norwic’, xiiii die Septembris anno regno nostri vi [1222] per eundem [H de Burgo]. contrabeve.15 A similar writ of computate would be issued to get supplies for the household from local officials. Rex vicecomiti Glouc’ salutem. Precipimus tibi quod emi facias ad opus nostrum lx salmones tam recentes quam salsos et xx lampredas tam recentes quam salsas et eos salvo mittas usque Londinium ita quod eos habemus ibidem die Dominica proxima post diem Cinerum. Et custum

13 For the procedure, see Dialogus de Scaccario, ed. C. Johnson (London, 1950), 34, 89–91; Memoranda Roll 1 John, xxxv. Every so often in the close rolls, and after 1226 in the liberate rolls, one will find such entries as ‘from here the counterwrits are to be sent and before they have been sent by the hand of R. bishop of Chichester [the chancellor] to the king’s exchequer’ (Hinc mittenda est contrabrevia et prius liberata per manum R. Cicestr’ episcopi ad scaccarium domini regis): RLC, ii. 64b. The contrabreve system implies that the exchequer was sent simply copies of the writs to the local agents, either in a file or on a roll. On the other hand, the exchequer was often written to directly with instructions to grant appropriate allowances (usually when the size of the allowance was already known) and this was the letter enrolled rather than the corresponding letter to the local agent. For the two methods see the allowance to the bailiffs of Wilton in CLR 1226–40, 34, 36. In the English calendar of close rolls the writs of computate to local agents are printed in the following form: ‘To the sheriff of Oxfordshire. Contrabreve to cause the king’s houses at Woodstock to be repaired’. This strikes me as misleading because the contrabreve was not the writ sent to the sheriff but the copy sent to the exchequer. 14 RLC, ii. 20. 15 Ibid., i. 511. This writ was attested by Hubert de Burgh during the king’s minority.

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quod ad hoc posueritis computabitur tibi ad scaccarium. Teste me ipso apud Westmonasterium, xxiiii die Februarii [1226]. contrabreve.16 Large numbers of these writs of computate and liberate were issued each year. In the first of the separate liberate rolls, that for the regnal year 1226–27, for example, there were some 165 of the former and 250 of the latter, of which fifteen ordered the sending of money to the wardrobe.17 Just how far the king’s entire revenue was thus controlled is shown by the close match between the revenue disposed of on the liberate rolls and the king’s annual revenue as calculated from pipe rolls and receipt rolls.18 The intimate relationship between the chancery and the king is also shown by the highly personal nature of some of the expenditure involved. Indeed, it is through the writs of liberate and computate and some other letters close that we come closest to the personality and predilections of King Henry III. It is here that we see the king’s piety in full flow with expansive orders for vestments, tapers and alms-giving; here that we see the detail in which he supervised the embellishment of his palaces and the building of Westminster abbey; and here too that we see his affection for his queen: Mandatum est Edwardo filio Odonis quod sub omni festinatione de consilio thesaurarii regis fieri faciat tam de die quam de nocte unum ciphum auri cum pede ad opus regine qui sit ponderis duarum marcarum vel amplius et precii xx. marcarum, ita quod promptus sit contra instans Natale Domini, et quod predicta regina bibere possit in predicto festo; et quod provideat quod intus sit excentellatus aimallo et aliter modis quibus poterit decentius et pulcrius apparatus, et quod tam rex quam regina inde possint esse contenti. Teste rege apud Windles’, xix die Decembris [1240].19 If we turn to the early fourteenth century, and look at the liberate rolls, the picture is completely different. From having been centre stage in managing the king’s revenues, the chancery is in the wings. Take the liberate roll for 1304–05.20 The first thing that strikes one is its size, a mere six membranes, some thirteen or fourteen fewer than the liberate rolls in their pomp in the 1240s and 1250s. It has, moreover, some fifty writs of liberate, as opposed to 250 in 1226–27, and these, together with an even smaller number of writs of computate, command but a fraction of the king’s revenue. The fact was that in managing the revenue the chancery’s writs had largely been replaced by the wardrobe’s bills and letters. In saying this we are, admittedly, omitting three exceptional chancery writs, yet they were the exceptions which proved the rule.21 These writs ordered the treasurer and chamberlains of the exchequer

16

Ibid., ii. 100b. Local officials might also be ordered to pay off debts incurred by the wardrobe, for example for the purchases of wine and cloth, CLR 1251–60, 366. 17 CLR 1226–40, 1–56. 18 D.A. Carpenter, The Minority of Henry III (London, 1990), 412–13, 416–17; R. Stacey, Politics, Policy, and Finance under Henry III 1216–45 (Oxford, 1987). 19 CR 1237–42, 258. And see The History of the King’s Works. The Middle Ages, ed. H.M. Colvin, 2 vols (London, 1963), i. 93–5. 20 C 62/81. 21 I am also omitting one other exceptional item, namely a group of fifty-two writs of liberate which attempted to clear various debts incurred in Gascony.

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to give the keeper of the wardrobe two sums of £20,000 and one of £5831, this money being needed for the expenses of the royal household. At first sight, then, chancery writs were still the means of securing money for the wardrobe. The impression is misleading. In issuing the writs, the chancery was simply obeying the orders of the wardrobe: all three were authorised ‘by bill of the wardrobe’. It was also not so much securing money for the wardrobe (as it had done with the old writs of liberate) as providing formal authorisation for numerous individual financial transactions by the wardrobe, which had already taken place.22 One reason for this situation was the way the chancery had gone out of court. Edward I was said to have attested the first of the £20,000 writs of liberate at Burstwick on 21 November 1304, but this did not mean that the chancery was with him there on that day. In fact it was almost certainly forty-five miles away at York.23 The chancery, in drawing up the writ at York, presumably some time later than 21 November, had simply assigned to the writ the date and place on the wardrobe bill which authorised it. Given the king’s separation from the chancery it was inevitable that he should use such wardrobe instruments as well as privy seal letters to secure money, goods and services for his household. We move now from the liberate rolls to the fine rolls which underwent equally illuminating changes in the course of the thirteenth century. The fine rolls for 1204–05 recorded around £14,000 offered the king by some 300 individuals or institutions for various concessions and favours. £8700 of this money came from offers connected with relief, wardships and marriages; another £3160 came from miscellaneous offers for land.24 There can be no doubt that John himself was very personally involved in the processes of bargain and extortion which lay behind these proffers. Indeed this very fine roll, that for 1204–05, revealed its intimate connection with the king in another way, by recording his cruel joke at the expense of his minister Hugh de Neville: Uxor Hugonis de Nevill [presumably John’s mistress] dat domino Regi CC gallinas eo quod possit jacere una nocte cum domino suo Hugone de Nevill.25 As though 200 chickens was all that a night with Hugh was worth! A hundred years later things were very different, and not simply in respect of the king’s sexual morality and sense of humour. In the fine roll of 1304–05 the total amount offered Edward I was £1121 (of which £500 effectively were pardoned), together with thirty-eight ‘reasonable reliefs’.26 This 22

C 62/81, mm.6, 3, 2. For fuller discussion of all this see below, 59–60. Thus Michael Prestwich’s concise comment: ‘The issue of the liberate writs was little more than an empty formality, for by Edward’s closing years they were made out at the request of the wardrobe officials long after that the expenditure that they were meant to cover had been incurred’: M. Prestwich, ‘Exchequer and Wardrobe in the Later Years of Edward I’, BIHR xlvi (1973), 3. 23 Calendar of Chancery Warrants, 1244–1326 (London, 1927), 239. 24 Rot. de Oblatis et Finibus, 196–286. 25 Ibid., 275. For discussion, see S. Painter, The Reign of King John (Baltimore, 1949), 231–2; J.C. Holt, ‘King John’, Magna Carta and Medieval Government (London, 1985), 88. 26 C 60/103. The ‘reasonable reliefs’ were probably levied in accordance with Magna Carta, that is £100 or 100 marks for an earldom or barony and £5 for a knight’s fee. For the change from £100 to 100 marks and relief more generally in the thirteenth century, see S. Reynolds, ‘Magna Carta 1297 and the Legal Use

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contrast between the monies on the fine rolls reflects changes beyond the scope of this essay. The vis et voluntas of Angevin kingship, its power to extract enormous sums of money from individuals, had been fundamentally limited by Magna Carta and the political climate which it introduced.27 Another change is more relevant since it suggests the principle reason why the chancery moved out of court. This is the huge increase in the number of offers, usually of half a mark, sometimes more, for writs which initiated or furthered litigation. In the roll of 1204–05 there were about 100 of these offers;28 in that of 1304–05 some 900.29 The multiplication of such writs reflected but in no way fully revealed the expansion of litigation which took place in the thirteenth century, an expansion which meant a corresponding increase in the work of the chancery since the processes of such litigation were almost wholly dependent on writs which the chancery provided. I say reflect but not reveal because the writs for which half a mark or more was proffered in the fine rolls were ones which in some ways secured the litigants special favour; they were not the original writs ‘of course’, de cursu, with which litigation most normally commenced. It was above all the inexorably rising numbers of these de cursu writs which wore down the chancery and ultimately forced it from the ambulatory court into some fixed place; that and the convenience of the litigants for whom the writs were provided. Some idea of the increasing amount of litigation in the thirteenth century can be gauged from the fact that in the year 1225–26 less than 2500 cases came before the justices of the bench;30 a hundred years later, in 1327–28, according to the figures of Robert Palmer, the number was over 6500; by the early 1330s it probably approached 8700.31 This, moreover, only told part of the story because in 1327–28 (as was much less the case in 1225–26) cases were also heard by justices in the localities.32 The number of writs de cursu which the chancery was having to issue in order to service this litigation was absolutely colossal. The evidence comes from the accounts of the keeper of the hanaper, the office responsible for the chancery’s receipts and expenses. These accounts, which first survive from the 1320s, recorded the amount of money received each day throughout the year for the sealing of letters patent and writs, the great bulk of the latter being almost certainly writs de cursu. The rolls do not say how much one had to pay for a writ de cursu. Later in the fourteenth century, however, it was 6d and, save on a handful of occasions, 6d divides exactly into the daily sums recorded in the 1320s.33 On that basis the of Literacy’, BIHR lxii (1989), 233–44, reprinted as chapter V of her Ideas and Solidarities of the Medieval Laity. England and Western Europe (Aldershot and Vermont, 1995). 27 For a particularly striking examination of how the sums exacted from widows declined after 1215 see S.L. Waugh, The Lordship of England. Royal Wardships and Marriages in English Society and Politics 1217–1327 (Princeton, 1988), 158–61. 28 I have included here offers pro habendo quodam pone (often coram rege), although the writ is not specifically mentioned. 29 There were 37 offers to have a ‘place’ (see note above); 163 proffers for commissions to particular judges to hear assizes; and 702 proffers for various writs of which perhaps two thirds were for the writ ad terminum, a writ returnable at a specified time in the king’s court (the form of action not being stated in the fine rolls). See R.C. Palmer, The County Courts of Medieval England 1150–1350 (Princeton, 1982), 237, 318, for an analysis of offers for writs in the fine rolls between 1250 and 1326. 30 CCR, xii, nos. 407–2674. This is Trinity 1225 to Easter 1226, dates chosen so as to get a run of rolls for a complete year. 31 R.C. Palmer, The Whilton Dispute, 1264–1380 (Princeton, 1984), 5–8. 32 There was no general eyre in progress in 1225–26. 33 Maxwell-Lyte, The Great Seal, 331; Wilkinson, Chancery, 61. See Memoranda Roll 1 John, xlix, n.1.

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labours of the chancery were, as we have said, colossal.34 In the roll from October 1324 to September 1325, there were some half a dozen days on which there were no writs to seal; on two days only three were sealed; but then, for days on end, the numbers sealed would be consistently over a hundred.35 The most sealed on any one day was 517 on 9 November 1324. Looking at the monthly totals, the lowest was 986 in April 1325 and the highest 4287 in the following July, perhaps in anticipation of the commencement of the legal year at Michaelmas. The number was also over 4000 in November 1324. All told, during the course of the year, the chancery sealed some 29,000 writs, an average of nearly eighty a day. The utility of the chancery remaining in one place, preferably London, is reflected in the highest monthly totals being reached when it was there. Indeed, there was usually a marked rise in the number of writs issued as soon as the chancery arrived in the capital. In October 1324, when the chancery was at Titchfield in Hampshire and then journeying to London, it sealed between ten and thirty-two writs a day. On its first day in London, 10 October (probably in fact a day of travel from Guildford) it sealed only three. Thereafter down to the end of the month, with four gaps due to the absence of the chancellor, it sealed on successive days the following number of writs: 174, 189, 206, 80, 182, 256, 172, 73, 192, 191, 121, 367, 206, 201, 303 and 330. The total for the month was 3413.36 The work of writing and sealing the writs de cursu, moreover, was only part of the chancery’s burden because it had also to advise potential litigants which writs suited their needs. As early as the reign of Edward I, there were senior chancery clerks, learned in law, who performed this task. Against this background one can understand why the staff of the chancery became so large: in the reign of Richard II, and probably earlier, it consisted of around 100 clerks, divided into various grades, numbers which themselves provided a reason why the chancery needed to become fixed at Westminster.37 What then were the consequences of the chancery moving out of court? It may be worth reflecting first on the consequences for the historian. That these are unfortunate is indisputable. The task of the historian of the fourteenth century is far harder than that of the thirteenth. Take first the king’s itinerary, and indeed that of the chancery as well. For much of the thirteenth century there is little doubt about either. The chancery was with the king and the itinerary of both can be reconstructed from the dating clauses of royal letters, the clauses which, as we have seen, stated that letters had been witnessed by the king at specified places on specified dates. It is thus possible to know where kings of England were on the great majority of days each year: a tremendous advantage if one is tracing the detailed narrative of politics or trying to work out where the king liked to live.38 As the chancery went out of court, 34

Maxwell-Lyte seems to have assumed a rate of 6d when making his own calculations from the rolls of the hanaper about the number of writs sealed each day, The Great Seal, 296. 35 E 101/211/12. 36 In 1324–25, the total amount of sealing wax required averaged about 30lbs a week, much the same as in the 1260s. However, de cursu writs required far less wax than letters patent and charters, being sealed with only a dab of wax and a corner of the seal; see Maxwell-Lyte, The Great Seal, 305. There may well have been many more de cursu writs in the 1320s but fewer instruments to which the great seal as whole was appended. 37 Wilkinson, Chancery, 65. 38 For the problems of reconstructing the itineraries of Henry III and Edward I, see D.A. Carpenter, ‘King Henry III and the Tower of London’, The Reign of Henry III, 201, 211–18.

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confusion sets in. Even when separated from the king, the chancery continued, until the reign of Edward III, to date all its letters by his location. Thus it is not always clear where the chancery itself actually was.39 Nor are the dating clauses of the letters any infallible guide to the situation of the king. True privy seal letters coming into the chancery provided relevant information; but they could be intermittent, and when the king was on the move the chancery probably made no more than an educated guess as to his situation.40 In the reign of Edward III, the chancery eventually dated its letters (save those authorised by the privy seal) by its own position (usually Westminster), but this only increases the problems of discovering the location of the king. None of this would have mattered had central rolls and registers recording all the letters issued under the privy seal survived, but they do not.41 The historian is reduced to establishing the king’s itinerary from the sometimes patchy sequences of privy seal letters, kept in files by the chancery, giving dates to letters on the chancery rolls, and preserved at the exchequer. The other chief resort is the information provided by household material, but that too is often fragmentary. Perhaps the only consolation is that for the twelfth century the situation is even worse. There historians are very largely dependent on the exiguous information of chroniclers. The chancery instruments, given the lack of central enrolment, survive haphazardly in local archives, and, while they supply a place of issue and a witness list, vouchsafe no date at all.42 Another problem becomes that of knowing who was at court.43 In the thirteenth century, when the chancery was with the king, the witness lists of royal charters almost certainly indicated the senior figures at court on the day the charter was ‘given’, that is its drawing up was authorised by the king. The lists thus make it possible to see how long particular magnates and ministers spent at court and to trace their entrances and exits at times of political crises. In the fourteenth century this ceases to be the case. The king, separated from the chancery, usually ordered charters to be drawn up by letters of privy seal. While, however, the date of the privy seal letter supplied the date of the eventual charter, it did not also supply (for it did not mention) the names of the witnesses. Instead these were supplied by the chancery and reflected not who was at court when the charter was agreed but who was around the chancery at the time of some kind of witnessing ceremony several days or weeks later. The chancery rolls of the fourteenth century are disappointing in another way: they cease to reveal the personal will and character of the king. One would be astonished to find on a fourteenth century roll the kind of jest John made at the expense

39

Tout, Chapters, iii. 57, n.2; Wilkinson, Chancery, 96–7. For the dating of chancery instruments, see Maxwell-Lyte, The Great Seal, 241–53, 405–9 and note especially 253. In June 1336 the chancery dated some instruments according to its own location (Northampton) and some (even where not warranted by the privy seal or in any other way) by the location of the king in Scotland; see ibid., 405, 408–9. 41 For these rolls and registers, see below, n.82. 42 The place of issue can be used, however, to establish where twelfth-century kings spent their time. See for example, T.K. Keefe, ‘Place-Date Distribution of Royal Charters and the Historical Geography of Patronage Strategies at the Court of Henry II Plantagenet’, Haskins Society Journal ii (1990), 179–88. The charters and letters of the kings of England between 1066 and 1154 have been brought together in Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum 1066–1154, and see now The Acta of William I 1066–1087 ed. D. Bates (Oxford, 1998). 43 For what follows, see C. Given-Wilson, ‘Royal Charter Witness Lists 1327–1399’, Medieval Prospography xii (1991), 35–93, especially 36–44. 40

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of Hugh de Neville or the kind of Christmas present Henry III gave to Eleanor of Provence. The king’s will was now expressed by letters sealed not by the great seal but by the privy seal, or by even more personal seals like the secret seal and the signet. Of course, many such letters addressed to the chancery and the exchequer survive, but a huge range of other letters addressed to magnates, ministers and local officials have gone for good. Edward III, it has been remarked, may have taken just as close a personal interest in the rebuilding of Windsor castle as Henry III did in that of Westminster abbey, but we cannot be sure since his privy seal letters to the equivalent of Henry’s Odo of Westminster do not survive.44 Of course, the administrative changes which we have been discussing were not made for the benefit of modern historians. What were their advantages and disadvantages at the time? It is to these questions that we turn in the second part of this essay. The process of the chancery moving out of court owed a great deal to Edward I’s wars in Wales and Scotland, when it was based for considerable periods of time at Rhuddlan, Chester or York.45 This made sense. Edward did not want to drag a large chancery staff around with him on campaign, often in difficult territory. Equally, those needing de cursu writs did not want to chase them out in the furthest corners of the land. Even in time of peace, as we have seen, the pressures of the de cursu writs pushed the chancery inexorably and logically towards residence in one place. As early as January 1280 when the king left Winchester to hunt in the New Forest, the chancellor returned to London, ‘so that’, as the annals of Waverley put it, ‘all seeking writs and prosecuting their rights might find a remedy ready in a certain place’.46 The people could only welcome the convenience of knowing that de cursu writs could always be obtained at Westminster. The king lost nothing by that since he had no interest in the business involved. He likewise had little or no interest in the increasing number of writs which the chancery issued dealing with matters of routine administration: minor appointments, inquiries, pardons, and commissions. All these could be safely separated from the immediate presence of the king.47 There were, therefore, clear advantages in the chancery going out of court; yet there was also a price, a price paid in terms of delay and obfuscation. Government decisions had to be processed through larger webs of bureaucracy and were recorded in ways which were both longwinded and misleading. Take the financing of the wardrobe which we have already briefly mentioned. In the early part of the thirteenth century the processes were clear-cut and, if one can use the word in this context, ‘truthful’; the documents meant what they said. The wardrobe secured part of its money, and discharged some of its debts to individuals, via writs of liberate addressed to the exchequer. It also secured money and provisions and paid debts through writs of computate addressed to local officials.48 In the early fourteenth century the writs of liberate still commanded the despatch of money to the wardrobe but without any expectation that they would secure cash to anything

44

History of the King’s Works, i. 162–3. Tout, Chapters, ii. 74–81. 46 Ann. Mon., ii. 393. 47 For an analysis of the type of business which the chancery dealt with on its own see Wilkinson, Chancery, 23–5. 48 For the payment of debts through writs of computate to local officials, see above, n.16. 45

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like the amounts specified;49 rather, the essential purpose of the great writs of liberate, frequently for sums as large as £20,000, was to enable those who had provided the wardrobe with money, goods and services either to secure due allowance at the exchequer, if they were local officials who accounted there, or payment if, like merchants or soldiers, they did not. The need for this procedure derived from the replacement of the chancery writs of computate and liberate, through which such obligations had formally been discharged, with either wardrobe bills or the keeper of the wardrobe’s own letters patent. These wardrobe instruments acknowledged the financial transaction which had taken place and (in the case of the keeper’s letters for local officials at least) asked the exchequer to give an appropriate allowance. In that sense the keeper’s letters were much the same as the old writs of computate. But there was a crucial difference, which made the whole process of clearing such obligations far more convoluted than in the past, namely that the exchequer would not accept such letters when the officials came to account. This was probably because written merely in the keeper of the wardrobe’s name and authenticated with his seal they lacked the authority of the old chancery writs, written in the king’s name and authenticated with the great seal. Indeed, the difference in authority was reflected in the very phraseology of the letters. Whereas the keeper’s merely ‘asked’ the exchequer to grant an allowance, the chancery’s ordered it to do so. Wardrobe bills had even less status since they mentioned neither the name of the writer nor that of the addressee and often merely recorded debts owed by the wardrobe without mentioning how they were to be discharged.50 The great writs of liberate commanding sums like £20,000 to be delivered to the wardrobe got round this problem created by the lack of authority of the wardrobe instruments.51 The idea was for the exchequer to take as contributions to the £20,000 past receipts from and expenditure by local

49

They did secure some money. For example on 21 June 1307, 2000 marks were despatched to the wardrobe under a £20,000 writ of liberate of 1 April 1307: E 403/136. The situation in the early fourteenth century needs to be viewed against Edward I’s enormous financial demands and the administrative chaos into which these threw the exchequer. For a recent discussion see W.M. Ormrod, ‘State Building and State Finance in the Reign of Edward I’, England in the Thirteenth Century. Proceedings of the 1989 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. W.M. Ormrod (Stamford, 1991), 15–35. What follows is based on my own study of the liberate roll, issue roll, and receipt roll for 33 Edward I (C 62/81; E 403/125; E 401/159); on Cal Memoranda Rolls 1326–7, where no. 871 is particularly relevant, and on the evidence cited in n.50 and n.58 below. However, my discussion adds little to M. Prestwich, War, Politics and Finance under Edward I (London, 1972), 157–8; idem, ‘Exchequer and Wardrobe’, 2–4; J.F. Willard, Parliamentary Taxes on Personal Property, 1290 to 1334 (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), 233–41; H. Jenkinson, ‘Medieval Tallies’, Archaeologia lxxiv (1925), 304–6; and C. Johnson, ‘The System of Account in the Wardrobe of Edward I’, TRHS 4th ser., vi (1923), 55–7. 50 Wardrobe bills were strips of parchment sometimes authenticated with the seal of the keeper of the wardrobe, or another wardrobe official. They could be used for all manner of business (see above, 54 and next note) but in their most common surviving form they simply recorded a debt or debts owed by the wardrobe. For example, Debentur in garderoba regis Johnanni de Corbrigg, solidario, de vadiis suis . . . Hence the description of these types of bills as ‘wardrobe debentures’. See Tout, Chapters, i. 50–1; ii. 125–6 and 126, n.1, from where the passage quoted comes. Large numbers of wardrobe bills from John Droxford’s time as keeper between 1296 and 1307 are usefully brought together in E 101/354/11. Examples of his letters patent dealing with allowances for local officials are also found there, for example nos. 23, 46, 80, 104, 109, 125. 51 It was true, of course, that wardrobe bills were sufficient to authorise such writs (see above, 54), but these bills came directly from the wardrobe, clearly with the king’s authority. It was a very different matter when local officials and others turned up with wardrobe bills and letters and demanded allowances and payments.

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officials as recorded in the wardrobe’s bills and letters. In this way these transactions received the king’s formal sanction (for the covering writ of liberate, of course, was in his name and authenticated with the great seal) and local officials could obtain due allowance when they came to account. Likewise, the exchequer also cleared off the £20,000 by paying the debts which the wardrobe instruments recorded as owing to merchants, soldiers and so forth.52 The process by which this actually worked was labyrinthine, especially when it was a case of conceding allowances to local officials – sheriffs, keepers of manors, escheators, collectors of customs and taxation and the rest.53 Even when covered by a great writ of liberate, such officials could not use their wardrobe bills and letters directly at their accounts at the upper exchequer, the exchequer of audit. Instead they had first to go into the lower exchequer, as the exchequer of receipt was called. This was the branch of the exchequer which received and disbursed money and issued wooden tallies to individuals as testimony to the money which they had paid in, tallies which those individuals later presented when they came to account at the upper exchequer as evidence of their payments. The local official with his wardrobe bill or letter thus entered the lower exchequer. If there was still money outstanding to the wardrobe under great writs of liberate (which were usually deposited at the lower exchequer), then the official could exchange his letter for a tally which recorded the sum of money he had given to the wardrobe or expended on its behalf. It was this tally which he presented at his account and which secured him his allowance.54 Even by itself this seems a far more cumbersome process than that which prevailed earlier under the old chancery writ of computate system where no tally was involved and the official presented his writ directly at the upper exchequer and secured his allowance once the writ had been checked against the exchequer’s copy.55 The way the whole transaction was recorded in the early fourteenth century was even more longwinded and mysterious. In the first place there was the entry on the issue roll of the exchequer. In the old days this would simply have recorded the despatch of money to the wardrobe in answer to the writ of liberate. Now there were hundreds of entries showing how the great £20,000 writs had been ‘paid’, entries along the lines of ‘and to the same keeper of the wardrobe on 12 February £60’. The 12 February date, however, as the entry then went on to make clear, was not the date when the keeper had received any money. It was the date when the local official had exchanged his wardrobe bill or letter (sometimes months or years old) at the lower 52

Letters under the privy seal commanding the exchequer to make payments or grant allowances were sometimes covered in the same way. 53 For a survey of the local officials responsible for collecting revenue in the fourteenth century see The English Government at Work 1327–1336. Volume II: Fiscal Administration, ed. W.A. Morris and J.R. Strayer (Cambridge, Mass., 1947). 54 The payment was recorded by the lower exchequer on both sides of the tally stick, which was then split down the middle with one half being given to the local official and one being kept by the exchequer. At the account the exchequer verified the payment by matching the two halfs. 55 Local officials in the past had thus appeared at the upper exchequer with their writs of computate as testimony to the money they had paid into the wardrobe or expended locally and with wooden tallies as testimony to the money they had paid into the lower exchequer. Now they required tallies for all these transactions. I am not clear how far the wardrobe sent to the exchequer copies of the bills and letters it gave to local officials, thus imitating the old chancery contrabreve system. If the failure to do this with privy seal letters is any guide (see below, 65) then probably it did not do so systematically. This would have created further doubts over the authority of such instruments.

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exchequer for a tally.56 The second entry came, bizarrely, on the receipt roll of the exchequer. This was because tallies in the past had only been issued for money actually delivered into the lower exchequer and thus, although the local agent had in fact long since given his money to the wardrobe or spent it on its behalf, the receipt roll recorded it as though, on 12 February, it had been paid into the exchequer. True, there was a marginal warning that this was not the case because against the entry the word ‘gard’ was written, thus indicating that in fact the money had been paid into or expended on behalf of the wardrobe. But no notice was taken of this when the exchequer totalled its weekly and ultimately yearly receipts, which thus became totally fictional.57 The final account of the local official on the pipe roll was equally fictional since it stated that the money had been paid into the exchequer, not that it had been used by the wardrobe.58 We are moving in an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ world where nothing is as it seems. These complexities of account and record keeping at the exchequer scarcely bothered the wardrobe. Controlling finance through its own bills and letters, it secured money, goods and services on an unprecedented scale, and made a magnificent contribution to Edward’s war effort.59 Bothering about the overall financial situation would only have cramped its vigour. There was also, up to a point, nothing new 56

On 26 November 1304, three tallies (for a total of £349 13s 5½d) were given to the sheriff of Essex and Hertfordshire in response to a letter patent of the keeper of the wardrobe, dated 18 November 1303. On 28 November 1304, the sheriff of Lincolnshire, Thomas fitz Eustace, was given a tally (for £54 4s 10d) in response to three letters of the keeper dated 24 May, 3 July and 10 August 1304. All these sums were entered as ‘payments’ towards the £20,000 writ of liberate dated 21 November 1304: E 403/125. Willard, Parliamentary Taxes on Personal Property, 233–41, shows how a similar system operated for collectors of taxation who exchanged letters of the exchequer ordering them to make payments and letters patent from the recipients testifying to those payments for tallies usable at their accounts. Ultimately the procedure was speeded up by giving the tally to the intended recipient of the revenue, who handed it over to the collector when payment had been made. The date on the receipt roll remained the day on which the tally was cut: ibid., 238 n.1. The development of these tallies of assignment has been seen by modern historians as a tremendous administrative advance; but this was scarcely appreciated at the time, since they were introduced very gradually and for years ran alongside the older system (ibid., 238). For other aspects of exchequer reform, see M. Buck, ‘The Reform of the Exchequer’, EHR xcviii (1983), 241–60 and chapter 8 of his Politics, Finance and The Church in the Reign of Edward II. Walter Stapeldon Treasurer of England (Cambridge, 1983). 57 There was certainly some value in keeping a record of the money from local officials drawn or expended by the wardrobe, but it should surely have been kept on a roll specifically for that purpose, not on the exchequer’s receipt roll. 58 See the case of the sheriff of Lincolnshire, Thomas fitz Eustace, mentioned in n.56 above: E 372/151, m.3d. The whole process outlined above can be traced in respect of the £115 19s 3d which Robert of Barton paid into the wardrobe on or shortly before 1 April 1307 from the issues of the manors of Penrith and Sowerby of which he was keeper. E 101/354/11, no. 23 is the letter patent of the keeper of the wardrobe, John Droxford, dated 1 April at Carlisle, which acknowledged the receipt of the money and asked the exchequer to concede Robert his due allowance. E 403/136 is the exchequer’s issue roll which recorded, as one of many entries related to the clearance of £20,000 due to the wardrobe under a writ of liberate, also dated 1 April at Carlisle, the assignment to Droxford on 21 June 1307 of £115 19s 3d ‘in one tally made to Robert of Barton . . . on the authority (per) of one letter patent of the said keeper dated at Carlisle on 1 April’. E 401/167 is the exchequer’s receipt roll which recorded, with the marginal note gard, the receipt of the £115 19s 3d from Robert on 21 June. E 372/158, r.43, mm.l, 2, 1d is Robert of Barton’s final account in the pipe roll of 6 Edward II. Although he cleared virtually all he owed for Penrith and Sowerby for 1307 and subsequent years (the debts for each year were amalgamated into one lump sum) no mention was made of payments into the wardrobe. All the cash was said to have been paid into the exchequer in eleven tallies. 59 Ormrod, ‘State Building and State Finance’, 29, perhaps underestimates the importance of this wardrobe system, though see the qualification in n.51.

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about this situation for the exchequer. Under the old chancery writ system it had likewise exercised no day-to-day control over the wardrobe, being expected simply to issue money and grant allowances as ordered. By the same token, the disadvantages of wardrobe activity had also long been apparent: the labour of its getting in its own revenue from local collectors by dribs and drabs and the danger of running up debts which the exchequer could not pay, however many writs of liberate were despatched. By the 1250s, both king and reformers could agree that royal finance would work in a more secure and responsible fashion if the exchequer received all the revenues and funded the wardrobe through block transfers of money.60 In the second half of the century the problem became more acute, as the scale of wardrobe activity increased and it accumulated debts far beyond the capacity of the exchequer to pay them. By the end of Edward’s reign, it has been calculated that the wardrobe owed some £200,000: testimony both to its success in obtaining goods and services on credit and to its failure to live anywhere near within its means. Such an economy was ultimately unsustainable.61 There was also, as we have seen, a new problem, namely that of the authority of the wardrobe instruments upon which the exchequer was expected to act, a problem which the great writs of liberate circumvented in a way both cumbersome and tendentious. From the 1290s onwards, therefore, the exchequer looked to more radical solutions. It attempted, sometimes with the king’s support, to revive the reforms of the 1250s by insisting that it received all revenue and then transferred money to the wardrobe for the household expenses.62 The only qualification, mentioned in an ordinance of 1304, was that local officials could pay money direct to the wardrobe when this was sanctioned ‘by writ of the king’, which looks very much like an attempt to revive the old chancery writ of computate.63 If these schemes had succeeded they would have completely destroyed the wardrobe bill and letter system and also have prevented the king from running into debt. But they did not succeed chiefly because the king’s financial needs were so pressing. The wardrobe had still to secure goods and services on credit, draw directly on local revenues and, given the absence of the chancery, issue wardrobe instruments as receipts.64 In the area of finance which we have been discussing, the problems which derived from the chancery going out of court led to convoluted and confusing practices at the exchequer, but these were only one element of the larger problem of the king’s financial demands running beyond his resources. The separation of the chancery from the 60

CR 1256–59, 46–7; DBM, 106–7, no. 14. Prestwich, War, Politics and Finance, 221; and idem, ‘Exchequer and Wardrobe’, 5. 62 J.F. Willard, ‘An Exchequer Reform under Edward I’, The Crusades and Other Historical Essays Presented to D.C. Munro, ed. L.J. Paetow (New York, 1928), 225–44. 63 E 159/78, m.26/28. For the 1304 Ordinance, see Prestwich, ‘Exchequer and Wardrobe’, 6–7; for later schemes of reform see E 159/97, m.282d and Red Book, iii. 908–11, discussed in Buck, ‘The Reform of the Exchequer’, 242–3. 64 For the failure of such schemes, see Prestwich, ‘Exchequer and Wardrobe’, 8–9 and his War, Politics and Finance, 219. Willard, ‘An Exchequer Reform under Edward I’, 240–1, did not appreciate the failure because he did not realise that the large sums apparently revealed by wardrobe books and draft accounts, as being transferred from the exchequer to the wardrobe, embraced sums covered by the great writs of liberate discussed above which, as we have seen, were only in part discharged in cash. See Prestwich, ‘Exchequer and Wardrobe’, 3 and n.6. It is worth bearing this point in mind when looking at the tables of wardrobe funds received from the exchequer in Tout, Chapters, vi. 80–2 and Prestwich, Edward I, 570. Prestwich believes (War, Politics and Finance, 158) that the exchequer eventually established some control over the wardrobe by developing the tally of assignment. The point cannot be discussed here (though see above, n.56), but I am less clear that this was a decisive advance. 61

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king was much more central to another phenomena which impeded governmental business in the later Middle Ages: namely the extraordinary processes of duplication and even of triplication which arose from the great seal being moved by the privy seal and the privy seal on occasion being moved by even more personal seals like the secret seal and the signet. The king was no longer with the great seal but he was far from cutting it loose and allowing it to attend simply to routine matters while everything else was taken over and dealt with directly and definitively by the privy seal. Instead there remained a large number of important concessions and orders which the king wished to be executed through the great seal and which he sent letters of privy seal to secure. In 1304–05, for example, the king sent privy seal letters instructing the chancery to issue charters, letters of pardon, letters of protection, writs of liberate, and writs connected with commissions to judges and investigators, prohibitions of tournaments, summonses to parliament, and orders to seize and deliver land.65 ‘We order you to order’ ran the formula, which surely provokes the question ‘why not do the ordering yourself?’ When Edward I, on 29 June 1305 from Goudhurst in Kent, sent a privy seal letter to the chancery in London ordering it ‘as soon as possible’ to summon Master Philip Mattel and Master Renaud de Braundon to the parliament due to meet at Westminster on 15 August, would it not have been simpler and more effective to have sent privy seal letters to Philip and Renaud direct?66 To be sure, the king on occasion was saving time, in that the privy seal letters gave only general instructions and left the chancery to fill out the details. But in many instances the privy seal and corresponding chancery letters were virtually identical. And in any case, all of this type of business had been dealt with in earlier years by king and chancery alone, without the need for any privy seal in between. That this process of duplication led to considerable delay is certain, although the chancery always made it look as though it had acted instantly by giving to its charters and letters the same date as the privy seal letters which commanded them. Occasionally, however, we can see that the time taken to act was considerable. Thus two privy seal letters of 22 June 1296, ordering the chancery to issue pardons, were not implemented until 26 and 28 August.67 A privy seal letter, witnessed by the king at Glasgow on 23 August 1301, which ordered the chancery at York to warn the Gascon fleet bringing the autumn wine harvest to England of possible attack by the king of France, was not handed over to the chancellor until 8 October.68 Edward himself was well aware of such problems. In January 1299 when ordering the chancery to summon parliament, he observed that ‘he knows what day the message will reach the chancellor and has given good time for the letters to be made’. Doubtless ‘we didn’t get the order in time’ was one of the chancery’s constant refrains.69 The delays were, of course, equally frustrating for those seeking favour or justice from the king. In the old days, having obtained a concession, the chancery was on the spot to embody it in a charter, letter patent or letter close. Now, the concession had to be processed through the privy seal and then processed again through a perhaps far off chancery. Petitioners had also to put up with the king referring their 65 Cal. Chancery Warrants, 241–54; CChR 1300–26, 48–65; CPR 1301–07, 290–407; CCR 1302–07, 226–356; CFR 1272–1307, 502–45. 66 Cal. Chancery Warrants, 251. For the postponement of the parliament, see CCR 1302–07, 340. 67 Maxwell-Lyte, The Great Seal, 244. 68 Cal. Chancery Warrants, 132–3. 69 Ibid., 106.

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requests and complaints back to the chancery for it to make a decision or supply further information, something he did with increasing frequency, doubtless often as a delaying tactic.70 In these circumstances, it was easy to forget the benefits which flowed from having the chancery in a fixed place and think instead that it should always be with the king, ready with the expertise to enable him to dispose of matters which came to court. It was precisely this which the Articuli super Cartas demanded in 1300.71 The situation could get even worse with the increasing use of the secret seal. Already in 1322 one can have letters of this kind: Edward par le grace de dieu roi Dengleterre . . . a nostre cher clerk Mestre Robert de Baldok [keeper of the privy seal] saluz. Nous vous mandoms que par lettres souz nostre prive seal facez maunder en covenable forme as gardeins de nostre grant seal quils par brefs souz meisme nostre seal facent maunder au viscounte de Wiltes’ et a Robert de Hungerford, gardeins des terres forfaites a nous en dit countez [to return specified lands to John of Bradford]. Done souz nostre secre seal a Yar’ le vii. jour Ottobre lan de nostre regne xvi The same procedure, that of using the secret seal to move the privy seal to move the great seal, was even used in matters of some urgency, for example in securing the arrest of a man who had absconded with £73 of the king’s goods.72 There were, therefore, both advantages and disadvantages to the chancery moving out of court. The advantages were above all for those ‘seeking writs and prosecuting their rights’, who now found ‘a remedy in a certain place’. It also made sense to hive off from the king’s presence a large amount of routine administrative business dealt with by the chancery. On the other hand, the replacement of chancery liberate and computate writs as a means of financing the wardrobe with wardrobe letters and bills covered by fictional writs of liberate introduced a time-consuming and tendentious system of record keeping and account. Likewise, the system of duplication involved in using the privy seal to move the great seal, and even of triplication once the secret seal was introduced, bogged down the processes of government and made the issuing of orders and the concession of favours a far more drawn out process. In that sense later medieval kings ruled with less decision and despatch than their twelfth and thirteenth century predecessors. Several ways may be canvassed as to how the advantages just discussed could have been retained and the disadvantages avoided. The basic problem lay, as we have seen, in the whole status of the great seal. Fundamentally it had been too successful; it had created the belief that only its instruments were well and truly authoritative.73 One solution would have been to have increased the authority of the privy and other seals

70

Examples of Edward I referring matters back to the chancery are found throughout Cal. Chancery Warrants. 71 English Historical Documents, 1189–1327, ed. H. Rothwell (London, 1975), 499, chapter 5. This also laid down that the justices of king’s bench should follow the king. 72 Maxwell-Lyte, The Great Seal, 76–7; CCR 1318–23, 599, 464. In both these cases Baldock himself tried to reduce the process in the first place by attaching the privy seal to the secret seal letter, and in the second by giving the order to the chancery by word of mouth. 73 See Wilkinson, Chancery, 11–12.

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which the king retained close to his person. Up to a point this was indeed accomplished. By the 1320s and probably earlier what were in effect privy seal letters of computate were accepted by the exchequer.74 In 1339 Edward III attempted to confer the same authority on another of his private seals the ‘griffoun’.75 But there were still difficulties. Since the privy seal did not send copies of its writs of computate to the exchequer (here failing to imitate the old chancery contrabreve practice), the exchequer refused to accept them until the accountant had acquired another writ of privy seal addressed to the exchequer, a problem which an ordinance in the 1320s tried to remedy.76 Likewise, the problem over the wardrobe bills remained, and these were still not accepted unless covered either by fictional writs of liberate as before, in which case they could be exchanged for tallies, or by separate letters under the great or privy seal, in which case they could be actually presented at account.77 Something of the idea that debts were best acquitted and expenditure authorised by letters under the great seal persisted, and the privy seal continued to move the great seal in such matters.78 Indeed in 1322 the keeper of the privy seal himself informed the chancery, in reference to a privy seal letter which had authorised the bailiffs of Worcester to make payments out of their farm, that ‘writs of that kind should be made under the great seal of the king’.79 Likewise the privy seal continued to move the great seal for the issue of charters, letters patent and a whole series of miscellaneous letters close. Given the status of the great seal, a different solution to the problems we have discussed might have been via a reduction of the chancery’s business, thus enabling it to stay at court. The most obvious and most significant way of doing this would have been by hiving off to the court of common pleas at Westminster the issuing of the de cursu writs which originated litigation. These could have been written by the justices’ clerks and been sealed either with the justices’ own seals, or, perhaps better, with a specially created royal seal like that indeed given to the court of common pleas in 1344 for the sealing of judicial writs.80 There was certainly no need for the absolutely routine de cursu writs to be sealed with the great seal; indeed, in effect they were not, for the custom was probably to seal them, like other letters close, with merely a dab of wax touched by a portion of the seal.81 If the court of common pleas had issued de cursu writs, that would have provided litigants with both the fixed place of issue which they desired and the necessary legal advice about which writ to obtain. The chancery would have been relieved of a very large part of its business, certainly of that 74

Red Book, iii. 948–51; for some examples: Memoranda Roll 1326–7, nos. 262, 267, 321, 442, 616. Under Ordinances of October 1305 for the running of the exchequer during the absence abroad of both the treasurer and chancellor of the exchequer, no money was to be disbursed save by special order of the king and by writ of privy seal: J.F. Willard, ‘Ordinances for the Guidance of a Deputy Treasurer, 22 October 1305’, EHR xlviii (1933), 88. Likewise under the Walton Ordinances of 1338, for the governing of the kingdom during Edward III’s absence, the exchequer was to make no payment unless authorised by letters under the privy seal or by letters under the great seal moved by the privy seal. See Tout, Chapters, iii. 70, 144–6 and observe 70, n.1. 75 CCR 1339–41, 25; Wilkinson, Chancery, 5–16. 76 Red Book, iii. 948–51. 77 Memoranda Rolls 1326–7, nos. 680, 871, 197, 244, 434, 614, 769, 1641, 2153. 78 Ibid., nos. 754, 777, 784; CPR 1327–30, 125, 130, 109. 79 Maxwell-Lyte, The Great Seal, 36, and see 37 for the suggestion that writs of privy seal addressed to the exchequer but found in the chancery were in fact replaced by great seal letters. 80 Ibid., 330–1. Judicial writs were issued by the court in the course of actions, for example to compel a litigant to come to court. De cursu writs originated the actions themselves. 81 Maxwell-Lyte, The Great Seal, 304–6; Pleas Before the King or his Justices 1198–1212, i. 28–9; Chaplais, English Royal Documents, 10; Roll and Writ File of the Berkshire Eyre, lxiii.

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part which most obviously forced it from court. As for the other routine administrative matters with which the chancery dealt, many of these could have been managed as well, if not better, by the exchequer. In considering ways in which the chancery’s business could have been reduced, a slightly quizzical eye may also be cast over the chancery rolls themselves. Of inestimable value to historians, were they worth the labour at the time? After all the Angevins, great and powerful kings, had managed with simply the fine rolls which noted the money offered to the king, and with the originalia roll which conveyed the information to the exchequer so that it could levy the sums involved.82 Likewise the Capetians, through all their thirteenth century triumphs, did without anything like the English chancery rolls. It was not until the 1300s that the French chancery began to record its acts in any systematic fashion, and then, as Olivier Guyotjeannin has put it, it confined itself to registering charters containing ‘des actes à valeur perpétuelle’.83 At least that would seem to suggest that the English charter rolls were of value: the king wanted to know what he had conceded just as much as the beneficiaries wanted some central record of the concession. Yet in practice it was rare for a charter to be verified against the copy in the charter rolls. Indeed, in the early thirteenth century at least, there were sometimes differences between the issued charter and the copy on the rolls, the result most probably of making the enrolment from a preliminary draft.84 One can be even more sceptical about the value of the vast amount of short term material placed on the close and patent rolls, the numerous judicial and administrative commissions, the petty favours and so on. Were these ever looked at again? The answer is that occasionally they were, though usually to check comparatively minor points: to demonstrate that the king had indeed given Richard de Grey some beasts in Pickering forest or to investigate how much the men of Retford manor had been tallaged.85 Useful but hardly by itself worth the effort of compiling the rolls.86 Were the rolls designed to meet another purpose, namely that of pinning responsibility for the letters on those who had authorised their issue? In any chancery roll a proportion of the letters had warranty notes which appeared to do just that. The letters might be by the king himself, by some named minister, or by the council – per regem, per Hubertum de Burgo justiciarium, per consilium.87 In reality, however, the notes were but haphazard symbols of responsible government. In the thirteenth century, there were great variations in the frequency with which they appeared. In some 82 For the early fine and originalia rolls, see Memoranda Rolls 1 John, xxi–xxxiii, 85–8. It may also be noted that though records of privy seal letters were kept by the wardrobe under Edward I and Edward II, it is far from clear whether this practice continued. For the early rolls and registers of the wardrobe see Tout, Chapters, ii. 80–1; Maxwell-Lyte, The Great Seal, 26; P. Chaplais, ‘Privy Seal Drafts, Rolls and Registers, Edward I–Edward II’, EHR lxxiii (1958), reprinted with the same pagination as chapter XX of his Essays in Medieval Diplomacy and Administration (London, 1981). 83 O. Guyotjeannin, ‘L’enregistrement à la chancellerie royale française, XIIIe–XVe siècle’. I am most grateful to M. Guyotjeannin for sending me the text of this paper. 84 See, particularly, J.B. Edwards, ‘The English Royal Chamber and Chancery in the Reign of John’, (unpublished University of Cambridge D.Phil. thesis, 1974), 81–9, 95, 103. On the other hand the rolls were checked and some errors corrected; see 102. 85 CR 1251–53, 316; CR 1242–47, 465, 467. 86 In the 1320s the exchequer felt that the labour of writing the appallingly swollen pipe rolls delayed the actual hearing of accounts: Buck, ‘The Reform of the Exchequer’, 246. See also Ormrod’s comment about the increase in exchequer documentation in the 1290s: ‘State Building and State Finance’, 24–5. 87 See, for example, the letter quoted above, 52.

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years under Henry III there were hardly any; in others large numbers. For a time in the 1250s a very high proportion of letters were authorised by the king himself.88 Had Henry suddenly decided to work much harder or were the notes becoming largely formulaic? Up to a point, moreover, the notes served a slightly different function from that of enabling the king to see who was responsible for the acts issued in his name. The notes appeared not merely on the rolls but on the letters themselves.89 They thus indicated to the recipient who was responsible for the letter, pulling away the facelessness of government and quite probably giving it more clout. Sometimes the chancery did not bother to copy the notes from the letters onto the rolls.90 Sometimes it may have copied them automatically. At other times, often during periods of political uncertainty, it did so with a will. The notes in that case were less ‘king down’ than ‘chancery up’, designed to protect the chancellor or the chancery staff by indicating on whose orders they had acted.91 The rolls themselves were scarcely designed for ease of access and inspection. True, there were marginal notes indicating the subject matter of the entry or the person involved. But one membrane was sewn to the next until the rolls became, in the fourteenth century, twenty sometimes thirty membranes long, and perhaps some fifty or sixty feet in length. The only way to find something was to scroll through looking at a half or quarter membrane at a time, then and now an extremely time-consuming business. In pipe rolls, by contrast, which really were documents in every day use, only two membranes were sewn together and a series of two membrane sets (around sixteen in the 1220s, many more later) were sewn together at one end. Rolled up, a pipe roll looks not unlike a chancery roll; unrolled on a large table it is quite different for the whole of it is immediately accessible: one can turn with equal ease to any membrane. A pipe roll, therefore (as Élisabeth Lalou put it to me) is rather like a large book; turning over the two membrane sets is like turning over large pages, the length being all to the good because one’s eyes run quickly down a great number of entries.92 Given all this one wonders why the chancery rolls got started in the first place. One view is to ascribe them to the administrative genius of John’s great chancellor, Hubert Walter, who, certainly as justiciar in 1195, inaugurated the tripartite final concord.93 Yet as archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter neither bothered to date his acta nor, as far as the evidence goes, to record them.94 The same is true of another

88

This is particularly true between 1251 and 1253 and is evident in all the rolls. See, for example, the authorisation by Stephen of Seagrave in 1230: Ann. Mon., iii. 121; CR 1227–31, 321. 90 Contrast, for example, the letter authorised by the bishop of Carlisle in Memoranda Rolls 16–17 Henry III preserved in the Public Record Office, ed. R.A. Brown (London, 1991), no. 1035 with CR 1231–34, 88. 91 For analysis and comment on variations in the frequency of authorisations, see CRR, xv, lxi; xvi, xlviii. It was likewise as ‘cover’ that the chancery filed the orders it received via privy seal letters. 92 The same is true of the plea rolls of the judicial benches. Consultation of the pipe rolls was facilitated by a note in a large hand at the bottom of each two membrane set indicating the county or counties which they covered. 93 For various hypotheses about the origins of the chancery rolls see Richardson’s introduction to Memoranda Rolls 1 John, xxi–li; Painter, Reign of John, 96–106; C.R. Cheney, Hubert Walter (London, 1967), 108–9. In the tripartite final concord, third copies of agreements which ended law suits were deposited in the treasury, previously there having been just two copies, one with each of the litigants. (See Cheney, Hubert Walter, 95–6.) 94 C.R. Cheney, English Bishops’ Chanceries 1100–1250 (Manchester, 1950), 86, 108. Cheney is reduced to the hopeful and circular comment (108) that ‘Hubert Walter’s periods of office as justiciar and 89

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great minister of the early thirteenth century, Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester. For over a generation Peter was at the very centre of royal government as baron of the exchequer, justiciar, royal tutor and ultimately between 1232 and 1234 virtual ruler of the kingdom. Yet, as bishop of Winchester, Peter too neither consistently dated nor recorded his acta.95 What he did do was start the great series of Winchester pipe rolls, modelled very closely on the pipe rolls of the king.96 Here again we have the contrast between pipe rolls and chancery rolls. From year to year one pipe roll was used to compile the next. Each recorded the money owed the king, the amount paid in each year and the balance outstanding. The pipe rolls were absolutely central to the getting in of revenue, the supervision of the king’s local agents, and the political control over magnates and everyone else who owed money to the crown. They were great working documents; by contrast the chancery rolls were essentially passive records. The beginnings of those rolls in John’s reign should be ascribed less perhaps to ministers than to the king himself. John’s morbidly suspicious nature was notorious and at the start of his reign it doubtless went into overdrive. John inherited a justiciar in Geoffrey fitz Peter and thought it prudent to make Hubert Walter chancellor, two great established and establishment figures, neither of whom, perhaps, he entirely trusted.97 The exchequer and the bench at Westminster both constituted centres of power independent in some ways of himself. And, if this was not enough, John would frequently be out of England altogether, in Normandy and elsewhere in his far flung dominions. For such a king it seemed a natural step to record his letters and charters so that he knew exactly what he had ordered and what he had given. The form in which the rolls were made precisely suggests the interfering amateur. John knew enough to want records but too little to conceive ones which would actually work.98 The first close and patent rolls in John’s reign were comparatively slim affairs; but gradually more and more business was recorded on them, a process which continued steadily until we reach the monstrous compilations of the fourteenth century.99 Of course, even at their worst the actual compilation of the rolls engaged only a part of the chancery’s energies, but their burgeoning size reflected the more general increase in its writing work, an increase which, as we have seen, gradually forced it out of court. Aspects of that move were inevitable and right. Above all it was essential to have a fixed place to dispense the de cursu writs which originated litigation. But this need could surely have been met without the duplication and sometimes triplication of administrative processes which confused and delayed government in the later

chancellor bore so much fruit in the public records that it is difficult to believe that he was content without registration in his archiepiscopal chancery’. 95 English Episcopal Acta IX. Winchester 1205–1238, ed. N. Vincent (Oxford, 1994), xliv, lxxiii–v. Peter here rejected the practice of his predecessor, Bishop Godfrey de Lucy, who had dated his acta. For Peter’s career see N. Vincent, Peter Des Roches. An Alien in English Politics 1205–38 (Cambridge, 1996). 96 N. Vincent, ‘The Origins of the Winchester Pipe Rolls’, Archives xxi (1994), 25–42. 97 John quarrelled with Hubert Walter and momentarily dismissed him: see Cheney, Hubert Walter, 105. On the surface, however, his relations with Geoffrey fitz Peter were harmonious: Painter, Reign of John, 61. 98 In the early close rolls (see above, n.7) by far the greatest number of letters were writs of liberate and computate involving the exchequer. Also large numbers of letters, when John was out of England, were addressed to Geoffrey fitz Peter. 99 The vast increase in the size of the close and patent rolls far more than made up for the diminishing size of the liberate roll referred to above.

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Middle Ages. Either, as we have suggested, the privy seal should have been invested with more authority and a clear cut division have been made between its activities and those of the chancery; or the chancery should have hived off its routine judicial and administrative business to the three benches and exchequer and have remained at court. It was certainly elements from both these solutions which enabled France to avoid England’s bureaucratic nightmare. The French chancery, while forming a distinct department or ‘chamber’, remained part of the royal household and continued on the whole to follow the king. It was able to do so because, as we have seen, it largely escaped the tyranny of compiling numerous rolls; and it also, more importantly, bore no responsibility for the English kind of de cursu writs. Rather judicial business was shouldered by the parlement of Paris with its own extensive notarial staff. In the early fourteenth century Philip the Fair certainly had a secret seal and a signet alongside the great seal. Occasionally all three were used to seal acts of great importance. But there was little equivalent to the duplication and triplication of processes found in England. This was partly because the chancery remained with the king, as we have said. But it was also because the secret seal and the signet were fully authoritative within their separate areas of activity.100 English government, therefore, could and should have taken a different path. Or should it? For, at the end of the day, one is left with a feeling that the duplication and triplication served a purpose, though one which was political rather than administrative. The Angevin kings, financially self sufficient, unrestricted by Magna Carta, and dealing with a comparatively small political community were able to act swiftly and decisively. The fourteenth century kings were not. They were in a totally different situation. They had to bargain for funds with parliament and conciliate a wide political nation. They had to move with care and sensitivity and be ready to compromise and draw back. From this point of view, a system of government which imposed delay, blurred the issue of responsibility and made it easy to pass the buck, was all to the good. If the chancery going out of court, with all of its misleading records and repetitive processes, was administratively wrong, politically it was right.

100

These remarks are based on the essay by E. Lalou in Écrit et pouvoir dans les chancelleries médiévales: Espace français, espace anglais, actes du colloque international de Montréal, ed. K Fianu and D. de Guth (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1997). I am also most grateful for her advice in a private letter.

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In October 1301, Edward I wrote to the exchequer from his campaign headquarters in Scotland. Typically, he was demanding funds for an ambitious attempt to construct a floating bridge across the Firth of Forth, so he could pursue his enemies through the winter. ‘Know that we wonder greatly why you have sent us as little money as you have sent up till now, and in particular, we are surprised you have sent it in such small instalments . . . we would have achieved such a success against our enemies, that our business in these parts would have been brought to a satisfactory and honourable conclusion in a short time.’1 As well as typifying his style of kingship, Edward’s letter encapsulates various problems in the structure of state finance in the latter years of his reign, especially after his policies brought the country to the verge of civil war in 1297. The similarities with the crisis facing his grandfather in 1215 are striking. Edward was forced to make sweeping concessions – the Confirmatio Cartarum issued in November 1297, and the Articuli super Cartas in 1300 – that effectively blocked further demands for extraordinary taxation, on which his government had come to rely; and, in consequence, the continued expenditure of the wars in Scotland brought his financial administration to the brink of collapse. Prestwich has argued that at the time of Edward’s death in 1307, the crown was at least £200,000 in debt, of which £60,000 was still outstanding in the late 1320s; and he identifies the inability of the exchequer to exercise effective authority over the wardrobe as a major cause of the debt, as the department was permitted to spend far beyond its means.2 The primary aim of this paper is to investigate the evolution of the exchequer during the thirteenth century. The first section will detail how the exchequer’s role in the financial administration rapidly changed between the days of Richard fitz Nigel’s Dialogus de Scaccario and the constitutional crisis facing Henry III in 1258. The second section explores the recovery of the exchequer as an institution from a state of virtual collapse in 1268, under the leadership of three important reformers, the treasurers Joseph de Chauncy, John Kirby and William March. Finally, using

1 2

E 159/75 m.7. M. Prestwich, ‘Exchequer and Wardrobe in the Later Years of Edward I’, BIHR 46 (1973), 1–10.

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evidence for the level of indebtedness at the close of Edward’s reign, the operation of the exchequer within the financial administration before and after the crisis of 1297 under treasurer Walter Langton will be re-examined and reinterpreted. Nevertheless it is impossible to analyse the exchequer without awareness of changes to the mechanics and constituent elements of English state finance, especially in the periods immediately after the restrictions placed on avenues of royal revenue in 1215 and 1297–1301. These will be referred to throughout when they have a bearing on institutional changes at the exchequer.3 However, given the complexity of the subject matter, and the sheer volume of primary and secondary source material at the historian’s disposal, a degree of prior knowledge of exchequer practice has been assumed. The exchequer has always exercised a peculiar yet powerful fascination for historians ever since Richard fitz Nigel was compelled to produce the Dialogus de Scaccario in the 1170s. One cannot help admiring the exchequer of Fitz Nigel’s day – an orderly place, with officials working to rigid procedures that had probably been established when the institution was conceived at the beginning of Henry I’s reign. Despite severe disruption under King Stephen, the durability of exchequer practice is clearly demonstrated by the appearance of pipe rolls within a year of Henry II’s accession, little altered in form or content from the only roll that predates his reign, covering the 1129–30 financial year.4 Yet there is a nostalgic feel to Fitz Nigel’s treatise, with the master fondly recalling the ancient days whilst listing newfangled areas of royal revenue under the persistent interrogation of his scholar. As Stacey suggests in his introduction to the 1241–42 receipt and issues rolls, before the reign of Henry II the exchequer had been an occasion rather than an institution, a twice-yearly event designed for the convenience of the crown to ensure the management of its estates was handled with propriety.5 Following Henry II’s legal reforms, officials struggled to keep track of the mass of new judicial material that began to appear on the pipe rolls, and several times in the 1180s the exchequer transferred unrecoverable debts into schedules in an attempt to keep the main rolls a current record of audit rather than a list of royal debtors.6 Yet the gradual introduction of new material under Henry II was nothing compared to the rapid increase in business in the reigns of Richard and John, who imposed intolerable burdens on the exchequer machinery in their relentless pursuit of revenue. It has recently been demonstrated elsewhere that Richard exerted sustained pressure on the exchequer from 1194, which John took to new extremes after the loss of Normandy in 1204.7 In particular John used his chamber after 1207 as a device to speed up the collection of revenue, bypassing the cumbersome exchequer processes

3

For a wider discussion of changes in state finance, see N. Barratt, ‘English Royal Revenue in the early thirteenth century and its Wider Context, 1130–1330’, Crises, Revolutions and Self-Sustained Growth: Essays in European Fiscal History, 1130–1830, ed. W.M. Ormrod, M. Bonney and R. Bonney (Stamford, 1999), 58–96. 4 J.A. Green, ‘Praeclarum et Magnificum Antiquatis Monumentum: The Earliest Surviving Pipe Roll’, BIHR 55 (1982), 1–17. 5 Receipt and Issue Rolls 1241–2, ed. R.C. Stacey (PRS, new ser., xlix), ix. 6 C.A.F. Meekings, ‘The Pipe Roll Order of 12 February 1270’, Studies Presented to Sir Hilary Jenkinson, ed. J. Conway Davies (London, 1957), 225–53, see 234–5. 7 N. Barratt, ‘The Revenue of King John’, EHR cxi (1996), 835–55; N. Barratt, ‘The English Revenue of Richard I’, EHR cxvi (2001), 635–56.

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of receipt and issue to amass enormous reserves of cash in castle treasuries.8 The consequences of John’s exactions for the exchequer were disastrous; it simply could not cope with the upsurge in business, nor keep track of monies paid into the chamber. By 1214 the established processes of audit were so disrupted that many accounts were simply not heard. With civil war came total collapse, and the hastily written and largely incomplete 1215 pipe roll bears its own sad testimony to the slide towards anarchy that followed John’s rejection of Magna Carta.9 Revival began as soon as Henry III’s regency government has secured the throne for the young king. However the challenge was immense; the administrative chaos of the civil war had left the exchequer’s record keeping and audit process in tatters, and the acceptance of Magna Carta by the minority government, albeit with important changes, had imposed serious restrictions on areas of revenue successfully exploited by Richard and John. Nevertheless recovery was achieved, slowly but surely. Revenue totals for Henry III’s minority years rose gradually from little over £4000 in 1218 to a far healthier £18,000 in 1225, the year in which the exchequer completed its retrospective work in assembling detailed accounts for the previous decade, having largely discharged debts owed to loyal supporters incurred during the civil war. During this period, the exchequer increased its levels of productivity, as debts were cleared from the pipe rolls at a growing rate; similarly more debts became ‘active’ and were subjected to audit – 50% in 1225 compared to only 30% in 1218 – and, to increase efficiency, the scattered debts of individuals were amalgamated into single accounts. Many of the larger debts were attermined, guaranteeing a set level of revenue to the exchequer whilst easing the debtor’s burden. More shrieval accounts were audited, and the business of the exchequer year soon returned to normal.10 Despite the recovery of the exchequer, the crown’s ability to determine policy remained fatally weakened by the imposition of Magna Carta. One of the most significant factors in the long-term development of state finance was the erosion of the traditional fiscal base – county farm revenue – under Richard I; and no regular, sizeable yet politically acceptable source had emerged to replace it.11 Magna Carta effectively limited future exploitation of revenue sources that John had used to finance his campaign of 1214, and consequently royal revenue had fallen to a level more typical of the reign of Henry II. Furthermore, in 1225 a potential solution in the form of extraordinary taxation – explored for dynastic purposes by John in 1207 – was effectively linked to ‘good government’ when a grant of a fifteenth by the community of the realm was made in return for the re-issue of the charters.12 Largely as a result of these limitations, the main crisis of Henry III’s reign was precipitated by the financial implications of Henry’s proposed conquest of Sicily on behalf of the pope, who expected England to pay for the venture. The refusal of the political community to

8

J.E.A. Jolliffe, ‘The Chamber and Castle Treasuries under King John’, Studies in Medieval History Presented to F.M. Powicke, ed. R.W. Hunt, R.W. Southern and W.A. Pantin (Oxford, 1948), 121–37. 9 PR 17 John. 10 N. Barratt, ‘An edition of the 1225 Pipe Roll and Early Receipt Rolls of the Exchequer’ (unpublished University of London Ph.D. thesis, 1996). 11 Barratt, ‘Revenue of Richard I’, 643–52. 12 N. Barratt, ‘The Revenues of John and Philip August Revisited’, King John: New Interpretations, ed. S.D. Church (Woodbridge, 1999), 91–2; see N. Barratt, ‘Financial Pressures and Dynastic Problems in Angevin England’, presented at the 1997 Harlaxton Symposium (Stamford, forthcoming).

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agree to the required papal taxation opened the floodgates for protest against Henry’s regime in 1258. Although historical attention has naturally focused on the legal and administrative implications of the Provisions of Oxford and Westminster, it can be argued that at the heart of the reforms lay an equally important debate about the structure of state finance. One of the baronial council’s grievances, laid before Louis IX for arbitration in 1264, was that: certain courtiers . . . arranged that escheats, wardships and other perquisites of the lord king, by means of which he ought to replenish his treasury, . . . should be conferred upon themselves in turn. Further, out of the assured revenues of the lord king they procured grants of so many and such large fees . . . that the royal patrimony was almost completely exhausted by fees of this kind.13 It was not just ‘certain courtiers’ that had benefited from Henry’s profligate patronage. In an attempt to provide a suitable allowance for Edward’s marriage, Henry bestowed so many territories on his son in 1254 that Matthew Paris sneered in disgust that he had turned himself into a ‘mutilated kinglet’.14 Furthermore, Edward initially appeared as inept at managing his finances as his father, selling lands and wardships formerly assigned to him, running up large debts at tournaments, and consequently taking loans from the king of France. All of this occurred during the period when royal finances were under the greatest scrutiny.15 Apart from using the restitution of royal demesne as a way of settling a few scores with the king’s foreign half-brothers, the reformers were clearly concerned about the manner in which royal finances were managed. A clause in the Provisions of Oxford stipulated that ‘all issues of the land should go to the exchequer’, and was clearly a reference to the quiet usurpation of exchequer functions of receipt and issue by the financial and administrative department of the royal household.16 Tout’s figures for wardrobe receipts and expenses from 1224, the first surviving set of wardrobe accounts, show that 1242 was a key moment in this process, when the wardrobe received vast sums of cash from the treasury to finance the costs of Henry’s unsuccessful campaign in France. After his return to England, foreign or non-treasury receipts rose from a pre-campaign average of £4000 per year to over £6200, and thereafter more funds were routed through the wardrobe.17 Although the exchequer continued to undertake its primary function as a place where royal accounts were audited – and indeed the keeper of the wardrobe was required to present his accounts to the exchequer – the wardrobe increasingly collected revenue directly from crown debtors, reminiscent of John’s use of the chamber after 1207. 13

DBM, 277, baronial gravamina clause seven. Matthaei Parisiensis, Monachi Sancti Albani, Chronica Majora, ed. H.R. Luard, 7 vols (RS, 1872–83), v. 450. 15 For a discussion of Edward’s finances prior to and during the period of reform, see M. Prestwich, Edward I (Yale, 1997), 11–38 passim. 16 Ann. Mon., i. 446–53. The relevant section reads: ‘Of the treasurer and of the exchequer. Likewise of the treasurer. Except that he is to render account at the end of the year. And other good men are to be put at the exchequer in accordance with the ordinance of the said twenty-four. And there all issues of the land are to come and no part of them elsewhere. And what is seen to need amendment is to be amended.’ 17 Tout, Chapters, vi. 74–83. 14

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In an attempt to control the king’s receipts and issues, the reformers decided to place their own officials in key positions, and an entry in the Michaelmas receipt roll dated 4 November 1258 proclaims the appointment of John de Crakehall as treasurer of the exchequer.18 The scribes deliberately provide separate totals in the rolls to show how much had been collected before and after this date, as if to provide concrete evidence that the baronial appointment was a success. But did John de Crakehall and the baronial reformers actually regenerate state finance? The short answer is no, and it could be argued that this made the situation far worse. Recent research by James Collingwood clearly demonstrates that ‘ordinary’ revenue during the period of baronial reform had failed to expand, and that the crown relied upon miscellaneous and ad hoc sources to prop up its finances.19 Chronological exchequer receipt rolls fortuitously survive for complete financial years in 1254 and 1257 to 1260, and the data they contain confirms these findings. Receipts at the exchequer in 1257 were only £13,000,20 compared to nearly £30,000 in 1254;21 just over £13,500 was deposited in 1258;22 and with Crakehall’s appointment, revenue for 1259 rose to £15,000,23 and stayed constant in 1260.24 Yet it is clear that these totals are still remarkably low, especially when over £20,000 of foreign receipts found their way to the wardrobe between 1258 and 1261.25 The composition of this total is interesting, as it included payments by sheriffs from their county revenues, a direct contravention of the Provisions of Oxford; we also find large sums of money seized from the king’s half-brothers, including rent from the bishopric of Winchester formerly enjoyed by Aymer de Valence as bishop-elect. Yet much of the other revenue paid directly to the wardrobe was from other ecclesiastical vacancies, which the king could legitimately claim was a regalian right and therefore not subject to baronial control. The receipt rolls also illustrate a fundamental weakness in the structure of state finance. With the survival of chronological rolls, as opposed to the columned copies that were retrospectively compiled for use in the upper exchequer, it is possible to reconstruct the flow of cash into the treasury during an exchequer year. During the period of reform, the majority of revenue arrived at the exchequer in the first few weeks of each term, with revenue dwindling to virtually nothing by the end. Occasional income provided a welcome boost throughout the remainder of the year – mainly Jewish monies, with issues from vacancies and escheats that had not found their way to the wardrobe. Mills has analysed payments made at the Michaelmas and Easter adventus vicecomitis, and suggests that the alarmingly low levels recorded in the memoranda rolls were due to a collapse in normal practices at the exchequer.26 We have seen that some of this money found its way to the wardrobe; but using the receipt rolls we can correlate monies deposited by sheriffs throughout the year with their respective account dates recorded in the memoranda rolls, thus diminishing the

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

E 401/39 m.1. J. Collingwood, ‘Royal Finance 1258–72’ (unpublished University of London Ph.D. thesis, 1996). E 401/28, 30. E 401/23, 25. E 401/33, 36. E 401/38–40. E 401/41–2. E 361/1. M. Mills, ‘Adventus Vicecomitum, 1258–72’, EHR cxliv (1921), 481–96.

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importance of the adventus and providing evidence that the traditional structure of business during an exchequer year was beginning to unravel. Mills extracted similar data for shrieval attendances for the business of audit and receipt to paint a grim picture of an exchequer on the point of collapse between 1258 and 1262, and suggests that a complete breakdown of the internal administrative machinery did occur between 1263 and 1268.27 Many debts remained unsummoned, un-audited or unrecorded by the exchequer, and in any case there was no guarantee that payments that had been made against debts would be recorded on the pipe rolls. Only the resumption of full royal authority enabled the exchequer to begin the daunting task of sorting out the chaos into which its record keeping and procedures had descended. Therefore in summary, the first half of the thirteenth century witnessed the exchequer’s recovery after the wars of John’s final years, being slowly eclipsed by the rise of the wardrobe as Henry III’s preferred instrument of receipt and expenditure from 1242. The crisis of 1258 precipitated another collapse of exchequer authority, further strengthening the crown’s reliance on the wardrobe. Furthermore, state finance had stagnated since Magna Carta had imposed financial restrictions on Angevin excesses, and no alternative regular source of revenue had emerged to replace the county farms. These were the challenges facing the exchequer, and during the first twenty years of Edward’s reign it was able to turn successive financial crises to its advantage by sweeping away some of the ossified practices that made it seem cumbersome in comparison to the more flexible wardrobe. The first step on the road to recovery was to tackle the exchequer’s own internal bureaucracy; the pipe rolls had swollen to unmanageable proportions, filled with debts that had accumulated during the confusion of the reform period, many of which were simply uncollectable. The architect of the reconstruction process was John of Chishill, who became treasurer of the exchequer on 6 February 1270.28 Within five days of his appointment he had drawn up and presented a series of measures to the council designed to clear dead and desperate debts from the pipe rolls in an attempt to streamline the documents. The plan was authorised by letters patent issued on 12 February, and the process of clearance is succinctly described by Meekings;29 after Easter 1270 all un-audited debts from 52 Henry III were to be marked ‘d’ in the pipe roll; if the sheriff was unable to collect revenue from any of these debts, then the ‘d’ would remain but the entry would not be copied into the roll for 53 Henry III, thus saving space in the rolls and reducing the workload for the scribes. Whenever payment was made against one of the marked debts, the roll for 52 Henry III would be annotated with the year in which account was heard, and the ‘d’ removed. Clearances of this nature had occurred in the past, but this was to be only the first small step towards a rationalisation of the bureaucracy and record keeping at the exchequer during the first twenty years of Edward’s reign. These years can be loosely grouped into three main periods of development during the respective tenures of Joseph de Chauncy, John Kirby and William March as treasurer. The initial challenge facing the exchequer was Edward’s return to England from crusade in August 1274. In purely financial terms, his crusade had been a disaster,

27

Ibid. For details of this and subsequent dates upon which key royal officials were appointed, see Tout, Chapters, vi. 19–20 (exchequer) and 26 (wardrobe). 29 Meekings, ‘Pipe Roll Order’. 28

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with massive debts rapidly accumulating after his departure in 1270. Although a crusading tax on movables assessed at a twentieth had been negotiated in 1270, most of which was collected before he set sail, costs spiralled out of control, and without easy access to the exchequer to raise and collect funds from England, Edward was obliged to rely on the wardrobe to borrow money heavily wherever he went – from the hospitallers at Acre; from merchants from Narbonne, Pisa, Genoa and Venice; from influential English subjects such as Robert Burnell; and most importantly the Italian banking firm, the Riccardi.30 In basic terms, Edward was using loans to anticipate his future revenue in advance of its receipt so that he could meet his household and military expenses. Edward’s first priority after his return to England was to raise sufficient funds to begin paying off his creditors. Yet with only limited funds available from traditional revenue sources, still considered by contemporaries to be the county farms, Edward appealed to Parliament in April 1275 for financial aid. He was granted a duty on exports of woolfells and hides at the rate of 6s 8d per sack specifically for the purpose of repaying the Riccardi, and for the remainder of his reign this important source of revenue continued to be used to repay loans. The Dunstable annalist attributed credit for the scheme to the treasurer, Joseph de Chauncy,31 but it seems more likely that the practical details were thrashed out by Italians, based on the ‘new aid’ granted in 1266 that was levied on the imports and exports of alien merchants; certainly, customs revenues were collected at English ports by the Riccardi as direct repayment of their loans. Although the exchequer was required to audit their accounts, no money actually passed through the hands of its officials. The customs revenues were lucrative and relatively stable, averaging nearly £10,000 for the first five years of collection, and thus theoretically plugged the hole in state finance that had been left unfilled since Magna Carta.32 In addition, Edward negotiated a grant of one fifteenth from another parliament held in October of the same year, which was assessed at £81,954 and yielded only slightly less.33 Large sums were again paid directly to the king’s creditors without exchequer involvement. As part of the wider drive to expand revenue, Joseph de Chauncy presided over an exchequer initiative to increase income from the royal demesne. The 1275 Statute of the Exchequer gave sheriffs responsibility for wardships within their county, but transferred the management of the royal demesne into the hands of three collectors, each with their own area of remit, whose accounts were audited separately at the exchequer.34 By keeping its lands in hand, the crown was attempting to mirror the practice employed by most contemporary landlords. However the scheme did not substantially boost revenue from this source, and was abandoned in 1282 with at least one of the custodians complaining of overwork.35 The 1275 statute also reinforced the principle that the wardrobe was subordinate to the exchequer, by requiring the keeper to present his accounts for audit once a year. At this stage, theory

30

For a summary of the state of Edward’s crusade revenues, especially the package of loans that were negotiated, see Prestwich, Edward I, 71–81. 31 Ann. Mon., iii. 258. 32 T.H. Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1977), 60–2. 33 Figures for lay and clerical taxation throughout this paper are derived from Prestwich, Edward I, 569, which in turn are collated from several works cited in his data table. 34 Statutes of the Realm, i. 196–8. 35 SC 1/10/157.

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was more important than practice; in reality, Edward continued to rely heavily on the wardrobe as his principal financial department of receipt and expenditure. Most of its revenue was derived from sources other than treasury drafts, which had a knock-on effect on exchequer receipts, which were correspondingly low throughout the 1270s.36 There are several reasons for this continued preference. One reason was that the wardrobe was always with the king, with day-to-day household management responsibilities. It was also a more flexible institution, not bound by the rigid practices that acted as a straightjacket on the exchequer and its methods of record keeping. However, as the first Welsh war demonstrated, the main advantage was that the core staff of twelve officials could take on and handle the administration and logistics of a military campaign, and thus the second Welsh war was conducted almost exclusively through the wardrobe.37 However, the wars and subsequent castle building programme impoverished the crown, and despite grants of lay and clerical taxes, Edward was once again forced to rely heavily on loans from the Riccardi, paid directly into the wardrobe.38 The financial difficulties presented the exchequer with a second opportunity to implement internal reform in its attempts to re-establish authority, and the appointment of John Kirby, a protégé of the chancellor Robert Burnell, as treasurer on 6 January 1284 brought a dynamic individual to the helm. On 23 March 1284 the Statute of Rhuddlan was issued to reform exchequer accounting practice, formally recognising the changes in state finance through modernisation of its records.39 The final acceptance that demesne revenue no longer played an important role in the crown’s finances led to the removal of the bodies of the county farms from the pipe rolls; they were copied onto a separate roll, the rotuli de corpus comitatibus, along with various dead and desperate debts.40 Although this may seem a cosmetic change, the act of altering the traditional format of the pipe rolls was a major step in recognising that the internal practices needed to change; and the removal of desperate debts thus permitted the exchequer to devote more energy to pursuing recoverable ones. Even more innovative was Kirby’s attempt in the same year to produce an assessment of annual royal revenue.41 It may seem remarkable to modern scholars that such an attempt had previously been beyond officials who worked at the exchequer year in, year out, and had a continuous series of documents from which to work; but this would be to seriously misinterpret both the role and function of the medieval exchequer, which primarily existed as a place of audit and receipt, rather than a producer of budgets and financial statements. However, the results of this ground-breaking assessment of the contribution of distinct elements of state finance, analysed by Mills, made sorry reading for a king 36 Wardrobe accounts are enrolled on the pipe rolls in E 372 – see Tout, Chapters, vi. 74–83 for document references. Similarly receipt rolls in E 401 can be used to produce levels of cash deposited into the exchequer for complete financial years between 1273 and 1279. Data tables similar to those published in J.H. Ramsay, A History of the Revenues of the Kings of England, 1066–1399, 2 vols (Oxford, 1925), ii. 88–9, are in preparation by the present author. 37 For a detailed analysis of the financial implications of Edward’s wars in Wales, France and Scotland see M. Prestwich, War, Politics and Finance under Edward I (London, 1972), 151–203. The role of the wardrobe during Edward’s wars was first discussed at length in Tout, Chapters, ii. 131–45. 38 Prestwich, War, Politics and Finance, 204–23. 39 Statutes of the Realm, i. 69–70. 40 E 372/129. 41 E 163/1/23.

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still chronically short of cash.42 County farms were adjudged to provide just over £10,000, but this figure fails to take account of the levels of terrae datae that had been removed and were subsequently listed in the corpus comitatibus; a more realistic figure of £2000 was all that the crown could expect from the remnants. This contrasts with the estimate of £8000 from the customs, and other important contributions were expected through average incomes from wardships, vacancies, court profits, eyres and issues from Chester and South Wales; and an impressive sum of £1414 from the attermined debts of individuals. In total, the best the king could hope for was £26,828, though a more realistic total would be nearer £20,000, once adjustments are made to county farm income. To put this in context, the king’s average annual household expenditure during this period immediately accounted for half this total. It was therefore the exchequer that took the lead in looking for ways to boost revenue still further. Based on the clearance of desperate debts from the rolls, in 1285, the treasurer launched an ambitious attempt to investigate unpaid debts due to the crown, and vigorously pressed for their speedy settlement. However Kirby’s Quest met with protest and resistance, and many debts were simply attermined, which at least added to the guaranteed level of income received each year. In general, the success of Kirby’s reforms are seen in the adventus totals after 1285, when there was a noticeable increase in the totals paid by the sheriffs which continued until changes were made to the system in 1299.43 These measures should be viewed as an indicator that the exchequer’s former reputation as a feared place of audit was being restored, with a power to summon debts and distrain non-payment that was totally beyond the capacity of the wardrobe. The final period of exchequer reform was perhaps the most important of all, and began with the appointment of William March as treasurer on 6 April 1290 following the death of John Kirby. March had previously served in the wardrobe as controller, and brought his administrative experience to bear on the exchequer. At the same time, Walter Langton was appointed keeper of the wardrobe, and in tandem they completely overhauled the financial structure. Once again, the driving force behind reform was crown debt, this time occasioned by Edward’s prolonged visit to Gascony. In 1290 Edward was able to negotiate further grants of taxation, designed to pay off the loans he had once again incurred from the Riccardi. Yet the lay fifteenth and clerical tenth was administered in a completely different manner. Instead of being paid into the wardrobe to cover repayments to the Riccardi, it was collected and administered by exchequer officials, and recorded on separate exchequer receipt rolls.44 Furthermore, all foreign receipts that had previously been paid directly to the wardrobe, save a few select sources, were brought under exchequer control, many of which were recorded on separate receipt rolls, such as Jewish chattels seized after their expulsion in 1290.45 Funds were then transferred to the wardrobe, recorded on separate issue rolls that were soon assimilated into the main issue roll series.46 Whereas treasury drafts to the wardrobe before 1290 were minimal, apart from the

42 43 44 45 46

M. Mills, ‘Exchequer Agenda and Estimate of Revenue, Easter Term 1284’, EHR xl (1925), 229–34. M. Mills, ‘Adventus Vicecomitum, 1272–1307’, EHR xxxviii (1923), 340. E 401/1611–1745. E 401/1564–1610. E 403/1310–15.

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second Welsh war, exchequer payments into the wardrobe between 1290 and 1295 averaged 84% of its total income.47 Three further changes occurred under March that underlined the exchequer’s new predominance. The increase in business was reflected in a dramatic increase in the size of the memoranda rolls, from around thirty membranes before 1290 to around ninety membranes thereafter, to record the new level of business and transactions.48 A new set of documents was introduced, the jornalia rolls, which essentially recorded the daily balance in the treasury by means of a comparison between total receipts from all sources, and total issues.49 Finally, from the 27 October 1290, an ordinance recorded on the receipt roll decreed that all tallies struck at the exchequer were to bear the date, an important step towards the creation of a negotiable instrument that could be exchanged in place of cash.50 Taken as a package, these measures had a profound impact on the structure of state finance. By introducing full accountability for crown receipts, the exchequer reestablished a position of predominance over the wardrobe not enjoyed since the minority of Henry III, and could now be used as an effective means of political control. Its newly recovered authority was quickly put to the test. The outbreak of war with France in 1294, coupled with the Welsh revolt and hostilities with Scotland from 1296, once more created a financial crisis. Edward’s increasingly arbitrary measures – prise of provisions, the maltolt, seizure of private cash deposits in churches, constant demands for subsidies from both laity and clergy, forced loans from Italian merchants and the seizure of English wool for profit – were largely enforced by the exchequer, who were instructed to chase all debts mercilessly and were ordered to cancel all inter-term vacations.51 In a move reminiscent of his grandfather, Edward used the exchequer’s powers of distraint to threaten nineteen magnates refusing to serve in Gascony – he wrote to the exchequer authorising its officials to proceed with collection of all debts ‘without fear or favour’ if they did not comply,52 and the device was used in the 1300s to ensure service in Scotland. Yet the exchequer’s ability to flex its muscles could only work effectively if the threat of distraint was backed by an efficient method of audit, and without full accountability this was simply not possible. Thus the subjugation of wardrobe receipts to the exchequer in the 1290s is a clear continuation of earlier policy to tidy up desperate debts and return the pipe rolls to their original purpose, namely a roll of audit rather than a list of crown debtors. However with the exchequer’s new power came unpopularity, and March paid the price for Edward’s exactions in 1295 when he was

47

Figures derived from Tout, Chapters, vi. 80–1. J.F. Willard, ‘An Exchequer Reform under Edward I’, The Crusades and other Historical Essays Presented to Dana C. Munro, ed. L.J. Paetow (New York, 1928), 242. 49 E 405/1/1–58. These important and hitherto underused documents will be discussed in more detail later. 50 An entry dated Friday 27 October in E 401/116. There is considerable debate as to the use of such tallies as negotiable instruments. See Prestwich, ‘Exchequer and Wardrobe’, 2; W.M. Ormrod, ‘State Building and State Finance in the Reign of Edward I’, Harlaxton Medieval Studies I: England in the Thirteenth Century, ed. W.M. Ormrod (Stamford, 1991), 29; Tout, Chapters, vi. 99–101; H. Jenkinson, ‘Medieval Tallies’, Archaeologia lxxiv (1925), 304–6; and J.F. Willard, Parliamentary Taxes on Personal Property 1290–1334 (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), 237–9. 51 E 159/69 m.11d. 52 E 159/68 m.65. 48

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dismissed.53 Langton moved across to take his place, and John Droxford filled the vacancy in the wardrobe. Edward’s policies in 1297 precipitated a crisis that nearly resulted in civil war; and the similarities with John’s attempt to regain Normandy in 1214 are striking. Edward was forced to make concessions in the face of strong political opposition, and agreed to curtail prise, abandon the maltolt and seek the consent of the community of the realm for future grants of taxation. The Confirmatio Cartarum was followed by further limitations in 1300, when the Articulis super Cartas additionally sought a drastic reduction of the royal forest. Although the fallout from the political crisis of 1297 gradually settled, Edward was reluctant to seek further grants of lay taxation from parliament for the remainder of his reign, given his opponent’s ability to link grants with reform. The financial situation looked bleak. The 1297 campaign saw a massive mobilisation of resources to pay allies and troops abroad, and various estimates have been made about the overall cost of the campaign and Edward’s consequent level of indebtedness. The wardrobe account for 1297–98 shows an overspend of nearly £39,000, and there were financial promises to be kept to continental allies and unpaid troops.54 Furthermore, Edward became embroiled in a series of costly campaigns in Scotland that continued beyond his death in 1307, but the concessions had wrecked the apparatus to fund them. The king had broken with the Riccardi in 1294, and, although the Frescobaldi gradually replaced them, the king’s credit rating was damaged, especially as he was unable to raise large injections of cash from taxation after 1297, the means by which he had repaid his creditors in the past. Thus the customs duties were used to pay for loans from the Frescobaldi, and a package of more traditional lines of revenue were investigated by the exchequer for exploitation – currency manipulation through the Statute of Stepney in 1299, feudal aids in 1302 and 1306, a tallage in 1303, and in the same year a new customs duty imposed on foreign merchants. Yet these sources were still insufficient to meet the costs of the Scottish wars, let alone pay off debts incurred during the Gascon campaign. To speed up the flow of cash, sheriffs and other royal officials were instructed to pay their receipts directly into the wardrobe, a clear reversal of the reforms implemented by March and Langton. This decision was overturned in 1301, and from 1304 sheriffs were instructed to pay money into the wardrobe only when specified by royal writ.55 Yet Mills has demonstrated that the adventus totals slumped dramatically after 1299, in part due to a further order to the sheriffs in 1301 demanding payment of their proffers in June rather than Michaelmas.56 Cash was clearly needed more quickly, and not even the removal of the exchequer from Westminster to York between 1301 and 1304 appears to have alleviated the situation.57 Prestwich has suggested that by the end of the reign, Edward was indebted to creditors to the tune of at least £200,000, with over £60,000 still outstanding in 1329.

53

Prestwich, Edward I, 405. Tout, Chapters, vi. 80–1; E 372/144 m.22. 55 Initial order in 1299, SC 1/48/6; reversal in 1301, E 159/74 m.58d; reinforced in 1304, E 159/78 m.20. 56 Mills, ‘Adventus Vicecomitum, 1272–1307’, 340. 57 Noted in the jornalia rolls that on 16 October 1301 ‘on this day left to go to the court’ (E 405/1/18); and its return on 6 December 1304 ‘Sunday the feast of St Nicholas on which day the exchequer left York towards London’ (E 405/1/37). 54

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The final section of the paper tackles some of the more complex issues thrown up by the resurgence of the exchequer prior to 1297, and the implications that the subsequent concessions had on Edward’s ability to anticipate in advance sufficient money to fund the Scottish wars. At face value, it would appear that Edward’s financial system was strained to breaking point by 1307, and that exchequer control of the wardrobe had completely broken down. After 1298, no wardrobe account was formally compiled or audited at the exchequer during the remainder of Edward’s life; and Prestwich has shown that the accounts of John Droxford remained unresolved right up to his death in 1329.58 From a variety of draft accounts and associated wardrobe documents, it is possible to broadly determine the deficits accumulated by the wardrobe – £30,000 in 1301, £12,000 in 1303 and £13,000 in 1306 – and conclude that the wardrobe was at least £93,000 in arrears by 1307.59 However, another indicator of the crown’s financial health was the daily treasury balance recorded in the exchequer jornalia rolls, which survive from 1293.60 The earliest rolls are more difficult to use, as they do not provide summarised totals for issues, whilst separate schedules of daily balances only survive from 1298. Nevertheless it is clear that Edward was able to build up sizeable cash deposits in the exchequer prior to 1297, for example £23,834 in August 129561 and £18,753 as late as December 1296.62 The pattern of issue was for large sums to be withdrawn at irregular intervals, after which the totals would quickly accumulate again. The situation after 1299 is in marked contrast. It is clear that the crown’s coffers were bare; after the exchequer’s move to York in October 1301, the treasury balance only reached £1000 on rare occasions, with smaller sums of several hundred pounds allowed to accumulate over short periods before removal. Most of the time the treasury was virtually empty; and on five occasions in 1301 and a further three times in 1302, exchequer officials were forced to borrow money from external sources to meet the demands of the crown.63 Surviving wardrobe journals that record similar daily cash balances paint a similar picture – only rarely is there over £100 left in the wardrobe’s coffers at the end of the day, and it is clear that regular prests made to the wardrobe kept the department solvent between exchequer drafts.64 Yet there are signs that by 1304 the tide was turning. Large cash deposits started to be made into the wardrobe in February 1304,65 though some were from the Frescobaldi, and after Easter nearly £3000 accumulated in the treasury.66 Totals in excess of £1000 were reached more regularly after the exchequer’s return to Westminster, especially during 58

Prestwich, ‘Exchequer and Wardrobe’, 4–5. Data derived from Prestwich, Edward I, 570. 60 The jornalia rolls for the period from 21 Edward I to 10 Edward II are listed in the TNA:PRO as E 405/1/1–58. They are stored unsorted in a box, and permission by the production staff to view the entire collection at once has greatly facilitated the research for this paper. 61 E 405/1/5 on 13 August 1295. 62 E 405/1/10 on 22 December 1296; this figure represents the minimum calculated amount left in the treasury, as the opening balance at the start of the term is not recorded in the roll. 63 E 405/1/15 on 19, 22 and 24 May and 27 July 1301; E 405/1/22 on 16 October 1301, 8 January and 1 February 1302. 64 E 101/359/5 for the period 24 March to 18 July 1301, and E 101/361/13 for the period 24 March to 25 April 1302. 65 BL Add MS 35292; for example on 7 February 1304 the wardrobe received an exchequer draft of £800, £2219 from the collectors of the papal tenth and £250 from the new customs, paid by the Frescobaldi. 66 E 405/1/34; the recorded treasury balance stood at £3277 on 29 April 1304. 59

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the summer months of 1305 and 1306, and from February 1307 a substantial sum built up, peaking at £11,000 in May.67 When Edward died in July 1307, over £5000 remained in his treasury.68 This does not fit in with the accepted picture of a debt-ridden financial system struggling to find sufficient cash to survive. Indeed the jornalia rolls can be used to investigate another area relating to crown debt, namely the mechanism by which the crown was able to anticipate revenue in advance. Tout has suggested that once exchequer tallies had been assigned dates, they could be handed to a royal creditor, who would then exchange them for cash with a sheriff or tax collector; in turn the official would present the tally during their audit as proof that payment had been authorised.69 After 1299, the exchequer receipt rolls note entries paid directly into the wardrobe, cross-referenced with a corresponding issue roll entry as paid by tally. Prestwich and Ormrod have echoed the work of Jenkinson and Willard when they state that Tout has misinterpreted the evidence.70 They argue that the entries are simply wardrobe bills or debentures, issued under the privy seal on payment of funds into the wardrobe and then presented to the exchequer at a later date in return for a receipt. Similarly, royal creditors could be given a wardrobe debenture authorising an issue from the exchequer, which on presentation could be exchanged for cash. Large liberate writs, often as high as £20,000, were periodically issued by the chancery to authorise transfers to the wardrobe, ensuring that all payments made under the writ could therefore be accounted for. Both Prestwich and Ormrod have used this as evidence that the wardrobe was no longer accountable to the exchequer, and that the system did not provide the exchequer with any form of control. It is possible to track some of these debenture payments and verify the mechanism of transfer. For example, on 17 April 1301 the exchequer receipt roll contains a number of entries marked as paid in the wardrobe, including £26 from William de Rodeston for the issues of his bailiwick. These sums contributed £775 out of a daily total of £885 – thus it is fair to assume that £110 was handed over in cash.71 Jornalia receipts totalled £915, so an additional £30 in cash was deposited; and the daily treasury balance correspondingly rose by £140 to £168.72 In the wardrobe account book, the daily receipts from the treasury for 17 April totalled £775, including the £26 accredited to William de Rodeston. The full entry states that ‘William de Roddeston bailiff of Wudestok paid money on 26 March at Evesham, in one tally made to him from the exits of his bailiwick’.73 When the wardrobe journal for March 1301 was checked, William’s entry appeared.74 Thus he would have been handed a wardrobe debenture, dated 26 March, which he handed into the exchequer on 17 April to be assigned a tally for production at the audit. Yet this is not the same as 67

E 405/1/49; the treasury balance was £11,465 on 1 May 1307; this figure represents the minimum amount left in the treasury, as no schedule survives for this period. 68 E 405/1/49; as late as 7 August the minimum treasury balance stood at £5419. 69 Tout, Chapters, ii. 100. 70 The complexities of wardrobe accounting procedure during the keeperships of Walter Langton and John Droxford are tackled by Tout, Chapters, ii. 85–130; C. Johnson, ‘The System of Account in the Wardrobe of Edward I’, TRHS 4th ser., vi (1923), 50–72; and Prestwich, ‘Exchequer and Wardrobe’, 1–10. 71 E 401/149. 72 E 405/1/17. 73 BL Add MS 7966A. 74 E 101/359/5.

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anticipating revenue in advance, merely a method by which collection into the department of expenditure was speeded up. It would appear from further analysis of the jornalia rolls between 1301 and 1307 that just over £290,000 was assigned to the wardrobe, equivalent to 91% of all recorded issues. Over the same period, an average 51% was specifically transferred ‘by bill or letter’; but this figure masks wide fluctuations in the level of transfer. For example, bill transfers were particularly high in 1302–03 and again 1304–05, but by the 1307 Easter term, cash payments accounted for 78%. Therefore transfers of this nature were not the norm during this period, but depended very much on circumstances dictated by the financial, political and military circumstances. Thus there is clear evidence that debentures were being used in the 1300s to divert revenue into the wardrobe, but this does not automatically preclude an earlier use of tallies of assignment. One of the arguments put forward against Tout’s claims was that the exchequer could not sufficiently predict its levels of income to assign it in advance. Whilst this may be true after 1299, it most certainly was not the case between 1294 and 1297, when the exchequer administered the assessment and collection of the various grants of taxation. This data, coupled with the introduction of dated tallies, would have been sufficient to permit the exchequer to assign revenue due locally to a third party, and the jornalia rolls furnish ample proof of this arrangement. For example, on 15 November 1296, issue ‘£250 to John Droxford. Paid in one tally made to Peter Beard and Hugh de Walecote collectors of the eleventh in the county of York for the West Riding by letters patent to the said John’;75 on 1 December 1296, issue ‘£120 to John Droxford. Paid by one tally made to Master Richard de Hogham and Nicholas Ailundel collectors of the eleventh in the county of Lancaster, on Saturday 1 December; £250 to the same John. Paid by one tally made to Thomas de Lascelles and Peter de Taunton collectors of the eleventh in the county of York for the North Riding first day of December.’76 A comparison of the receipt and jornalia rolls shows that, as with later wardrobe debentures, a fictional receipt is entered in the jornalia roll’s receipt column to balance the books. It is noticeable that, with only one exception, all entries of this nature examined to date are made against revenues from assessed taxes. Therefore, before 1297, the exchequer was using tallies of assignment to allocate money from the assessed taxes to the wardrobe to speed up collection during the military campaign; this is not the same as anticipating revenue in advance, as it had already assessed what was due. However, the concessions made after the political crisis in 1297 effectively prevented Edward from seeking further tax grants after 1300 without incurring renewed demands for the further erosion of royal powers, and so a new means of securing revenue transfers to the wardrobe was deployed. The evidence contained in the documents suggests that assignment by debenture replaced assignment by tally due to the uncertain levels of royal revenue, and that the blanket liberate writs were merely a formality to speed up the cumbersome bureaucratic procedures of issuing separate writs for each transaction. It may be possible that the two systems coexisted, as the jornalia rolls clearly differentiate between issues to John Droxford by bill and by letter. It also helps to explain the 1299 directive to secure payments from royal officials directly into the wardrobe, with debentures providing

75 76

E 405/1/6. Ibid.

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the mechanism by which official receipts were procured. The reversal of the directive in 1301 can also be viewed in terms of the criticism that Walter Langton received in parliament for overthrowing the old customs of the exchequer,77 but it is implicit in the 1304 instructions that direct payments to the wardrobe were still acceptable as long as they were authorised. The adventus figures after 1299 support this chronology, dropping sharply from nearly £5000 in 1298 to just under £1900 in 1299, and thereafter remaining on average around £1300 for the remainder of the reign with the exception of 1301, when it rose briefly to £3000.78 For this theory to be correct, the exchequer and wardrobe would have to have worked closely to ensure that administrative chaos did not ensue. Prestwich and Ormrod have argued that the spiralling debts that are evident in the wardrobe accounts are evidence that the exchequer had lost effective control of wardrobe expenditure.79 Whilst wardrobe indebtedness cannot be denied, this conclusion misrepresents the reality of the relationship not just between wardrobe and exchequer, but also between the king and his officials. There is no doubt that Edward’s finances were strained by the constant demands of warfare. However, the crisis that Edward perceived was of cash flow, rather than institutional conflict. The issue of wardrobe debentures to creditors in place of cash payments to secure vital services should be viewed by historians in the short-term context of the extraordinary circumstances of the Scottish wars, when demand outstripped supply. This is the real reason that large deficits accumulated in the wardrobe, and should not be confused with the deployment of debentures in the system outlined above, which was clearly a sophisticated way of ensuring speedy delivery of money to the king. One of the reasons why the wardrobe accounts had developed to such levels of intricacy during Langton’s keepership was not simply a love of bureaucracy, but a reflection of the sophisticated mechanisms that were being employed to ensure that all fictional entries between exchequer and wardrobe correlated. Similarly the exchequer’s maintenance of jornalia rolls, and the practical limitation that in a cash-based economy the treasury could not go overdrawn, ensured that only a finite number of bills could be paid at any one time, no matter how many were issued or in circulation. The use of lump sum liberate writs ensured that sufficient funds could be released if required, and were an integral part of the system, rather than evidence of a loss of exchequer control; and it is worth noting that the writs never exceeded £20,000 – the upper limit of the anticipated exchequer revenue for any one year – even though normal drafts to the wardrobe during a given year were at least £40,000.80 It is easy to lose sight of the fact that the reforms of the 1290s were a logical extension of the earlier attempts to clear the backlog of desperate debts and thus reimpose overall accountability to royal revenue. Consequently the exchequer and wardrobe formed two interlinked halves of an integrated financial system of revenue collection, disbursement and audit, bound together by senior officials who were well acquainted with the administrative machinery of both departments. Thus there should be no surprise at Droxford’s appointment as treasurer during Langton’s absence abroad in 1305, and it is inconceivable to think that they were unaware of

77 78 79 80

Prestwich, Edward I, 548–9; Tout, Chapters, ii. 91 and subsequent footnote. Mills, ‘Adventus Vicecomitum 1272–1307’, 340. Prestwich, Edward I, 535–6; Ormrod, ‘State Building’, 23–8. Prestwich, Edward I, 570.

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the operations of the other.81 At the end of the day, both men worked for the king, whose sole interest was the speedy delivery of funds in the pursuit of military ends, as illustrated by the letter quoted at the start of the paper. There is sufficient evidence in the treasury balances recorded in the 1307 jornalia rolls, and Edward’s ability in 1306 to turn a feudal aid into an assessed twentieth and thirtieth, to suggest that yet another cycle of recovery was about to begin, and the increased level of cash transfers recorded in the Easter 1307 jornalia suggests that the measures adopted after 1299 to secure the flow of revenue into the wardrobe were already being scaled back. After all, these were wartime expedients, and there is no evidence that the system was intended as anything other than a temporary measure. Instead of being viewed as an acknowledgement that EdwardI’s financial system had virtually collapsed at the end of the reign, the administrative reforms of the 1320s should instead be interpreted as part of a longer process by the crown to re-establish effective control over royal finance; clause two of the Cowick Ordinance of 1323 specifically states that the ‘great roll has been, and is, so weighted by copious writing that the settlement of the accounts hath been, and is, the more delayed’; clause four established the exannual roll on which dead and desperate debts were removed; and further rolls were created for the audit of customs, wardrobe, foreign and tax accounts.82 The sentiments behind the reforms employed by de Chauncy, Kirby, March and Langton were no different to those clearly defined in 1323: an efficient system of audit meant the king could pursue revenue collection more effectively, and therefore it was not in the crown’s best interests to undermine a resurgent exchequer that was potentially one of his most effective weapons.

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Nevertheless it is to be noted that instructions regulating the amount of money to be transferred to the wardrobe were carefully recorded on the memoranda roll E 159/79 mm.24-24d, described in J.F. Willard, ‘Ordinances for the Guidance of a Deputy Treasurer, 22 October 1305’, EHR xlviii (1933), 84–9. 82 For a summary of changes in exchequer practice during the reign of Edward II, see M. Buck, ‘The Reform of the Exchequer, 1316–1326’, EHR xcviii (1983), 241–60.

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The Mortmain Licensing System, 1280–1307 Paul Brand

On 14 November 1279 King Edward I issued the Statute of Mortmain.1 The statute prohibited all future alienations in mortmain in England, which meant any permanent grant of land or any other form of real property (such as a rent or the advowson of a church) to religious houses or any other kind of ecclesiastical office-holder (including bishops, rectors of parish churches and chantry priests). Any breach of this prohibition was to render the property liable to forfeiture. The immediate lord of whom the property was held was given a year to take possession of it for himself. If he failed to act, each of the superior lords of the property between the immediate lord and the king in the tenurial hierarchy was to be allowed six months in turn to take possession of it. Somewhat confusingly, however, the statute also stated that after the first year had elapsed the king might take possession, but that he had immediately to regrant the land to a new lay tenant to hold of the original lord for the original services plus new services to the king. Despite some confusion in detail on this last point, the statute seems clear on the general principle. Alienations in mortmain were henceforth to be illegal. The practice was, however, somewhat different. Alienations in mortmain did not cease after 14 November 1279 but they did come to be subject to a complex and bureaucratic licensing system. Surviving governmental records of the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries allow us to trace the creation and modification of a classic system of ‘red tape’ that from an early stage controlled not just the acquisition of property by the church, but even the transfer of property from one ecclesiastical property-owner to another and the appropriation of a church by the holder of its advowson.2 The easiest part of the system to trace from the published calendars of chancery rolls is the final stage of the process, the issuing of licences by the king’s chancery to grant and acquire property in mortmain. The first of these was issued within six months of the publication of the statute. This was a general licence issued on 26 May 1280 to the warden of the chapel of St Katherine at Wanborough in Wiltshire allowing him to acquire rents and possessions to the value of ten pounds from money left for this purpose by the chapel’s founder, Emeline countess of Ulster. The second was

1 Statutes of the Realm, i. 51. On the date of the statute see Paul Brand, The Making of the Common Law (London, 1992), 240 n.3. 2 For earlier descriptions of this process see T.F.T. Plucknett, Legislation of Edward I (Oxford, 1962), 99–101; J.M.W. Bean, The Decline of English Feudalism (Manchester, 1968), 49–66; Sandra Raban, Mortmain Legislation and the English Church, 1279–1500 (Cambridge, 1982), 38–41; Brand, Making of the Common Law, 241–2. For the working of the licensing system in Ireland in the same period see Brand, Making of the Common Law, 266–74.

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a specific licence issued the following day which authorised Peter of Lench and his wife Margery to grant certain (unspecified) lands they held of Westminster abbey of her inheritance to that abbey.3 One thing that the calendars do not make clear, however, is just how much variation and experimentation there was in the format and wording of these earliest licences. Initially, for example, they took two quite different forms. One was a notification that the king had given a licence for an alienation in mortmain to take place that included a brief non obstante clause at the end mentioning the statute and saying that the transaction might take place notwithstanding its provisions. The other started with a much longer recital of the terms of the statute (‘although it has been provided . . .’) and then went on to license the transaction. Only after 1283 did this latter type come to be the sole form. There were also early variations (in both forms of licence) as between giving permission for the transaction to take place only to the donor, only to the donee or to both. Again, after 1283, there came to be a standard form of licence and it came in almost all cases to be a licence both to the donor to give and to the donee to receive. A third significant early variation was in the way in which early licences referred to the statute. Some of the earliest licences talked of the legislation as providing that ‘it was not to be permissible in future for lands or feudal possessions to be assigned in mortmain to the religious or to others’ (non liceat decetero terras aut possessiones feodales personis religiosis seu aliis in manum mortuam assignari);4 others of it as providing that ‘no-one of our realm is to alienate any lands or tenements to the religious or in any way put them into mortmain’ (nullus de regno nostro terras aut tenementa aliqua viris religiosis alienaret seu [aliquo modo] ad manum mortuam poneret);5 yet others summarised the legislation as having provided that ‘it is not allowed that the religious add to their lands and tenements in any way, by which prejudice might be engendered in any respect to the lords of those fees’ (non liceat viris religiosis se accrescere de terris et tenementis aliquibus per quod dominis feodorum illorum prejudicium aliquatenus possit generari).6 All these were reasonable, albeit rather different, summaries of the statute. A further formula, first used in a licence of 1281, however, summarised the statute as providing ‘that it is not permissible for the religious or others to enter the fee of anyone, so that it comes into mortmain, without our permission and that of the chief lord of whom that property is immediately held . . .’.7 This was much further from what the statute actually said, but it was this formula that became the standard one in all licences issued from 1284 onwards. In effect it stated not what the 1279 statute had said but how the statute had come to be modified and interpreted in practice through the working of the licensing system. But the licence, as has been noted, was only the final step in a much more elaborate licensing system. The first step in that process seems normally to have been the submission of a written petition to the king or to the king and his council asking for permission for an alienation in mortmain to go ahead. A few of these preliminary

3

C 66/99 m.17 (calendared in CPR 1272–81, 372–3). C 66/99 m.17 and compare C 66/101 m.22 ( feoda laicalia ad manum mortuam non deveniant). 5 C 66/99 mm.7, 3, 1. 6 C 66/100 mm.27 schedule, 22, 19, 14. 7 Licet de communi consilio regni nostri providerimus quod non liceat viris religiosis seu aliis ingredi feodum alicujus, ita quod ad manum mortuam deveniat sine licencia nostra et capitalis domini de quo res illa immediate tenetur. For the earliest licence to recite the statute in these terms see C 66/100 m.2. 4

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petitions survive, either as originals,8 or in the form of transcripts or summaries made for parliament rolls which recorded or summarised petitions.9 Many more must once have existed. An endorsement to a petition not of this type submitted to the 1294 Easter parliament notes the submission of a total of thirty-seven petitions of this specific type to that parliament.10 None seem to survive. We learn of the former existence of others only through the fact that the writ authorising the holding of an inquisition ad quod damnum bears a note that it had been authorised ‘by a petition of council’ (per peticionem de consilio)11 or by ‘a petition returned from the council’ (per peticionem retornatam de consilio),12 or even ‘by the king himself by a petition of council’.13 Some early petitions of this kind may have led directly to the granting of licences.14 Others were evidently rejected at this preliminary stage without any further investigation.15 The normal outcome, however, was an authorisation for a further investigation into the proposed alienation by means of an inquisition ad quod damnum.16 An ordinance enacted at the Epiphany parliament of 1292 appears to require that no inquisition ad quod damnum into a proposed mortmain alienation be issued by chancery in future (as from 3 February 1292) except in response to petitions produced in full parliament. It also seems to require that licences only be issued if the religious are so poor that they are unable to live of their own.17 If this was intended to ensure that all such petitions in future came to, and were considered by, parliament, it seems to have been ineffective. Our best, if still imperfect, means of judging whether or not a preliminary petition for a licence had been considered in parliament is to look at the dating of the writs authorising inquisitions ad quod damnum. These must normally have been issued around the same time as the petition itself was considered and accepted.18 There is no single year (including 1292 itself) when the timing of the issue of these writs coincides only with the known sessions of parliament (or of the king’s council, since those who considered petitions at

8

For original petitions of this type that survive from this period see SC 8/99 no. 4948 (1283); SC 8/114 no. 5667 (1283); SC 8/123 no. 6101 (1290); SC 8/309 no. 15414 (1290) [⫽SC 9/2 no. 128]; SC 8/1 no. 23 (1305) [⫽SC 9/12 no. 38]; SC 8/276 no. 13758 (1305) [⫽SC 9/12 no. 50]; SC 8/80 no. 3980 (c. 1294). For an original petition which seems no longer to survive see Parliamentary Rolls of Medieval England, ed. C. Given-Wilson, (Cambridge, forthcoming), Petition 2, no. 3 (1302). 9 SC 9/2 nos. 45, 76, 175, 244; SC 9/12 nos. 17, 179. 10 De xxxvij peticionibus de terris ad manum mortuam ponendis si rex velit concedere inquisiciones . . .: SC 8/151 no. 7514. 11 The earliest writ to bear such an annotation is one issued in November 1293: C 143/22 no. 9. 12 For an example see C 143/21 no. 8. 13 For an example see C 143/22 no. 6. 14 The response to SC 9/2 no. 128 (and SC 8/309 no. 15414) records the king’s agreement in 1290 to Guisborough appropriating three of its own churches without prior investigation, but there is no recorded licence for this. 15 See the endorsement to SC 8/99 no. 4948 (1283) rejecting a request from the Carmelite friars to be allowed to acquire somewhere to reside in Cornwall without any further investigation. For another refusal in 1290 because a prior had already entered the land concerned without obtaining a licence see SC 9/2 no. 175. 16 For examples of this authorisation being given in response to a preliminary petition see SC 9/2 nos. 45, 76 (1290); SC 8/123 no. 6101 (1290); Petition 2, no. 3 (1302); SC 9/12 nos. 17, 38 [⫽SC 8/1 no. 23], 50 [⫽SC 8/276 no. 13758], 179 (1305). 17 SC 9/5 no. 4. 18 The connexion is sometimes made explicit in writs issued mainly between 1293 and 1301 by the writ noting its authorisation by a petition of council: see above, notes 11–13.

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the one were also present at the other). It is only in 1292 and in five other years (1293, 1295, 1297, 1305 and 1307) that a majority of the writs authorising inquisitions ad quod damnum were issued during a known session of parliament or of the council and the year that saw the issuing of the highest annual total of such writs (ninety-two) is 1304, a year when there was no meeting of parliament. There had also been some degree of correlation between sessions of parliament or the council and the issuing of such writs prior to 1292, notably in 1290 when an overwhelming majority of such writs were issued during sessions of parliament. There are two possible explanations for this apparent gap between the ordinance and subsequent practice. The 1292 ordinance may simply represent an aspiration or even an attempt on the part of the king’s council or parliament to gain overall control of this part of the licensing process, which the king was reluctant to accept at the time and was subsequently able to ignore. This might fit with evidence from the previous year of instructions given to the chancellor which are recorded on the close roll by which the king had commanded that no writ for such an inquisition should be issued without his own special authorisation (but had said nothing about parliament).19 The alternative explanation is that the ordinance was essentially no more than an internal administrative regulation about how such petitions were to be dealt with once they reached, but only if they reached, parliament. They were not simply to be approved by the triers of petitions and sent straight to chancery as warrants for the issuing of the relevant writs, but were to come before parliament for discussion and approval before being sent on to chancery as warrants for action. On this interpretation, it was never intended that the king’s hands be tied and no attempt was made to route all preliminary petitions through parliament. During periods when parliaments were being held with some regularity a significant proportion of such petitions were funnelled through parliament, but parliament never had, or even claimed, any kind of monopoly over their consideration. The next stage in the licensing system was the issuing of a writ authorising the holding of an inquisition ad quod damnum into the proposed alienation for which a licence was being sought. From the mid-1240s onwards (and possibly before) the king had ordered the holding of local enquiries or inquisitions into the potential losses that he, and in some cases others as well, might suffer from making various kinds of grant or authorisation: allowing specified individuals to assart forest land,20 or enclose woods within royal forests;21 confirming the lands and franchises of specific religious houses,22 or granting specific franchises to particular individuals;23 commuting or reducing the services owed him by tenants-in-chief;24 granting lands to specific individuals to hold in chief,25 or confirming grants of land held in chief;26 or allowing particular individuals to divert rights of way or rivers.27 Not long after the adoption of a mortmain licensing system in 1280 it was decided to adopt a similar

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Ryley, Pleas in Parliament, 457–8. The earliest examples are C 143/1 nos. 1, 5. The earliest examples are C 143/1 nos. 3, 19. The earliest examples are C 143/1 nos. 6, 25. The earliest examples are C 143/1 nos. 2, 4. The earliest examples are C 143/1 nos. 11, 18. The earliest examples are C 143/1 nos. 26, 27. The earliest examples are C 143/1 nos. 31, 37. The earliest examples are C 143/1 nos. 8, 10, 16, 20.

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system of preliminary enquiries (inquisitions ad quod damnum) for all mortmain alienations for which a licence was being sought.28 The earliest writ known to have been issued was issued in February 1281, though this only survives in the form of a copy preceding the surviving returned inquisition.29 The earliest surviving original writ comes from 25 May following.30 By 1284 even the queen mother was required to have an inquisition before she could have her grant licenced,31 and it seems probable that by this date no licences were granted without prior inquisitions,32 even if not all the inquisitions made survive, so that it is not possible to match every licence against a surviving inquisition ad quod damnum. During the early years of the licensing system (down to 1290) there was a considerable degree of variation in the actual contents of writs authorising inquisitions ad quod damnum and more specifically in the list of questions which the addressee of the writ was instructed to enquire into. What began to emerge as a standard list of questions, however, asked the addressee (normally the sheriff of the county where the property concerned was located but sometimes, especially where the restoration or retention of an unlicensed alienation was concerned, the escheator) to enquire through a jury as to whether it was to the damage or prejudice of the king or of others if the proposed alienation went ahead; if so, what that damage or prejudice was and whom it adversely affected and how; of whom the property concerned was held and by what service; and what the property was worth. He was also instructed to return the verdict on these questions under the seals of himself and of the jurors together with the writ. In the summer of 1290 there was a revision of what had become the standard form of writ and a new clause was added that came close to doubling its length. This asked for additional enquiries to be made as to what lands and tenements would remain to the donor after the proposed gift and what they were worth; whether they would suffice for the services owed for the property retained as well as that given and for the continued performance of other public obligations such as suits of court, attendance at the view of frankpledge, the payments of aids, tallages, wards, fines, ransoms, amercements and all other similar obligations and so that his locality (patria) would not be additionally burdened as a result of the grant. This new clause was regularly included in writs authorising inquisitions ad quod damnum from 14 June 1290 onwards and the new form of writ was copied from an actual writ issued on 22 June 1290 onto the dorse of the close roll as an exemplar with an appropriate heading.33 Writs issued thereafter seem normally to have included all these clauses though they were sometimes omitted where the transaction for which approval was being sought

28

The earliest licences of May 1280 were almost certainly issued without them. The first was a general licence for which no inquisition could be held; the second does not specify the quantity of land involved. 29 C 143/5 no. 17. 30 C 143/5 no. 24. 31 C 143/7 no. 1. The licence is CPR 1281–92, 128. 32 But see above, 89 and note 14, for a possible example from 1290 of a permission being granted without a prior inquisition ad quod damnum. 33 The earliest writ of this form is C 143/13 no. 22. The writ issued on 22 June and taken as a model is enrolled on C 54/107 m.7d with the heading forma brevis de inquirendo de terris et tenementis ad manum mortuam ponendis and printed in full in Ryley, Pleadings in Parliament, 457. There is an earlier, but defective, attempt to copy the writ on the same membrane. The original writ still exists and is C 143/14 no. 26 but this is dated 19 July 1290. It bears on its face not just the name of the clerk who wrote it but also ‘Brabazon’. Could Roger Brabazon, the justice of king’s bench, have been responsible for overseeing the drafting?

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was one for which they did not seem appropriate, such as an exchange;34 or the grant of an advowson.35 In 1292 the requirement was enshrined in a further ordinance issued at the Epiphany parliament which seems again to have been intended for the guidance of the triers of petitions. This required them to reject returned inquisitions where the original writ did not make mention of each of the articles added by the king in accordance with the new form.36 The wording of the inquisition ad quod damnum for mortmain alienations is of some interest because it embodies a clear perception (also reflected in part in the original statute) that mortmain alienations were potentially prejudicial and damaging not just to the king and the lord of whom the property concerned was held but also to the neighbours of the donor, and it seems to show that the king and his advisers at this time thought it appropriate that the licensing system should take account of all these interests. Inquisitions ad quod damnum seem normally to have been taken by the addressee, though an escheator might delegate the hearing to his sub-escheator in the relevant county,37 and they were also regularly taken by the bailiffs of liberties which enjoyed the franchise of return of writs where the property concerned lay within their liberty.38 The jury would normally consist of twelve local jurors.39 There are some early examples of inquisitions ad quod damnum being taken at the appropriate local county court but this does not seem to have been the normal practice.40 The jurors would respond to the articles and cite possible losses to the king (including the fairly remote possibility that the king would no longer get his year and a day and the tenant’s chattels if he committed felony);41 cite possible losses to the lord of whom the land was held (most commonly the possibility of escheat); and also cite possible prejudice to neighbours. They might also cite possible advantages to the king if the transaction went ahead, most commonly that he would profit from the property acquired in the event of a future vacancy in the abbey or bishopric concerned.42 The verdict of the inquisition ad quod damnum provided the raw material for a decision as to whether or not a licence should be granted for the proposed alienation. That decision was often, though not perhaps invariably, preceded by some sort of consideration by the king’s council and sometimes by the king himself, in parliament or at a session of the king’s council. This is easiest to see in the case of those proposed alienations which did receive permission. In some years, though by no means all, there is a marked clustering of licences during sessions of parliament or of the king’s council. This is true of the licences granted in 1280 (where 11 out of 14 were granted during sessions of parliament); 1286 (where 30 out of 35 were so granted); 1292 (where 50 out of 62 were so granted); 1293 (where 35 out of 36 were so granted); and 1307 (where 37 out of 38 were so granted). Even when licences were 34

For examples see C 143/13 no. 10; C 143/34 no. 10. For examples see C 143/18 no. 16; C 143/31 no. 12. 36 Nisi breve originale mencionem faciat de singulis articulis secundum novam formam per ipsum regem adjectis: SC 9/5 no. 15. For an early example of an inquisition rejected precisely for this reason see C 143/19 no. 11 (1293 writ): Nichil fiat quia breve non facit mencionem de singulis articulis. 37 For an early example see C 143/6 no. 7 (1283). 38 For an inquisition taken by the bailiffs of the honour of Wallingford in 1299 see C 143/29 no. 16. 39 But for a jury consisting of forty-eight jurors see C 143/12 no. 25. 40 For orders to produce jurors for a session of the Berkshire county court in 1284 see C 143/7 no. 1. For verdicts taken in the Staffordshire county court in 1284 and 1289 see C 143/9 no. 10; /12 no. 6. 41 Mentioned in C 143/5 no. 6; C 143/7 nos. 15 and 26. 42 For examples see C 143/6 no. 9; /7 no. 15; /8 no. 17. 35

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issued at other times we cannot always be certain that the basic decision had not been made at a session of parliament because sometimes approval was made conditional on the showing of permission from the immediate lord and the date of the licence may well be the date when this was shown in chancery, not when the original decision was taken. In other years, there seems to be a rough balance between those licences agreed in parliament and those agreed outside. In 1303 twelve out of 24 licences were issued during sessions of parliament and in 1305 45 out of 88. In yet other years, however, it seems clear that the primary locus for decision-making must have been elsewhere. The sixty licences granted in 1303 and in 1304 were all granted in years when no parliaments at all took place. There seem to have been two different mechanisms for bringing a proposed alienation (and probably the returned inquisition ad quod damnum itself as well) before parliament. One was the submission of a second petition by the intended beneficiary (though perhaps sometimes by the intending donor) to parliament. The earliest such petition to survive is one submitted to the Shrewsbury and Acton Burnel parliament of Michaelmas 1283.43 Again, only a relatively small number of these survive either as originals or in the form of copies or summaries enrolled on parliament rolls; and it is probably significant that several of the originals survive attached to the inquisitions ad quod damnum to which they relate.44 The second mechanism was to make the inquisition ad quod damnum itself returnable to a specific parliament. This was done with two of the earliest inquisitions of 1281.45 The practice resumed in November 1293 with the writ for the holding of the inquisition ad quod damnum being modified to include an additional clause instructing the sheriff or other addressee to instruct both grantor and grantee to be at the following parliament to ‘do and receive’ what the king’s court adjudged.46 The practice continued (but only for some and never for all writs) down to 1299.47 A general ordinance at the Epiphany parliament of 1292 recorded that the king had ordered, in respect of inquisitions returned to chancery for mortmain alienations, that nothing was to be done where there were mesne lords (between the donor and the king) unless the religious showed their assent to the lord king by letters patent sealed by their seals; where the donor had retained no lands for himself; where the inquisitions had been returned without their warrant (the original writ); and where the writ did not mention all the necessary articles.48 Although it is not entirely clear, it seems likely that these basic requirements were laid down to allow the triers of petitions or other chancery personnel to make a preliminary scrutiny of the dossier of petitions and inquisitions even before they went before the council in order to allow them to weed out those petitions and requests that stood no chance of success. The other (and less likely) possibility is that they were intended to provide standing instructions for the council itself. There is certainly good evidence to suggest that the 43

SC 8/116 no. 5789: this makes plain that the returned inquisition had first been examined by the chancellor and he had told the prior to come to parliament. The inquisition itself does not survive. 44 From the Easter parliament of 1290: SC 8/218 no. 10881 [⫽SC 9/2 no. 124] and SC 9/2 no. 208; from the Easter parliament of 1294: C 143/21 no. 19, m.4; from the summer parliament of 1297: C 143/25 no. 19, m.1; from the Lincoln parliament of 1301: C 143/26 no. 22, m.1 and C 143/45 no. 8, m.3; from the Carlisle parliament of 1307 SC 8/179 no. 8935 [⫽Carlisle parliament, no. 112]. 45 C 143/5 nos. 17 and 26. 46 For the earliest examples of the modified form see C 143/22 nos. 9–10, 12, 20, 23. 47 The latest such writ was issued on 12 May 1299: C 143/30 no. 16. 48 SC 9/5 no. 15.

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council might sometimes make decisions about mortmain alienations on their own, because the annotations on some inquisitions ad quod damnum record the referring of particular proposed alienations to the king and sometimes the reasons for doing so. This seems to imply that others were made by them alone.49 Several annotations suggest a two-stage process, with the council making a recommendation and the king himself then either accepting,50 or overturning,51 that recommendation. I have argued elsewhere that the requirement of showing the consent (indeed the written consent) of the lord of whom the property to be alienated was held before a licence was granted was not something new in 1292: indeed that it had been the common, if not the invariable, practice from 1281 onwards.52 It is, I think, also only against a background of a general acceptance of this basic requirement that we can explain how the common form of licence in occasional use from 1281 onwards and the standard form from 1284 onwards talked of the terms of the statute as though they imposed a requirement of obtaining not just royal permission but also the permission of the immediate lord before mortmain alienations could proceed.53 Occasional annotations on inquisitions ad quod damnum noting the granting of a licence but on condition that evidence is provided of the lord’s consent suggest that this remained a requirement to the end of our period (and probably well beyond).54 One further requirement was added to the licensing system from April 1299 onwards. Probably as a result of the financial pressure on the king it was decided that in future a fine was to be charged for all mortmain licences (as for various other kinds of instruments issued by chancery) with the exchequer setting the amount of the fine for all property worth twenty shillings or more and chancery setting the amount of fines for all property worth less than that.55 Just occasionally the fine was waived,56 or commuted.57 More often, payment was required before the licence was 49

C 143/17 no. 23: Bene potest fieri de omnibus tenentibus excepto tantum Johanne Bernested’ de quo sciatur voluntas regis; /19 no. 6: Coram ipso rege quia post mortem episcopi rex a casu habebit custodiam; /19 no. 7: Dependet a voluntate regis quia tenementum tenetur de rege in capite . . . ; /20 no. 7: Non fiat sine rege quia tenementum tenetur de rege in capite . . . ; /20 no. 25: Coram rege etc. quia de magno tenemento. And note the annotation on C 143/20 no. 20: Concessum est per consilium . . . 50 For examples see C 143/15 no. 15: Satis clarum est, ita quod rex potest absque alicujus dampno. Rex concedit. Fiat ei carta; /15 no. 31: Videtur consilio quod rex bene facere poterit sine alicujus dampno si sibi placuerit. Rex concedit. Fiat ei carta; /20 no. 10: deleted Coram rege et propter paupertatem domus consilium acquiescit, si placeat regi and then Quando portabit cancellarie concessionem domini mediati et imediati cancellarius expediret eum. Postea ostendit concessionem.; /20 no. 11: Videtur consilio quod rex potest facere si sibi placuerit. Postea rex concessit. Ideo fiat. 51 C 143/15 no. 29: deleted note Videtur consilio quod rex, si velit etc. facere potest sine dampno, ut patet per inquisicionem, set peticio se extendit ad x libras per annum et satis sunt divites followed by Quia est ad honorem sancti Wolstani ad elemosinarum augmentandum rex postea concessit. Ideo fiat carta; /20 no. 16: deleted Non conceditur quia domus habundans est followed by Perquirat assensum medii et rex habebit consilium. 52 Brand, Making of the Common Law, 242. 53 Above, 88. 54 For examples see C 143/60 no. 11 and /64 no. 15. 55 Ryley, Pleadings in Parliament, 478. 56 C 143/35 no. 3 (founding of chantry chapel in memory of the son of Michael de Harcla): Rex concessit gratis quod fiat; /48 no. 12: initial fine of twenty shillings but then rex postmodum precepit gratis intuitu caritatis; /59 no. 17: Rex ob affectionem quam habet erga Hervicum de Staunton’ justiciarium suum de Banco concedit quod fiant ea que continentur in inquisicione de gracia regis speciali nunciante thesaurario. 57 C 143/34 no. 16 (for Dominicans): Fiat carta pro Deo et pro ducentis missis pro rege et regina et liberis eorum.

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issued. The impression one gets from the surviving inquisitions ad quod damnum is that the king’s need for money was sufficiently strong to override most other considerations. There certainly cease to be annotations on the inquisitions noting the refusal of permission. However, not all have annotations visible on them and these may be the refusals: I have not collated the inquisitions and the licences for this period. The shortness of the period between the enactment of the legislation and the issuing of the first licence suggests to me (as it has suggested to others) that it may never have been intended to stop all mortmain alienations and that from the first the real intention was to introduce a licensing system. But, if that is the case, why did the king and his advisers not simply enact legislation to that effect rather than the Statute of Mortmain? At least two different suggestions have been made. T.F.T. Plucknett thought it was all a trick on the part of the king. The lay lords thought they were assenting to legislation prohibiting all mortmain alienations, but what they were actually doing was creating the necessary preconditions for a system of licensing under which the king came to exercise the sole prerogative of ‘amortisation’ and to receive a new source of income from doing so. The rhetoric of the king’s statute was all about a total ban on mortmain alienations; the underlying reality was that the king merely wished to control and profit from them. J.W.M. Bean suggested that the immediate, and successful, purpose of the statute was to bring the clergy, and more especially Archbishop Pecham, to heel; and that it was retained, in tandem with a system of licensing, rather than repealed because the potential threat of a blanket refusal of licences was a useful weapon to hold in reserve against a potentially recalcitrant clergy. I believe, however, that both these views are mistaken.58 There seem to me to have been two reasons for the king and his advisers choosing to act in the way that they did. An absolute legal prohibition on mortmain alienations of the kind enacted by the Statute of Mortmain was a necessary precondition for the subsequent erection of a flexible licensing system. Because it was done in this way (as a total legal prohibition followed by licensed exceptions) the details of the licensing system and its operation did not need to be spelled out in the legislation and could be, and indeed were, easily adjusted and developed over time. They could also be (and were) operated with a considerable degree of royal discretion. The provisions for forfeiture contained in the statute helped in the enforcement of the requirement of a royal licence. The threat (and the reality) of seizures and forfeitures enforced both by lords and by the king’s officials in the case of unlicenced alienations ensured for the most part that grantors and grantees did go through the licensing system and sought licences before they went ahead with mortmain alienations. The possibility of forfeitures gave teeth to the licensing system. The system of mortmain licensing created after 1279 was certainly bureaucratic and intrusive, requiring a complicated (and probably expensive) process to be set in train before any ecclesiastical institution anywhere in the country could legally acquire property, even from another ecclesiastical institution. It was not in general popular with them. But lay lords (who had possessed a customary right to approve acquisitions of lands from their tenants prior to 1279) must have welcomed the extra teeth it gave to their right to give or withhold their consent, even if their right of control had now to be shared with the king and his council, and the licensing system did 58

For fuller references see Brand, Making of the Common Law, 242–4.

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help initially at least to avoid grants that were particularly damaging to neighbours. The king eventually gained a new source of income and from the start a new source of power from his right to approve and withhold approval from grants, even if in practice that power was often exercised only on the advice of his counsellors. In the end it was probably the king who benefited most from this new system of red tape.

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The Local Administration of Justice: A Reappraisal of the ‘Four Knights’ System Anthony Musson

The local administration of justice has never been one of those areas that naturally excites the historian. In its concern with structural and procedural features it can easily be regarded as arcane and insular. Giving a paper that concentrates on the assizes and gaol delivery, or more accurately that seeks to reappraise existing views on the subject, runs the obvious risk of being too esoteric for its audience or wallowing in the minutiae of a highly technical area. To view this subject in such terms, however, is to misunderstand and misrepresent its importance with regard to much wider themes, about which this volume of essays is concerned, namely the growth of royal authority and the stimulation of bureaucratic control through the production of documents. These records we now use to recreate the activities of crown officials and government institutions. The hearing of actions concerning land ownership and property rights in sessions known as the petty (or ‘possessory’) assizes and the trying of prisoners charged with felony (a serious offence against the crown) were by the thirteenth century important features of medieval life (both from the perspective of the crown and the ‘ordinary’ landed person or corporation).1 The significance of these judicial sessions lies in their divergence from, or emergence as supplements to, the visitations of the general eyre, the omnicompetent judicial agency that supervised local government and the administration of justice in the shires.2 Over the course of the thirteenth century, there evolved an increasingly complex network of officials purveying or overseeing the operation of royal justice at the local level, which centred especially on the assizes and gaol delivery.3 The organisation of this system through royal commissions issued to a small band of justices is commonly referred to in modern convention as the ‘four knights’ system, the name probably arising from the administrative and judicial duties that were frequently assigned to ‘four prudent and law-worthy knights’. For example, under 1 For their early history see HEL, i. 136–225, ii. 558–73; W.L. Warren, Henry II (London, 1973), 281–4, 286; J. Hudson, The Formation of the English Common Law (London, 1996), 157–219; R.B. Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1968). 2 On the functioning of the eyres see the introductions to The 1235 Surrey Eyre, ed. C.A.F. Meekings, 2 vols (Surrey Record. Soc., xxxi, 1979); Crown Pleas of the Wiltshire Eyre, 1249, ed. C.A.F. Meekings (Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Soc., Records Branch, xvi, 1960); Roll of the Shropshire Eyre of 1256, ed. A. Harding (Selden Soc., xcvi, 1980) and D. Crook, ‘The Later Eyres’, EHR xcvii (1982), 243–6. 3 See generally R.C. Palmer, The County Courts of Medieval England, 1150–1350 (Princeton, NJ, 1982); H.M. Cam, Studies in the Hundred Rolls, Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, 6 (Oxford, 1921); R.B. Pugh, ‘The King’s Government in the Middle Ages’, in Victoria County History of Wiltshire (1957), v. 10–20.

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Magna Carta (chapter 18) four knights (in association with two royal justices) were to visit each county four times a year and take the petty assizes. The Provisions of Oxford called for four knights to hear complaints of trespasses committed by local officials (such as sheriffs and bailiffs) or any other persons. Among other things, a knightly quartet was required to record (along with the sheriff) pleas of false judgment in a manorial court and also to verify the excuses for non-attendance made by litigants to the royal courts.4 In theory, the ‘four knights’ system as it pertained to the assizes and gaol delivery operated from the 1220s, the period when the first commissions were enrolled in chancery, until the 1290s, the point at which the crown radically altered its attitude towards judicial administration. Our knowledge of the operation of the assizes and gaol delivery in its early years of delegation to the provinces is incomplete and skewed owing to the nature of the surviving records. While there are plea rolls for the sessions of the majority of eyres held in the thirteenth century,5 there is not a corresponding body of material relating to the early sessions held by assize and gaol delivery justices. The survival of proceedings seems to have depended considerably upon the conscientiousness of the individual justices, as they seem to have been personal rolls (and so enable one to chart their itinerary). Rolls of assize sessions held outside of the general eyre do survive for Henry III’s reign,6 but, apart from a few from the start of Edward I’s reign,7 it is really only from the 1280s that there are significant numbers of plea rolls for a good proportion of counties.8 Gaol delivery proceedings are a comparative rarity and really only start to occur at the beginning of Edward I’s reign, though they are far from geographically comprehensive even then. Before 1289 the surviving rolls relate to about a dozen counties outside of London and Middlesex. The picture of gaol deliveries in action comes predominantly from the sessions held in the south-west (in the counties of Devon, Hampshire and Wiltshire), from the eastern side of the country (Essex and East Anglia), and from prisoners tried in London and Westminster.9 As Ralph Pugh noted, ‘Through this lack of records, the work of the thirteenth century justices may tend to have been unduly minimised.’ He goes on to add, ‘It forces us . . . to base our conceptions of the state of early criminal justice in the provinces largely on the records of the eyres.’10 Certainly Maitland underestimated the role of gaol delivery justices in the thirteenth century.11 There is clearly a need to restore the equilibrium and establish (or re-establish) in historians’ minds the importance of routine sessions to the upholding of public order. The comparative inefficiency of the eyre and the decreasing frequency with which eyres visited and revisited the shires as the thirteenth century progressed means that over-concentration on their records will not 4

A. Harding, England in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, 1993), 205–7. D. Crook, Records of the General Eyre (PRO Handbook no. 20, 1982). 6 For example: JUST 1/755 (Somerset), 863, 870 (Surrey), 910 (Sussex). There are also records of assizes and gaol delivery sessions held by the court of king’s bench during Henry III’s reign: e.g. JUST 1/1172, 1175, 1177A, 1192, 1193. 7 For example: JUST 1/146, 405, 1054 (Notts, Derbs, Lancs), 240 (Essex). 8 See List of Assize Rolls, 1206–1481, Preserved in the PRO (List and Index Soc., 220, 1986). 9 JUST 3/14/1, 61/1, 71, 61/2 (South-western counties, 1271–80); 35A, 35B, 85, 36/1 (London/Middlesex, 1273–91); 85, 18/1, 18/2, JUST 1/1267 (Essex, –1288); 85, 63/1, JUST 1/570, 1267 (East Anglian counties, 1276–85). The surviving rolls are not confined to these counties alone. 10 Pugh, Imprisonment, 277. 11 HEL, ii. 645. 5

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and does not yield an entirely accurate picture of the administration of justice in the provinces.12 To a certain extent this gap in our understanding is eased by the enrolment of commissions of assize and gaol delivery in the chancery patent rolls. While their existence as an alternative source of information does not make up for the type of detail obtainable from the plea rolls, nor provide evidence that a particular commission was fulfilled, the enrolments do offer a partial glimpse of the system in operation. They do not provide the sort of assurance derivable from the proceedings as to the definite holding of sessions (which would give the particular place and day with the names of the sitting justices) but they do at least give the names of those whom the crown deemed worthy to serve in a judicial capacity (and occasionally an indication of those felt unsuitable for the task or for whatever reason were unable to fulfil it). Something of the mechanics of the system can also be gleaned from them: fluctuations in the numbers of commissions sent out as well as changes in the typical assize venues and in the particular gaols delivered. It is also possible to indicate the most popular assize actions, the most frequently delivered gaols, the numbers of justices operating altogether and in a particular region, as well as the ratios of justices in individual commissions. The style of enrolments (either as a result of the clerk’s attitude towards them or the crown’s requirements) clearly altered over the course of the century. The earlier commissions were fairly detailed compared with their counterparts enrolled after about the 1260s. This works to the researcher’s advantage since it coincides with the period for which proceedings are lacking and enables a slightly fuller picture to be realised. The early enrolments of commissions issued to hear assizes usually name the parties in the particular assize: for example, Rosa Cret brought an assize of novel disseisin against Robert, parson of Traditon and members of the Cumin family at Gloucester in 1232.13 This detail can sometimes facilitate the location of a record of the case (or part of it) in king’s bench or eyre proceedings. An assize of novel disseisin brought by Godfrey of Lynn against Clarice, formerly his wife, went on to the court of king’s bench, while an assize of novel disseisin between Mabil Perleben and her son, Michael, was originally heard in the 1232 eyre at Cambridge.14 The commissions sometimes provide an indication of the subject matter of the assize and thus the nature of the claim. For example, in 1233, an assize in Shropshire was to be held to recognise whether half a virgate of land and one messuage in Quatt was held by free alms pertaining to the church of Master Richard Nigri of Quatt or was the lay fee of Robert le Clerk.15 In 1259–60 Henry of Bratton (or Bracton) was commissioned to hear a complaint of nuisance to the free tenement of Thomas of Legh caused by diversion of the watercourse at Lee in Devon.16 12

In his study of the appeal of rape in the thirteenth century eyre rolls Klerman notes that ‘The relative importance of eyre and gaol delivery in the thirteenth century has not been systematically studied’ and surmises that ‘it is probable that by mid-century, if not earlier, more criminal cases were tried in gaol delivery than in eyre.’ See D. Klerman, ‘Settlement and the Decline of Private Prosecution in ThirteenthCentury England’, Law and History Review 19 (2001), 32. 13 C 66/43 m.8d. 14 C 66/43 m.7d. For the Lynn example see KB 27/163 m.10 (printed in CR xv no. 144). There is also an assize of novel disseisin heard at Lynn that appears in Bracton’s Note Book, i. no. 754. I owe these references to the research papers of Mr C.A.F. Meekings. 15 C 66/43 m.5d. 16 C 66/74 m.12d.

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The gaol delivery commissions can be equally informative in a way that is quite unlike those of the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A significant inclusion (that was emulated in assize commissions) is the date on which or by which the prisoners in the gaol were to be tried. For instance, Jordan Oliver, William de la Bruer, Martin fitz Acre and William le Prinz were commissioned on 12 November 1235 to deliver Exeter gaol on the first of December (the day after the feast of St Andrew) of that year.17 Whilst many of the commissions mention a specific day,18 others, such as the one issued in 1234 to Adam son of William and Thomas Camvill to deliver the gaol at Canterbury,19 give a specific period or terminus ante quem.20 Although it does not prove that the delivery was carried out, the provision of these details offers a more concrete picture of the system in operation. This is further enhanced by the inclusion of a date for the commission, a detail frequently omitted from later commissions, thus enabling a comparison to be made between the issuing of the commission and its envisaged accomplishment. If it was intended that all the prisoners in the gaol were to be tried, then this was stated,21 or more unusually (as in the case of Stafford gaol in 1234) it might be directed that chaplains and clerks were to be delivered.22 Where the justices are directed to hear an appeal, the parties are named and the nature of the appeal disclosed. There are also details about approvers’ appeals, including the alleged accomplices and their purported offences as well as record of orders to hold a duel.23 Cases that require further investigation by justices in order to ascertain the nature of a death include information on the parties, whether (as in one case) a homicide was premeditated or happened in self-defence or (in another) whether a death occurred as a result of felonious behaviour or by misfortune.24 I am not, of course, the first to tread this path. Professor Ralph Pugh focused on the workings of gaol delivery in his Imprisonment in Medieval England and analysed a proportion of the commissions relating to Wiltshire for his chapter on the king’s government in the shires in the Victoria County History. A considerable amount of work transcribing commissions from the patent rolls and calculating the numbers of justices was carried out by that other great doyen of the subject, C.A.F. Meekings – and I am most grateful to Dr David Crook for allowing me to have access to some of his papers. Their approach, however, was very much rooted in trying to establish the mechanics of the system and although they managed to determine some of the major patterns and features, unfortunately neither produced a definitive or exhaustive analysis, nor one that took account of the myriad combinations of personnel. A full prosopographical analysis, one which contextualises the local administration of justice, is required for a proper understanding of the system. Given that it is a huge area, one requiring much detailed and painstaking research, my contribution here cannot hope to be more than a pilot to a future more exhaustive study. This format nevertheless offers a way of crystallising some of the questions

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

C 66/46 m.14d. For example: C 66/73 mm.1d (Salop), 2d (Cambridge, Lincoln). C 66/44 m.17d. For example: C 66/44 m.16d (Ilchester), m.5d (Hereford); 45 m.12d (Oxford); 46 m.2d (Colchester). For example: C 66/44 m.15d (Lincoln); 45 m.5d (Nottingham). C 66/44 m.11d. For example: C 66/44 m.11d (Lincoln, Newcastle), m.6d (Nottingham). C 66/74 m.13d.

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that need to be asked of the administrative evidence. There are some questions that arise from a consideration of purely structural and administrative features. What was the relationship, for instance, between the assizes and gaol delivery during this period? What similarities were there in terms of procedures and/or personnel? Can observations or complaints relating to the functioning of the system be upheld? How successful were the sessions in fulfilling expectations of civil and criminal justice? I shall try and provide some initial answers to these on the basis of selective sampling of the patent rolls and surviving proceedings. From the early years of Henry III’s reign, for instance, there was a link between the hearing of assizes and delivering gaols in that sometimes the tasks were assigned in a joint commission.25 Although this was not necessarily a common phenomenon, a more obvious association came through similarities in the personnel commissioned for both tasks, which represented a practical way of making use of people’s time in a given location. Gilbert Preston, for example, regularly received assize commissions in locations from Kent to Lincolnshire, Norfolk to Leicestershire during Henry III’s reign.26 He was also commissioned separately to deliver gaols in this array of counties. During the mid-1380s, Richard Boyland was similarly entrusted with both tasks.27 As intimated earlier, however, it is important to remember the wider context: the ‘four knights’ system should not be viewed in a vacuum. It did not operate in splendid isolation from the rest of the judicial system, nor was it impervious to political change. Both its structural significance and its personnel should be considered within the spectrum of judicial agencies operating during the thirteenth century. The assizes and gaol delivery did not operate in isolation from the general eyre, for instance, nor from the mass of officialdom associated with the administration of the shire and the local courts, nor too from the newly the emerging office of keeper of the peace. In order to provide a meaningful interpretation, I shall examine the operation of the ‘four knights’ system in relation to a number of themes. The first is the very general theme of the relationship between centre and locality both with regard to judicial agencies and the personnel serving on commissions. In other words, how does the system relate to, complement or compete with the work of the general eyre and the court of king’s bench on the one hand, and the courts of the county and the hundred, on the other. The period is also one that merits a consideration of the potential tensions or overlaps arising from the exercise of private (delegated) power and the wielding of authority derived from holding public (royal) office. Moreover, did the so-called period of baronial reform and the opposition exhibited to Henry III significantly alter the routine operation of local justice? To what extent did political expediency influence the assize and gaol delivery commissions and sessions? There are also questions about the personnel involved in local justice and the nature of the legal profession at this time – even the extent to which it could be called a ‘profession’ – and the type of experience necessary to be accorded royal judicial commissions. If this volume of essays is concerned with the perceptual expansion of royal justice over the course of the thirteenth century, then we should acknowledge that the provincial sessions of assize and gaol delivery brought a significant growth in the levels of participation in royal justice. This can be assessed both in terms of the number

25 26 27

For example: C 66/43 m.7d; 45 m.6d; 73 m.13d; see also JUST 1/36. C 66/74 m.14d, m.11d; JUST 1/1193. For example: JUST 1/93, 209 (assizes), 570, 1267 (gaol delivery).

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of personnel administering the system and in the volume of ‘consumers’, those who passed through the provincial courts (whether as complainants or defendants). This was to the mutual benefit of the crown and the localities as the regular sessions afforded a stake in royal justice in the minds of litigants, while the numerous venues and frequency of the sessions accordingly expanded the influence of the crown. While the separate commissions of assize and gaol delivery may have started off as supplements to the visitations of the eyre, the postponement of scheduled eyres and the length of time between visits undoubtedly placed them to the forefront in the minds of litigants as routine sessions.28 There is empirical evidence for this. The number of commissions recorded on the chancery patent rolls reveal a gradual increase over the first half of the century with a veritable explosion in the number of commissions issued occurring during Edward I’s reign. According to the manuscript rolls, 104 assize commissions were sent out in 19 Henry III (1234–35).29 By comparison, there are 157 assize commissions recorded on just the first four membranes of the first part of the patent rolls of twenty-five years later in 44 Henry III (1259–60).30 By the 1290s the sheer number of individual assize commissions enrolled for different counties makes counting them extremely time-consuming (and has not been attempted as yet). The figures do not of course take into account the assizes heard under general commissions issued on a systematic basis after 1273.31 A comparison of gaol delivery commissions again reveals a similar blossoming in royal justice at the local level. From about twenty commissions enrolled in 1234–35, a figure that had more than doubled in 1259–60, we can find at least 151 in the roll for 1284–85 (a total that was matched in the final year of the system in 20 Edward I, 1291–92).32 Since the figures represent the number of commissions they may under represent the possible level of gaol delivery activity, as they do not take into account the commissions to several or groups of gaols. On the other hand, it is not possible to be certain that sessions were actually held under all these commissions and that, for instance, where several commissions are enrolled for a specific gaol, they do not represent duplicates or reminders, rather than separate deliveries. Moreover, the general trend does belie some interesting fluctuations in the numbers of commissions issued in each regnal year. The number of assize commissions issued during the five years from 1232 to 1236, for example, dropped from 125 to seventy-four, before rising to 104 and then gaining further to 135.33 The 1260s also witnessed a spectacular reduction in the number of commissions issued. In 49 and 50 Henry III (1264–66) there were as few as twenty-five enrolled and even in 47 Henry III (1262–63) a mere eleven – figures which may be symptomatic of other things, which I shall discuss below.34 So whilst quantitatively it all probably evens out in the end, the overall increase tends to mask some of the changes revealed by a more detailed investigation.

28

For the frequent postponement or rescheduling of eyre sessions see Crook, Records of the General Eyre. 29 C 66/46. I owe this calculation to Meekings. 30 C 66/74. Part 2 is /75. 31 For the enrolment see CCR 1272–79, 52. 32 C 66/46, 74, 75, 104, 111. The figures include some special gaol delivery commissions and represent the number of commissions issued rather than gaols to be delivered. 33 C 66/43–6. I owe these figures to Meekings. 34 C 66/83–4 (1264–66); Pugh, Imprisonment, 261.

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In terms of gaol delivery personnel there was by the end of the period a concomitant broadening of the arena with 171 different justices commissioned to deliver gaols in 20 Edward I (1291–92). By contrast in 17 Henry III (1232–33) there were thirty-four justices at work. Such comparisons, however, offer only a rather crude indication of the service and level of commitment of some of these men. A more balanced assessment would need to take account of variables such as length of service or of people delivering multiple gaols. Clearly, a more detailed study needs to consider the ratio of personnel to commissions over the course of the period and the spectrum of service rendered by individual commissioners. Did the number of justices increase exponentially with the amount of work available or was the increasing workload in fact falling upon fewer people? The picture with regard to assize personnel is unexpectedly complex and has ramifications for an understanding of the development of the legal profession (which I shall come on to later). There were significant fluctuations in the number of justices involved in hearing assizes during particular periods as well as variations in the number of justices enrolled per commission. While in the early thirteenth century there was a fairly large pool of people holding assizes by the late 1250s and 1260s the role of assize justice had become more exclusive, both in numerical terms and with regard to the personnel of commissions. By the 1280s the surviving records of sessions show that membership of the panels had opened up again, only to be restricted once more in the 1290s. Looking at the system in the wider context, we should not regard the eyre or the central courts as competing with the routine sessions or as necessarily providing an unwelcome centralising tendency – something that modern historians have emphasised.35 Analysing the personnel involved, it is clear that this is one of the major areas in which the assizes and gaol delivery system overlapped with the general eyre. The significance of this will be discussed further when I am considering private justice and the nature and development of the legal profession, but in practical terms the link must have provided some continuity between eyre sessions. This may have been particularly noticeable where the assize justice regularly operated in a small group of counties. The justices of assize affiliated with the central courts were often sent to the counties in which they either had family or held lands or benefices. Henry of Bracton, for example, almost entirely heard assizes in the south-west, in Devon, Cornwall, Dorset and Somerset. He not only came from Devon, but was sometime chancellor of Exeter cathedral. So not only could the central court justices boast local connections (thus preventing accusations of being unsympathetic outsiders), but also could bring to bear in their sessions vital local knowledge of persons and places. Local knowledge could also help determine the direction of government policy, especially in regions where an expansion of royal authority was desired. During the 1230s, for example, William of Ralegh, who had been active in his native Devon as a royal judge and was one of the king’s leading counsellors, initiated a series of inquests in the hundreds of the county.36 It is interesting to note from the details included in the commissions (backed up by some of the plea rolls) that from the second half of the thirteenth century the

35 M.M. Taylor, ‘The Justices of Assize’, The English Government at Work, 1327–36, ed. J.F. Willard, W.A. Morris and W.H. Dunham, 3 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1940–50), iii. 220–1. 36 Crown Pleas of the Devon Eyre of 1238, ed. H. Summerson (Devon and Cornwall Record Soc., new ser., xxviii, 1985), xxiii–iv.

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assize and gaol delivery justices were being utilised to pick up judicial business left over from the eyre. There were sometimes special commissions issued for the delivery of named offenders who had been placed in exigent at the last eyre in the county and now, having heard rumour of the exigent, had returned themselves to prison to await trial.37 Although Pugh maintains the earliest of these occurs in the 1280s in fact as early as 1235 Adam son of William and Oliver Vaux received such a command for prisoners of Norfolk and Suffolk.38 Such prisoners were not automatically convicted and appear to have been given a fair hearing. Walter Scharlet, tried at East Dereham in 1285, claimed benefit of clergy but was acquitted by the jury.39 Brother Thomas of Langley abbey, who was placed in exigent for arson of the church of Holy Trinity, Norwich and for homicide, was released to the bishop of Norwich’s attorney as he was ‘a religious man’.40 It was also not unusual for assizes justices to continue unfinished eyre business. For instance a commission of 1258–59 instructed the justices assigned to hear assizes in Tonbridge to hear pleas of dower that had been before the justices of the last eyre in Kent.41 In 1265–66 Richard Middleton was commissioned to inquire concerning a dispute over common pasture at Hocclyne that had been heard before Nicholas Tower and his associates, justices in eyre at Newport Pagnell.42 It is difficult to say how much the expansion of royal justice (through the eyre and nascent peace sessions rather more than the assizes or gaol delivery) affected the local courts and, indeed, drew business away from them, since there are so few records surviving from these courts. Franchises and the power of jurisdiction were highly valued and, the extent to which in the early thirteenth century at least the hundred court was the preferred forum for redress amongst litigants themselves should not be underestimated.43 Certainly the royal courts were keen to admonish franchise holders who had exceeded their jurisdiction. In 1225 (9 Henry III) the court of the liberty of the abbot of Reading confessed that it had exercised the death penalty on a certain man who had in turn confessed to have killed two men and had been found in possession of a stolen saddlebag. The court was reminded that this was a crown plea and not at the judgment of the abbot’s court for it could not hold such pleas without warrant.44 Some of the potential tensions, however, were diluted or defused by giving lords of liberties or those that normally presided over local courts a stake in the crown’s expanded administrative role. In the same way that estates stewards and local officials were sometimes included in the panel of eyre justices (where relevant) or important lords or leading churchmen were similarly recognised,45 so the issuing of assize and gaol delivery commissions took into account local territorial relationships and power structures. In 1262 (46 Henry III), for example, the abbot of 37

For example: C 66/104 m.27d (Dunheved); 107 m.18d (Ely, Reyleigh), m.7d (Sherburn). C 66/45 m.6d. 39 JUST 1/1267 m.2. See also ibid., m.14 (Waltham). 40 JUST 1/1267 m.1. 41 C 66/73 m.13d. 42 C 66/84 m.32d. 43 Summerson, Devon Eyre of 1238, xix–xx. 44 JUST 1/36 m.2. 45 See Crook, Records of the General Eyre, 157–8. Eyre sessions in the liberty of Wye in Kent were held with the abbot’s steward, Simon Etchingham and Robert Hardres (JUST 1/1600 mm.4, 4d). In 1278 Geoffrey Giffard, bishop of Winchester, was named as chief justice for the circuit though he did not actually sit. 38

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Peterborough sat with Gilbert Preston to hear assizes at Denham in Buckinghamshire.46 Guischard Charrun, the bishop of Durham’s steward heard assizes and delivered gaols in the palatinate and elsewhere.47 Nicholas Haudlo acted similarly while keeper of the temporalities of the bishop of Winchester.48 William Wintreshull, the bishop of Winchester’s steward in the 1260s, was commissioned on several occasions to deliver the gaol there,49 while William Aguillon, steward of Pevensey, was commissioned to try prisoners at Chichester gaol in the 1230s.50 The mayor of London frequently sat on commissions to try Newgate prisoners.51 Sometimes this exercise of private power brought apparent clashes of jurisdiction. At Colchester gaol delivery sessions in 1276, Richard le Welbe appeared before John Lovetot, John Filliol and Richard de Tany, having been indicted at Tany’s view of frankpledge. Welbe was convicted of robbery by the petty jury at the sessions. There was obviously some complaint concerning Tany’s rights in this case for a jury then confirmed that he had the franchise of hanging thieves taken within his fee in the county of Essex and his privilege was duly conceded to him.52 While the power and jurisdiction of local lords was clearly respected, the opportunity to try felons at gaol delivery accorded them increased scope to perform a judicial role and was undoubtedly recognition on the part of the crown (not to say a clever anticipation of the later role played by the justices of the peace) that partnership and cooperation was better (more constructive) than opposition. Overlaps in jurisdiction and the enhanced power that a royal commission brought should be examined in the context of the emerging office of keeper of the peace. The link between gaol delivery and the evolution of the justices of the peace has been charted for the fourteenth century,53 but there has been little detailed consideration of the possibility of overlaps between the two agencies in the thirteenth century. Professor Harding’s examination of the origins and early history of the office of keeper of the peace highlights the appointment of captains and keepers of the peace during the period of the baronial wars and the growing reliance on these officials to keep the peace during times of civil strife or in the king’s absence, such as at the start of the Welsh wars in 1277.54 The holding of inquests were clearly part of the keepers’ brief as evidenced by some commissions in the patent rolls (to Hugh Peverel, for example, keeper of the peace for Devon)55 and the surviving membrane of Richard de Tany’s sessions in Essex in 1277.56 The manuscript patent rolls demonstrate that as early as the 1260s gaol delivery commissions were received by men who were

46

JUST 1/1193 m.9d. For example: C 66/104 m.17d. See also Crook, Records of General Eyre, 147–8. 48 For example: C 66/73 m.13d; 74 mm.5d, 10d, 12d, 13d. 49 For example: C 66/84 m.25d; 85 mm.23, 28d. 50 For example: C 66/46 m.3d. 51 For example: JUST 3/85 m.11. 52 JUST 1/85 m.8d. 53 See A. Musson, Public Order and Law Enforcement: The Local Administration of Criminal Justice, 1294–1350 (Woodbridge, 1996) and A. Musson and W.M. Ormrod, The Evolution of English Justice: Law, Politics and Society in the Fourteenth Century (Basingstoke, 1998). 54 A. Harding, ‘The Origins and Early History of the Keeper of the Peace’, TRHS 5th ser., 10 (1960), 85–91. 55 C 66/83 m.27d. 56 JUST 1/252 m.2; printed in H. Cam, ‘Some Early Inquests before “Custodes Pacis” ’, EHR xl (1925), 415–19. 47

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also keepers of the peace. William le Zuche and Richard Southchurch, for example, were appointed keepers of the peace in Essex in 1267 and were commissioned to deliver Colchester gaol in the same year.57 In the same year, Thomas le Bigod of Bradely became one of the four knights appointed guardians of the peace in the liberty of St Edmunds and also received a gaol delivery commission.58 The extent to which the keepers of the peace appointed either during or in the aftermath of the civil war were military or judicial appointments or a mixture of both requires further analysis, but it is clear that at least some of those intended to keep the peace possessed (or subsequently gained) judicial experience. Gaol delivery proceedings of the 1270s prove that men such as Peverel and Tany actually sat as justices, though there is nothing to indicate that they determined indictments made before themselves at this date.59 However, some appointees as keepers, such as John le Breton, were sitting sheriffs and would regularly have tried prisoners previously indicted at their tourn when sitting as justices of gaol delivery.60 The extent to which the men serving as keepers of the peace were integrated into the criminal justice network can be gleaned from a comparison of the 1287 appointments to the office and those who had experience of trying prisoners around that time. Of the thirty-three counties for whom we have named commissioners, twentythree had at least one member of the peace commission with judicial experience. Indeed, just over half the keepers of the peace in those counties were gaol delivery justices. This suggests that we should not underestimate the judicial involvement of these officers in the second half of the thirteenth century, nor assume that because few records of their activities survive, nothing was in fact happening. The political implications of the appointment of keepers of the peace is not our concern here, but it raises the question to what extent the operation of the assize and gaol delivery system was influenced by political factors? In the absence of express statements as to policy it is difficult to determine whether changes in methods of administration and personnel were a reflection of political ramifications or merely coincidental upon it. Political considerations were most likely to have affected the administration of justice during two periods in the century for which we have records. First, the decade 1258–67 during Henry III’s reign (a period comprising the initial years of the ascendancy of the baronial reform movement, the ensuing civil war and the Declaration of 1267); and, secondly, the four years or so during Edward I’s reign following the dismissal of the higher judiciary from their posts in 1289–90. The first period may have witnessed specific changes in personnel. Pugh and Meekings posit that there was an influx of local men. A comprehensive analysis of the commissions during this period would need to be undertaken, but on a rather rough and ready basis (comparing names over several years worth of commissions) there do not seem to be enormous differences in the type of people appointed. What is noticeable, as I mentioned earlier, is the sharp decline in the number of gaol delivery commissions over the period; figures probably not aided by the baronial eyres and the bouts of warfare. However, this was not the case for assizes, which still flourished in the provinces and were placed tightly under the control of certain key justices. The

57 58 59 60

CPR 1266–72, 129; C 66/85 m.28d. CPR 1266–72, 56; C 66/86 m.11d. JUST 3/18/3 m.4 (Tany). For example: JUST 1/1267 m.2; 1286 m.1.

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commissions indicate that a single justice was appointed (normally connected with the central courts) and the surviving records indicate that he usually sat as sole judge with only occasional associations (normally like personnel). There is some justification for regarding this restriction of assize commissions to specific individuals as deliberate government policy on the basis of memoranda issued in 1259 and 1270–71. In the first, communicated by letters close, only seven named persons (in a list appended) were to be commissioned as ‘special justices’ (speciales justiciarie).61 All of those named can be identified as professional justices. Although the wording is a little ambiguous since it could refer to oyer and terminer justices, the second, contained in letters patent, is decidedly straightforward, referring specifically to assize justices and providing a list of those who were to be assigned to the various counties.62 This policy is clearly at odds with the supposed idea of greater involvement of knights of the shire. The 1290s also show alterations in the personnel of the assizes and gaol delivery with judges of the king’s and common benches brought into the fray and judges of common pleas, prior to a resumption of the general eyre in 1292. Significant changes were made to the assize circuits in 1293 and to gaol delivery in 1291–92. Edward I’s purge of the higher judiciary and a number of senior ministers brought political tensions as well as engendering a new sensitivity to complaint. The senior judges had to respond to public opinion and show that practices had altered and consequently there was a desire on the part of reforming legislators to tighten up on administrative practices. An ordinance concerning gaol delivery justices was issued in 1292 (possibly following a case that reached the court of king’s bench in 1291) and in the statute De Justiciariis Asignatis of 1293 the hearing of general assizes was concentrated in the hands of the few (‘eight circumspect and discreet justices’) rather than the many as had been the practice in previous years. It appears from the changes ushered in that the ‘four knights’ system had had its day. But was it necessarily corrupt or administratively inefficient? Analysis of the commissions and sessions offers an opportunity to test the allegation put forward in the late thirteenth century anonymous treatise The Mirror of Justices that once commissions were issued (or a writ procured) the justices were slow to carry out the delivery.63 Commissions issued in the 1230s including both the date it was issued and the day specified for sessions demonstrate that in this early period at least it was common for there to be about a two or three week gap between the two. In 1235, for example, sessions in Exeter were scheduled for 1 December following a commission of 12 November.64 In the same year a commission was issued on 2 March for a delivery to be held at Gloucester on 24 April.65 The commission for a special delivery of Ilchester gaol on 13 December 1234 was issued on 27 November.66 While this is evidence of the period of grace between commission and its execution, it does not prove the sessions were actually held as intended. In fact it is more difficult to find evidence for the prevailing practice in the later thirteenth century since commissions rarely carry a date and it is unusual to find a commission appended to or enrolled on 61 62 63 64 65 66

CCR 1256–59, 485. I owe this and the following reference to Dr Paul Brand. C 66/89 m.4d. Isti sunt justiciarii assignati ad assisas capiendas per diversos comitatus regni. The Mirror of Justices, ed. W.J. Whittaker and F.W. Maitland (Selden Soc., vii, 1895), 160. C 66/46 m.14d. C 66/45 m.13d. C 66/45 m.18d.

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the gaol delivery proceedings. For example, a delivery for Eye gaol where there is a commission dated 6 March appended to a session held on 26 June 1283.67 Exeter sessions of the 1270s show that the interval could range from as little as fourteen days in 127368 to about four or six weeks, as was the case in 1277,69 to the more lengthy three months of 1276–77.70 In the two-year period 1285–87 deliveries at Colchester were similarly variable, some intervals were shorter than others (17 June to 3 August 1286, 14 December 1286 to 9 January 1287, 24 July to 12 August 1287).71 The shortest interval between the issuing of a commission and the delivery – as exemplified again for Colchester gaol (1291–92) – seems to be one week (28 December 1291 to 4 January 1292).72 Although the few surviving rolls from the later thirteenth century provide a somewhat limited evidential basis, the foregoing examples do not appear to sustain the allegation made in the Mirror of Justices. Another supposed ‘abuse’ may be inferred from a mandate issued to justices in eyre in 1292. This ordered them to inquire concerning the behaviour of justices assigned to deliver gaols and included a requirement to deal with those who did not observe the form of their commission (potestatis sue seu waranti) and delivered a gaol inquorate, with just three of the panel sitting.73 Unlike assize commissions which sometimes included a clause that associated another justice to the panel so as to enable the assize(s) to proceed if one of the justices (named) was unable to be present,74 gaol deliveries rarely had such a proviso. On the basis of the allegation behind this mandate it would appear that all four justices named in the commission had to sit. Again this is a difficult area to pursue, especially as in various periods the crown diverged from strict adherence to the ‘four knights’ principle.75 If we examine the final years of the system and compare the numbers of justices sitting (as gleaned from the surviving proceedings) with the commissions issued (which Pugh for some reason did not analyse),76 it is again possible to refute the suggestion or implication that gaol delivery justices were routinely at fault here. The panels of justices present at the Essex sessions of 17 to 20 Edward I comprise four individuals with the exception of the delivery on Thursday 22 May 1292 for which there was only three, Laurence Plumbergh, Roger Baynard and Robert Horkeley.77 The patent rolls nevertheless show that a commission to deliver Colchester gaol was issued to the same three gentlemen sometime during 1292.78 Indeed, there are several addressed to

67

JUST 3/63/1 m.5. For another commission appended see JUST 3/71 m.4. JUST 3/14/1 m.12 (24 July to 7 August). 69 JUST 3/14/1 m.5 (2 November to 20 December), m.7 (13 June to 15 July). 70 JUST 3/14/1 m.6 (16 November 1276 to 22 February 1277). 71 JUST 3/18/1 mm.3–5. 72 JUST 3/18/3 m.2. 73 Rot. Parl i. 86. 74 For example: C 66/84 mm.35d, 40d, 42d. Generally only three assize justices are sitting for the assizes held in Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall (1289–90), but there is no mention of the clause, see JUST 1/1284, 1285. 75 The extent to which the model of four to a commission was followed during the period has been examined by Pugh and Meekings and I have no wish to duplicate their appraisal here. See Pugh, Imprisonment, 263–8 and Meekings unpublished private research papers. 76 Pugh, Imprisonment, 266 n.1. Pugh did not analyse the commissions for 15–20 Edward I because he assumed they were similar to 11–13 Edward I. 77 JUST 3/18/3 m.1. The other sessions are at mm.2–6. 78 C 66/111 m.18d. 68

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only three justices in the same roll.79 It cannot be assumed, therefore, that the mandate of 1292 to justices in eyre adequately reflected common practice. Could it have been a reaction to the evidence about appointments that emerged during a king’s bench case of 1291?80 Moreover, it is apparent that where an inquorate panel was occasioned by oversight or ignorance (per oblivionem aut ignorantiam) the crown was less concerned than if the holding of the session had occurred (of grace or) deliberately.81 How can we gauge the effectiveness of the ‘four knights’ system?82 One method is to examine the number of people coming before the justices along with the types of cases brought and offences dealt with. There are obviously some problems in providing a comprehensive survey, given the incompleteness of the records, but chronologically at least there is some continuity for the twenty years from 1271 to 1291 with long runs of sessions held in Devon and Essex, for example (as well as the probably more atypical records for London and Middlesex). Since this is just a pilot study, I have not undertaken a systematic investigation, but random sampling suggests that the numbers appearing for trial at gaol delivery were not large (certainly not by fourteenth century standards). Between ten and thirty prisoners seems to be the norm for shire gaols,83 though occasionally there were larger numbers delivered: forty-seven people were tried at Norwich in 1276 and fifty-one in the same city a decade later.84 The inflated numbers at the earlier of the two Norwich sessions were partly as a result of two approvers, whose accusations against accomplices brought in sixteen people. The number of convictions obtained during the sessions I have examined is interesting and obviously needs to be compared to the eyre sessions, suggesting (albeit rather generally) not only that the ‘four knights’ system made a significant contribution to law enforcement, but also that petty juries were considerably more willing to return a guilty verdict than is normally supposed. At the Colchester sessions of 1287 convictions effectively outnumbered acquittals: of the nine alleged felons appearing, four were acquitted, four were found guilty (although one of them had to remain in prison as the principal had not yet been convicted) and the ninth, an approver, did not present his appeal and was ordered to judgment.85 This was also the case in the trials with larger numbers of defendants. At Norwich in 1286, twentyfour people were acquitted (five of those on approvers’ appeals), while twenty-six were effectively convicted (including two who abjured the realm, an approver who withdrew his appeals, one person who was convicted on his appeal, and two claiming benefit of clergy); one person refused to place themselves ‘on the country’.86 At Guildford sessions in 1276 (as part of a sort of proto-trailbaston commission 79

For example: C 66/111 m.29d (Norwich, Huntingdon), m.24d (Rochester), m.22d (Newcastle). Three justices were sitting in York in 1291 (JUST 3/74/1). 80 Pugh, Imprisonment, 279–80. 81 Rot. Parl i. 86. 82 I cannot at this stage provide an analysis based upon the type of personnel staffing the commissions – whether central court professionals or local men made a perceptible difference or indeed a comparison between the deliveries carried out by the eyre and the supplementary or routine gaol deliveries. 83 For example: JUST 3/14/1 m.1 (Exeter – 15); 18/1 m.3 (Colchester – 9); 85 m.1d (St Edmunds – 19), m.4 (Guildford – 27), m.5d (Kingston – 30). 84 JUST 3/85 m.1. 85 JUST 3/18/1 m.3. 86 JUST 1/1267 m.1.

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concerning malefactors and disturbers of the peace in six counties) ten defendants were acquitted, but twelve were found guilty (including one man claiming benefit of clergy who was then accused of being a bigamist).87 The relationship of the ‘four knights’ system and the assize and gaol delivery commissions to the development of the legal profession is something that will emerge from closer scrutiny and a prosopographical survey. But perhaps certain general observations can be tentatively advanced. First, the assize and gaol delivery commissions comprise an amazing spectrum of personnel, from senior churchmen and king’s clerks to landed gentry and estates stewards. Many of those undertaking these tasks would probably not think of themselves specifically as lawyers, but as exercising jurisdiction. The commissions, however, undoubtedly offered early judicial experience for some local men, budding lawyers, who went on to become judges of the central courts. Conversely some members with experience in the eyres or central courts only received such commissions subsequent to their appointment to the higher echelons of judicial administration. The periods in which various types of personnel operated should be highlighted. Although the ‘four knights’ (or local men) were initially involved in hearing assizes, this increasingly (though not exclusively and with some fluctuations) became a role for central court personnel (be they judges, clerks or administrators). Likewise, the gaol delivery commissions were never wholly the preserve of so-called knights of the shire (with central court personnel appearing on many of the panels). The involvement of ecclesiastics (particularly some who in spite of papal prohibition took part in judgments of blood) suggests that the line between spiritual and temporal should not be drawn too firmly and confirms that this was a period before those in holy orders ceased to play a significant role in local justice. In effect, the commissions of this period represent a melting pot or meeting point of both central and local officials and the exercise of both royal and delegated private jurisdiction. Arguably, if we look at the broader chronological context (the ‘long thirteenth century’) the supposed end of the ‘four knights’ system in the early 1290s is something of an illusion thrown up by the administrative changes and the suspension of the eyre in 1294. The early fourteenth century can be said to have witnessed a continuation of the older system (albeit in the light of the change of direction of the 1290s and in a rather different overall legal context) and it was not until the later 1320s and 1330s that the way the assizes and gaol delivery operated altered inherently. Since in many respects the personnel divisions became blurred again, the administrative changes of the closing years of Edward I’s reign were no more profound than those occurring at an earlier date (for instance during the 1260s). What could be said to have been occurring was evolution – the processes of experimentation and refinement.

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Women as Sheriffs in Early Thirteenth Century England Louise J. Wilkinson

Introduction At a time when women were normally excluded from exercising any formal role in royal government, the early thirteenth century witnessed the unusual appointment of two female sheriffs in England. During the civil war of 1215–17, Lady Nicholaa de la Haye, the twice widowed heiress of the Lincolnshire barony of Brattleby, became the crown’s leading local official in this county, and conducted a spirited defence of Lincoln castle.1 Similarly, at the end of King Henry III’s minority, Ela Longespée, the widowed countess of Salisbury, was granted the shrievalty of Wiltshire. Although the appearance of two female sheriffs hardly represented a giant leap forward in the ‘monstrous regiment of women’, to borrow the later words of John Knox,2 the extraordinary roles that both Nicholaa and Ela fulfilled within the masculine realm of government office render them worthy of special attention. This essay will examine each of their careers in turn, seeking to explain their appointments, and considering their performances as sheriffs. Admittedly Nicholaa’s and Ela’s appointments were not entirely without precedent. Noblewomen often made a significant contribution to the governance of their families’ lands and estates in the central and later Middle Ages, and sometimes assumed more wide-ranging responsibilities in their husbands’ absence.3 According to the chronicler, Roger of Wendover, for example, the bishop of Ely’s sister had charge of the royal castle of Dover in 1191, and assisted the sheriff of Kent in the capture of King John’s illegitimate half-brother, Geoffrey, the newly ordained archbishop of York.4 Throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a handful of noblewomen acted as royal officials in their own right, most notably as foresters and constables of royal

1

Hitherto the most recent study of Nicholaa’s life has been C. Petit-Dutaillis, ‘Une Femme de Guerre au XIIIe Siècle: Nicole de la Haie, Gardienne du Château de Lincoln’, Mélanges Julien Havet. Recueil de Travaux D’Érudition Dédiés À La Mémoire de Julien Havet (1853–1893) (Paris, 1895), 369–80. 2 J. Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (Geneva, 1558), quoted by J.L. Nelson, ‘Women at the Court of Charlemagne: A Case of Monstrous Regiment?’, Medieval Queenship, ed. J.C. Parsons (Stroud, first publ. 1994, reprinted 1998), 55. 3 For the role of noblewomen in estate administration, see R.E. Archer, ‘ “How ladies … who live on their manors ought to manage their households and estates”: Women as Landholders and Administrators in the Later Middle Ages’, Woman is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society c. 1200–1500, ed. P.J.P. Goldberg (Stroud, 1992), 149–81; J.C. Ward, English Noblewomen in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1992), chapter 6. 4 Chronica Rogeri de Wendover liber qui dicitur Flores Historiarum, ed. H.G. Hewlett, 3 vols (RS, 1886–89), i. 193.

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castles, sometimes with mixed success. Matilda de Caux’s experiences offer a good case in point. Although King John as count of Mortain had awarded both Matilda and her second husband, Ralph fitz Stephen, custody of the royal forest in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire,5 the forestership was taken into the king’s hands when Matilda was widowed in 1202, and only returned to her in 1217.6 Even then, Philip Marc, the sheriff of Nottingham, still prevented her from exercising this office for another three years.7 Nicholaa de la Haye John’s grant to Matilda de Caux and her husband purported to have been made in recognition of all the liberties and free customs that Matilda’s ancestors had enjoyed in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire,8 suggesting that hereditary or ‘quasi-hereditary’ offices offered women the most accessible routes into local government in early thirteenth century England. There is much to be said for the view that Nicholaa de la Haye’s appointment as sheriff of Lincolnshire in 1216 owed a great deal to her inherited lands and connections, as well as to the standing that her second husband, Gerard de Camville, had enjoyed in the region. On the death of her father, Richard, in c. 1169,9 as the eldest of three co-heiresses, Nicholaa had inherited the modest Lincolnshire barony of Brattleby,10 for which scutage was charged on sixteen knights’ fees.11 Nicholaa also inherited a claim to be castellan of Lincoln. Both her grandfather and her father had received this office by royal grant,12 and a charter issued by King Richard I on his accession in 1189 confirmed Nicholaa and her second husband in possession of her inherited lands ‘with the [service of] castle-ward and the constableship of the castle of Lincoln’ (cum custodia et constabularia ca[ste]lli Lincolnie).13 It has been suggested that Nicholaa also carried with her a claim to the shrievalty of Lincolnshire. Whilst conceding that the charter of 1189 made no reference to such

5

J.C. Holt, The Northerners: A Study in the Reign of King John (Oxford, first publ. 1961, reprinted 1992), 30; The Registrum Antiquissimum of the Cathedral Church of Lincoln, ed. C.W. Foster (vols 1–4) and K. Major (vols 5–10) (Lincoln Record Soc., 10 vols, 1931–73), vii. 209–22, esp. 217–19. 6 CPR 1216–25, 123; RLC, i. 316; Registrum Antiquissimum, vii. 217; Holt, The Northerners, 30. 7 CPR 1216–25, 272; RLC, i. 441b; Registrum Antiquissimum, vii. 217; Holt, The Northerners, 243. 8 Registrum Antiquissimum, vii. 218. 9 Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, ed. R. Howlett, 4 vols (RS, 1884–89), iv. 241. 10 Richard de la Haye was survived by his wife and three daughters but no sons. See Rotuli de Dominabus et Pueris et Puellis de XII Comitatibus [1185] (PRS, xxxv, 1913), 12. For Richard I’s charter confirming Nicholaa and her second husband in possession of Nicholaa’s lands, see Ancient Charters: Royal and Private prior to A.D. 1200 Part I, ed. J.H. Round (PRS, x, 1888), no. 55. The initial family settlement between Nicholaa and her sisters, Julia (or Gila) and Isabella, was later modified by means of an agreement reached at Caen in c. 1197 which secured Nicholaa and Gerard in possession of Richard de la Haye’s former lands in England, while those in Normandy were divided between Julia and Isabella and their husbands. See CRR, xiv, no. 1155. 11 I.J. Sanders, English Baronies: A Study of their Origin and Descent 1086–1327 (Oxford, 1960), 109 & n.2; PR 13 John, 58. Her father, as a tenant-in-chief in 1166, had returned eleven knights enfeoffed before 1135, four enfeoffed after that date and five charged on his demesne. See Red Book, i. 390–1; J.C. Holt, ‘The Carta of Richard de la Haye, 1166: A Note on “Continuity” in Anglo-Norman Feudalism’, EHR lxxxiv (1969), 289–97. 12 Ancient Charters, no. 36; J.W.F. Hill, Medieval Lincoln (Cambridge, first publ. 1948, repr. Stamford, 1990), 87. 13 Ancient Charters, no. 55. We do not know if Nicholaa transmitted this claim to her first husband.

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an arrangement, J.H. Round believed it significant that, shortly after this charter was issued, Nicholaa’s second husband secured possession of both Lincoln castle and the shrievalty of the county.14 He also found a passage in William of Newburgh that apparently implied that the constableship of the castle and the office of sheriff went together.15 The problem is that, in Nicholaa’s case, there is no evidence that either her father or her first husband, William fitz Erneis, fulfilled the duties of sheriff in Lincolnshire.16 Even so, Nicholaa’s Lincolnshire estates offered a useful power base for a man who wished to establish or extend his influence in the locality. Although her first marriage to William fitz Erneis remains shrouded in mystery,17 Nicholaa’s second marriage to Gerard de Camville, which had taken place by 1185,18 clearly illustrates the opportunities for social and political advancement that marriage to Nicholaa could bring. The Camvilles, like the la Hayes, were established servants of the crown. Gerard’s father, Richard de Camville, was a commander of Richard I’s fleet for the 1190 expedition to the Holy Land.19 Gerard himself witnessed at least eleven charters issued by Henry II between c. 1172 and 1189.20 The Camville family had acquired holdings across the Midlands and south-west England after the Conquest,21

14

Ancient Charters, 92n. The pipe roll for Michaelmas 1190 recorded that Gerard had agreed to pay 700 marks pro vicecomitatu Lincolnie et castello civitatis habendis. See PR 2 Richard I, 89. See also J.H. Round, ‘The Early Sheriffs of Norfolk’, EHR xxxv (1920), 495. 15 Ancient Charters, 92n. The passage from William of Newburgh was this: Gerardus de Camvilla, vir dives et nobilis, summa non modica emerat a rege castelli Lincolniensis custodiam, quae uxori ejus jure hereditario competere videbatur, necnon et adjacentis provinciae praesidatum ad tempus certum. See Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, i. 337. 16 See List of Sheriffs for England and Wales. From the Earliest Times to A.D. 1831 (PRO Lists and Indexes, ix, Kraus reprint 1963), 78. 17 There is little remaining evidence for Nicholaa’s union with William fitz Erneis, partly because of the scarcity of surviving crown records for Henry II’s reign in comparison with later reigns, and partly because this marriage only lasted a few years. William first appeared in possession of Nicholaa’s barony, as we would expect him to be as Nicholaa’s husband, in the pipe roll for Michaelmas 1175. See PR 21 Hen. II, 148. William answered for money owing from the la Haye lands in the pipe roll for Michaelmas 1176. See PR 22 Hen. II, 78–9. By the time that the roll for Michaelmas 1178 was compiled, however, William’s death had left Nicholaa a widow and Jocelin of Ingleby, a la Haye tenant, rendered account for £13 19s from the revenue of the land that her late husband had held in her right. See PR 24 Hen. II, 8. The texts of two charters, concerning lands in Lincolnshire, that were issued by William have survived in the cartulary of Castle Acre Priory in Norfolk, a Cluniac house that was also patronised by Nicholaa’s grandfather, father and paternal uncle, as well as Nicholaa’s second husband and Nicholaa herself. For William’s and the la Haye family’s charters, see BL Harley MS 2110, ff. 70–73. 18 Rotuli de Dominabus, 12. 19 Flores Historiarum, i. 181, 186. Richard was appointed joint governor of Cyprus in 1191 and died later that year at the siege of Acre. See W. Dugdale, The Baronage of England (London, 1675), 627. 20 Acta of Henry II and Richard I, ed. J.C. Holt and R. Mortimer (List and Index Soc. special ser., 21, 1986), nos. 5, 37, 65, 80, 112, 115, 133, 198–9, 226, 288. 21 For lands valued at £30 in King’s Sutton in Northamptonshire, see Red Book, i. 655 (1154–55), 673 (1155–56). For two knights’ fees in Charlton and Henstridge in Somerset which were held as dower by Nicholaa after Gerard’s death, see Excerpta è Rotulis Finium in Turri Londinensi Asservatis. Henrico Tertio Rege. A. D. 1216–1272, ed. C. Roberts, 2 vols (Rec. Comm., 1835–36), i. 207. The royal inquiries of 1212 and 1235–36 (Book of Fees, i. 103, 449) also referred to half a knight’s fee in Middleton Stoney, but Gerard’s Oxfordshire property was assessed at one knight’s fee in all other surveys between 1190 and 1236. See, for example, Red Book, i. 70 (1190–91), 83 (1194–95), 100 (1196–97), 123 (1199–1200), 177 (1201–12); Book of Fees, i. 451, 455 (1235–36). For the properties in Berkshire, see Red Book, i. 93 (1194–95), 108 (1196–97), 127 (1199–1200), 143 (1201–12). There were also lands in Wiltshire, see Red Book, ii. 483 (1210–12).

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but it was Gerard’s alliance with Nicholaa which provided him with a concentrated landed base and exerted the greatest influence on his subsequent political career.22 Nicholaa’s Lincolnshire connections proved instrumental to his appointment as sheriff of this particular county in 1189 and 1190.23 This is not, of course, to underestimate Gerard’s own talents as an administrator. He also held the post of sheriff from 1199 to 1205 under King John,24 and served as a royal justice during the 1208–09 eyre on the circuit covering the eastern counties.25 Significantly, in spite of her legal subordination to her husband, Nicholaa was actively involved in the management of her estates during this marriage. The strongest image of her working in partnership with Gerard can be found in the chronicle of Richard of Devizes and concerns the events of 1191. During the king’s absence on crusade, Gerard de Camville became entangled in the violent dispute between the royal chancellor and John, count of Mortain. According to Richard of Devizes, while Gerard was with John, helping him to secure the castles of Nottingham and Tickhill, ‘his wife, Nicholaa, not thinking about anything womanly, defended the castle manfully’ (uxor eius Nicolaa nichil femineum cogitans, castellum viriliter custodiebat) against the chancellor’s forces.26 This choice of language to describe Nicholaa’s qualities as a military leader clearly implies that, although the role which she adopted was unusual for a woman, her performance in the author’s eyes was all the more praiseworthy because of her sex. It was a wise move by Gerard to place Nicholaa, the living focus for loyalties to the la Haye family, in charge of Lincoln castle at a time when their standing in the locality was of paramount importance. The pipe roll for 1191 reveals that mercenary soldiers were employed for forty days on the siege of Lincoln castle.27 It was no mean feat on Nicholaa’s part to withstand a siege for over a month. Nicholaa’s central role in these events was confirmed by King Richard’s response on his return to England in 1194. Both Gerard and Nicholaa were heavily penalised for their disloyalty. Gerard was deprived of both the castle and shrievalty of Lincoln for the remainder of the reign, and was compelled to pay 2000 marks for having the king’s good will and his lands. Meanwhile, Nicholaa herself proffered 300 marks to safeguard her daughter’s marriage.28 Nevertheless, it was only after Gerard’s death in January 1215 that Nicholaa really came to the fore in public life, securing possession of her inheritance as a femme sole, 22

Within Lincolnshire itself, Gerard’s father had only held four knights’ fees as a tenant of William de Roumare in 1166. See Red Book, i. 378. 23 R.R. Heiser, ‘Richard I and His Appointments to English Shrievalties’, EHR cxii (1997), 3. Gerard was removed from office in 1194. See List of Sheriffs, 78. 24 List of Sheriffs, 78. 25 The Earliest Lincolnshire Assize Rolls A.D. 1202–1209, ed. D.M. Stenton (Lincoln Record Soc., xxii, 1926), 280. 26 The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes of the Time of King Richard the First, ed. and trans. J.T. Appleby (London, 1963), 31. I have amended Appleby’s translation. The siege of Lincoln was only lifted through the archbishop of Rouen’s intervention; he persuaded John and the chancellor to negotiate a truce. See J.H. Ramsay, The Angevin Empire or the Three Reigns of Henry II, Richard I and John (London, 1903), 309–10. 27 PR 3 & 4 Richard I, 1. 28 PR 6 Richard I, 118–19. For the use of proffers as a form of political discipline by the Angevin kings, see Holt, The Northerners, 178–86. See also T.K. Keefe, ‘Proffers for Heirs and Heiresses in the Pipe Rolls: Some Observations on Indebtedness in the Years before the Magna Carta (1180–1212)’, Haskins Society Journal v (1993), 99–109.

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and assuming the office first of castellan of Lincoln and then, by royal appointment, of sheriff of Lincolnshire.29 The political situation in England holds the key to Nicholaa’s extraordinary career in her widowhood; it should be seen against the background of baronial opposition to King John, his acceptance then rejection of Magna Carta, the subsequent descent of the country into civil war in autumn 1215, and the landing of Prince Louis of France at Thanet in May 1216.30 Although modern scholars have largely neglected Nicholaa’s achievements, her contribution to the dramatic events of 1215–17 was noted by the ‘Barnwell’ chronicle, the Dunstable annals, the History of the Dukes of Normandy and Kings of England and the History of William the Marshal. She also featured regularly in the records of the chancery and exchequer, rendering account for her bailiwick and carrying out government orders.31 Nicholaa’s gender appears to have posed no obstacle to the duties that she was expected to perform as castellan. According to the ‘Barnwell’ chronicle, she successfully prevented Lincoln castle from falling into enemy hands in the summer of 1216 by purchasing a truce when Gilbert de Gant occupied the city.32 King John himself visited Lincoln twice that year, in February and September, and the hundred rolls, compiled sixty years later, recalled a meeting between John and Nicholaa that probably took place on one of these occasions and suggests that the king appreciated her talents. On the king’s arrival at Lincoln, Nicholaa offered John the castle keys and tendered her resignation as castellan, explaining ‘that she was a woman of great age and had endured many labours and anxieties in the said castle and was not able to endure such [burdens] any longer’ (quod esset mulier magne etatis et quod multos labores et anxietates in dicto castro sustinuerat et amplius talia non poterat sustinere).33 John had replied ‘sweetly’ (dulciter) to these protestations but instructed Nicholaa to keep the castle.34 It was both a measure of Nicholaa’s high esteem in John’s eyes and a sign of the desperate circumstances in which he found himself that on 18 October 1216, presumably just hours before his death, Nicholaa was appointed joint sheriff of Lincolnshire with Philip Marc.35 This appointment of a woman as a sheriff was, as far as I can tell, unprecedented and needs explanation. Although Round found a nearcontemporary case in Norfolk where a woman, Margaret de Caisneto, had apparently carried her late father’s claim to the shrievalty to her second husband, there is no evidence that she ever held or exercised the duties associated with this office in her own right.36 29

Nicholaa had been widowed by 15 January 1215 when her son, Richard, was placed in possession of his deceased father’s property at Middleton Stoney. See RLP, 127. 30 See D.A. Carpenter, The Minority of Henry III (London, 1990), 5–12. 31 Whereas Nicholaa received just three royal letters in 1215, for example, twenty-eight royal letters close and patent were either addressed or concerned matters relating directly to her between January 1216 and King John’s death. 32 Hill, Medieval Lincoln, 200; Holt, The Northerners, 138; Memoriale Fratris Walteri de Coventria, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols (RS, 1872–73), ii. 230. Sed et Aquilonares Lincolniam occupantes praesidium obsidere et expugnare conati sunt. Liberavit autem se ab hac obsidione matrona cui praesidii custodia commissa erat, Nicholaa nomine, pacta pro dominatione pecunia. 33 Rot. Hun., i. 309. 34 Ibid., i. 309. See also ibid., i. 315. 35 RLP, 199b. 36 Round, ‘The Early Sheriffs of Norfolk’, 491–2. For a discussion of the fiscal, judicial and military responsibilities of thirteenth century sheriffs, see W.A. Morris, The Medieval English Sheriff to 1300 (Manchester, 1927), chapters 6–9. See also above, 15.

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The reasoning behind King John’s apparent disregard for convention in Nicholaa’s case emerges from the political conditions in Lincolnshire in 1216. William Morris, commenting on the immediate aftermath of Magna Carta, observed, ‘To hold the counties at such a time required strong men’.37 Many of the men who might otherwise have been appointed sheriff under more peaceful conditions either were or recently had been in rebellion against the king. Thomas of Moulton, Gerard de Camville’s successor to the shrievalty in 1205, was one example, and Alexander of Pointon, who accounted as sheriff to the exchequer at Michaelmas 1213, was another.38 Simon of Kyme, a similarly experienced former royal administrator, also opposed John.39 Although Nicholaa’s son and heir, Richard, was still alive in 1216 and had attained his majority, his untimely death in early March 1217 suggests that he was already suffering from poor health which prevented his emergence as a viable candidate.40 Nicholaa might have been a woman but at least she possessed an association with the shrievalty of Lincolnshire through her second husband, Gerard, and had had an opportunity to observe the workings of the office at first hand. The combination of Nicholaa’s experience in managing and defending Lincoln castle, and the autonomy that she enjoyed as a widow, also made her a viable appointee. Hence her description by the ‘Barnwell’ chronicler as a matrona or matron, a term that reflected both Nicholaa’s standing and maturity.41 Furthermore, her position as heiress of the barony of Brattleby meant that she could provide important support for the loyalist cause through the influence that she exercised over her tenants; J.C. Holt has identified just one rebel, Adam of Buckminster, who held most or all of his lands from her.42 The precise nature of Nicholaa’s working relationship with her co-appointee, Philip Marc, who was already sheriff of Nottingham in his own right, is hard to establish. We have already seen how Philip managed to prevent another noblewoman, Matilda de Caux, from exercising the office of forester. In Nicholaa de la Haye, however, Philip met his match, and he disappeared from the records as joint sheriff just a short time after his appointment. On 7 January 1217, King Henry III’s minority government associated another man, Geoffrey de Serland, with Nicholaa but this time he was appointed ‘under our beloved lady Nicholaa de la Haye’ (sub dilecta nobis domina Nicholaa de Haya).43 From January 1217 until her dismissal in May 1217, Nicholaa firmly took control of affairs as sheriff of Lincolnshire. She issued letters of protection to the dean and canons of Lincoln cathedral,44 and supervised the transfer of hostages from one

37

Morris, Medieval Sheriff, 161. See List of Sheriffs, 78; Holt, The Northerners, 54, 59. 39 See Holt, The Northerners, 59; B. Golding, ‘Simon of Kyme: The Making of a Rebel’, Nottingham Medieval Studies xxvii (1983), 23–36. 40 RLC, i. 299. In any case, Richard had already forged a career in Leicestershire, Warwickshire and Oxfordshire, administering his inheritance from his father and the estates of his wife, Eustachia Basset. In 1200, Gerard de Camville had offered to pay the king the not inconsiderable sum of £1000 in order to secure the marriage of Eustachia, widow of Thomas de Verdun and daughter of Gilbert Basset, and her inheritance, for his son Richard. See PR 2 John, 87. 41 Memoriale Fratris Walteri de Coventria, ii. 230. 42 Holt, The Northerners, 44; Rot. de Oblatis et Finibus, 579; Book of Fees, i. 186 (1212). 43 CPR 1216–25, 20. For Geoffrey de Serland’s lands in Dorset and Lincolnshire, see Book of Fees, i. 91 (1212); Lincolnshire Records: Abstracts of Final Concords Temp. Richard I, John and Henry III, Vol. I, ed. W.O. Massingberd (London, 1896), no. 102. 44 Registrum Antiquissimum, ii. no. 337. 38

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loyalist stronghold to another.45 She also added to her personal wealth from the confiscated lands of local rebels. When the justices in eyre visited Lincolnshire in 1218, the former rebel, William of Huntingfield, sued Nicholaa for the recovery of chattels worth £273 8s 6d which she had seized from him.46 The final outcome of this case illustrates Nicholaa’s power and influence in the county; a compromise was reached between the parties whereby Nicholaa gave William just thirty silver marks in return for which he remitted and quitclaimed to her ‘all the right and claim that he had against her’.47 Nicholaa’s time in office also coincided with her successful resistance to further sieges when Gilbert de Gant, followed by Prince Louis, reoccupied the city and besieged the castle once more. The History of the Dukes of Normandy and Kings of England records that when Prince Louis reached Lincoln in February 1217, he found the castle still in Nicholaa’s hands and ‘she kept the guard very loyally’ (elle le garda moult loiaument).48 As before, the castle under Nicholaa’s command held out; Louis returned to London and Hugh, the castellan of Arras, took over from him in Lincoln.49 Nicholaa remained in charge of the loyalist garrison of Lincoln castle throughout the spring of 1217, while her attackers received reinforcements from the earl of Winchester and count of Perche. The Dunstable annalist related how this force joined with that of the other barons, besieging the castle, ‘in which a noble woman, by the name of Nicola, manfully defended herself’ (in quo nobilis mulier, Nicola nomine, viriliter se defendit).50 The ‘Barnwell’ chronicler was similarly filled with admiration for Nicholaa and also praised her for acting ‘manfully’ (viriliter).51 It was in response to the increasingly difficult circumstances in which Nicholaa found herself at Lincoln that William Marshal issued a summons to the loyalists to gather in force at Newark and from there they proceeded to Lincoln’s relief. The battle of Lincoln on 20 May 1217 resulted in a decisive loyalist victory that helped to seal the fate of Prince Louis’s ambitions in England.52 The role that Nicholaa herself played during this engagement was recorded in another source, the History of William the Marshal.53 This account strongly suggests that Nicholaa bore the ultimate responsibility for her garrison’s welfare, while her deputy, Geoffrey de Serland, met the physical demands placed on them by their predicament. According to the History, for example, it was Geoffrey who, before the battle of Lincoln, left the safety of the castle and showed the Marshal’s nephew a secret entrance through 45

CPR 1216–25, 23–4. Rolls of the Justices in Eyre Being the Rolls of Pleas and Assizes for Lincolnshire 1218–9 and Worcestershire 1221, ed. and trans. D.M. Stenton (Selden Soc., liii, 1934), nos. 467, 495. Nicholaa had received a temporary grant of all of William of Huntingfield’s lands in her bailiwick, William of Huntingfield’s castle of Frampton, and later all of William of Huntingfield’s lands in the county of Lincoln. See RLC, i. 249; RLP, 167; RLC, i. 272. 47 Rolls of the Justices in Eyre, no. 495. 48 Histoire des Ducs de Normandie et des Rois D’Angleterre, ed. F. Michel (La Société de L’Histoire de France, 1840), 182; K. Norgate, The Minority of Henry III (London, 1912), 20. 49 Histoire des Ducs, 182; Hill, Medieval Lincoln, 201. 50 Ann. Mon., iii. 49. 51 Memoriale Fratris Walteri de Coventria, ii. 237. 52 Carpenter, The Minority, 36–41. 53 The History’s account of the battle is discussed in T.F. Tout, ‘The Fair of Lincoln and the Histoire de Guillaume Le Maréchal’, The Collected Papers of Thomas Frederick Tout, 3 vols (Manchester, 1934), ii. 191–220. 46

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which it was possible to pass unchallenged.54 It was also Geoffrey who met the bishop of Winchester, amid the hail of mangonels, when the bishop brought news and comfort to Nicholaa who was in the tower.55 Although the masculine courage exhibited by Geoffrey de Serland and the bishop of Winchester served the History’s chivalric purpose well, the History’s portrayal of Nicholaa’s supervisory role rings true; she was too valuable to the loyalist cause to be exposed to the risk of capture in fighting. The author’s approval of Nicholaa’s conduct is conveyed in his description of her as ‘the good dame’ (la boene dame), ‘whom God preserve both in body and in soul’ (Que Dex gard en cors e [en] ame).56 In spite of Nicholaa’s impressive track record, she was removed from office as sheriff of Lincolnshire and replaced by Henry III’s uncle, the earl of Salisbury, just four days after the battle of Lincoln, on 24 May 1217.57 Not only did she lose custody of the county and city of Lincoln but Salisbury also seized the castle itself. If anything, Nicholaa’s response to this situation demonstrates her sheer force of character; she travelled to the king’s court in London to recover her right, reminding those present of her faithful service not only to King John but also to his son. These tactics paid off and Salisbury was ordered to restore the castle, city and county to her care in October 1217.58 Nonetheless, Nicholaa’s victory was only short-lived; on 4 December 1217, she was again ordered to hand over the county to Salisbury, but the castle and city of Lincoln remained in her hands.59 Nicholaa’s dismissal as sheriff had much to do with Salisbury’s personal ambitions and is best understood within the context of a family dispute.60 On his death early in 1217, Nicholaa’s son, Richard, was survived by a young daughter, Idonea, who stood to inherit not only the Camville family lands but also, eventually, her grandmother’s barony. Idonea’s marriage to Salisbury’s eldest son had been arranged in 1216 before her father’s death,61 and Salisbury had since been granted custody of Idonea’s Camville lands.62 If only Nicholaa would die, her lands and offices might fall to Salisbury as well. Nicholaa’s struggle with Salisbury reached crisis point in the summer of 1219. In mid-August, news reached the minority government that Salisbury was attacking Lincoln castle. The gravity of the situation was demonstrated when a force under the justiciar Hubert de Burgh, Peter des Roches and Falkes de Bréauté raced from Northampton to Nicholaa’s aid. On 23 August, a letter patent was sent to Salisbury, ordering him to maintain, protect and defend the lands and men ‘of our beloved and 54

Histoire de Guillaume Le Maréchal, ed. P. Meyer, 3 vols (La Société de L’Histoire de France, 1891–1901), ii. 228, lines 16423–32. 55 Ibid., ii. 230, lines 16467–98. 56 Ibid., ii. 230, lines 16491–2; P. Coss, The Lady in Medieval England 1000–1500 (Stroud, 1998), 33. Not all chronicles applauded Nicholaa de la Haye’s role in the war; the political sympathies of the authors influenced how she was seen. From a French perspective, the chronicle of anonymous of Béthune referred to her as ‘a very cunning, bad-hearted and vigorous old woman’ (molt engigneuse et mal querans et vighereuse vielle). Quoted in C. Petit-Dutaillis, Étude sur la Vie et le Règne de Louis VIII (1187–1226) (Paris, 1894), 148; Coss, The Lady, 33. 57 CPR 1216–25, 65. 58 Ibid., 117–18. 59 Ibid., 130. 60 See Carpenter, The Minority, 66–7. 61 RLC, i. 265; S.L. Waugh, The Lordship of England: Royal Wardships and Marriages in English Society and Politics 1217–1327 (Princeton, 1988), 211. 62 RLC, i. 299, 337.

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faithful Nicholaa de Haya’.63 The state of affairs in Lincoln was sufficiently serious for Falkes de Bréauté to be assigned ‘in the assistance and defence of Lincoln castle … for the conservation of the peace of the kingdom of England’ (in adjutorium et defensionem castri Lincolnie … ad pacem regni Anglie conservandam).64 Yet this was not the end of the matter. In January 1220, Falkes wrote to Hubert de Burgh, informing him that messengers from Nicholaa had come before the king at Northampton; this time, Salisbury had been trying to gain admission to Lincoln castle by offering his son and nephew as hostages.65 In her dispute with the earl of Salisbury over Lincoln castle, Nicholaa eventually emerged victorious,66 relinquishing control of the castle for the final time in June 1226, three months after Salisbury’s death.67 Although she had been unable to retain custody of the county as well, Nicholaa’s brief time as sheriff established an important precedent. Indeed, it is ironic that Salisbury, who had struggled for so long with Nicholaa, was ultimately succeeded as sheriff of Wiltshire by Ela, his wife. The circumstances surrounding Ela’s appointment to this office in 1227–28 and her subsequent reappointment in 1231–37 offer useful points of comparison with Nicholaa de la Haye’s career. Ela, countess of Salisbury Like Nicholaa de la Haye, Ela was an important heiress within the county in which she was subsequently elevated to public office. Whereas Nicholaa was merely the heiress to a barony, however, Ela was the heiress to an earldom. Ela’s grandfather, Patrick, constable of Salisbury, had received the earldom of Wiltshire in c. 1143, and had later served as sheriff of the county under King Henry II.68 Ela’s father, William fitz Patrick, who was styled earl of Salisbury, had also secured appointment as sheriff of Wiltshire in 1189–90 and 1191–96.69 It was after William fitz Patrick’s death

63

CPR 1216–25, 200–1; Carpenter, The Minority, 159. CPR 1216–25, 201. 65 Royal and Other Historical Letters Illustrative of the Reign of Henry III, ed. W.W. Shirley, 2 vols (RS, 1862), i. no. lxi. 66 Her guardianship was briefly interrupted once more by a short-lived grant to Stephen of Segrave in 1223. The patent rolls suggest that Stephen of Segrave, Salisbury’s successor as sheriff of Lincolnshire, had been awarded custody of the castle and that the castle had then been placed in the bishop of Lincoln’s hands following Henry III’s resumption of his castles and shrievalties on 30 December 1223. See CPR 1216–25, 419; Carpenter, The Minority, 274–5. On 23 June 1224, however, the king informed the bishop that he had entrusted the custody of Lincoln castle to Lady Nicholaa during his pleasure and instructed the bishop to hand over the castle to her. See CPR 1216–25, 446. 67 Osbert Giffard was appointed to replace Nicholaa. See CPR 1225–32, 41. Nicholaa spent the remaining four years of her life in full possession of her landed inheritance. The pipe roll for Michaelmas 1230 recorded that she owed forty-eight marks from her sixteen fees in Lincolnshire for the scutage relating to Henry III’s first crossing to Brittany. See PR 14 Hen. III, 309. Nicholaa died at her manor of Swaton in 1230. See Rot. Hun., i. 309. 68 See Sanders, English Baronies, 112. For Patrick as sheriff, see Red Book, ii. 649, 664–5; List of Sheriffs, 152. As a tenant-in-chief in 1166, Patrick had returned forty knights’ fees enfeoffed before 1135, two and three-fifths enfeoffed before that date from the domain, as well as another fifteen knights’ fees enfeoffed before 1135 and one enfeoffed after that date from his mother’s lands. See Red Book, i. 239–41. Scutage was charged on forty knights’ fees in the mid-thirteenth century. See Book of Fees, i. 421 (1235–36). 69 List of Sheriffs, 152. For a brief summary of William fitz Patrick’s life and career, see G.E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage of England, ed. V. Gibbs and others, 13 vols (1912–59), xi. 377–9. He also served as sheriff of Dorset and Somerset in 1194. See List of Sheriffs, 122. 64

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in 1196 that King Richard I granted the custody and marriage of his nine-year-old daughter and heiress, Ela, together with the earldom, to William (I) Longespée, the illegitimate son of Henry II.70 Just as Nicholaa de la Haye’s inherited wealth and connections had exerted a heavy influence on her husband’s career, so did Ela’s earldom on that of her husband. William (I) Longespée served as sheriff of Wiltshire, like his grandfather-in-law and father-in-law before him, for the greater part of King John’s reign and King Henry III’s minority; his final period in office lasted from 1213 until his death in 1226.71 Admittedly his loyal service to the crown was interrupted by his defection to the side of the French Prince Louis in 1216, an act which one French chronicler claimed was inspired by King John’s attempted seduction of Ela.72 Nevertheless, by March 1217, Salisbury had returned to allegiance,73 and was subsequently to play a leading role in royal government during the 1220s, adding to his wealth and reaping a full range of material rewards. In England, the earl of Salisbury’s personal ambitions and territorial concerns, as Nicholaa de la Haye found to her cost, extended right across the country. A letter patent of 1225, for example, referred to lands, wards and escheats that Salisbury had acquired by marriage or royal grant in eighteen counties, including Yorkshire and Northumberland.74 Although the responsibilities that Ela assumed as his wife remain largely hidden from view, Salisbury’s wide-ranging interests and his regular employment in royal service, especially during the last five years of his life, might well have allowed her to become active in the daily management of her Wiltshire estates. Her personal importance within Wiltshire was demonstrated at the foundation of the new cathedral at Salisbury in 1220 when the papal legate, Pandulf, laid one of the foundation stones on her behalf and another on behalf of her husband.75 When her husband was serving with the king’s brother, Richard of Cornwall, on the Gascon expedition of 1225,76 Ela’s personal intervention secured the postponement of a case of mort d’ancestor before the royal justices in Wiltshire for some tenants.77 The strength of Ela’s character was also demonstrated in her husband’s absence when she successfully rejected an unwelcome marriage proposal from Hubert de Burgh’s nephew, Raymond, following false rumours of Salisbury’s death by drowning.78 It is only as a widow that Ela, like Nicholaa, really becomes visible in the sources, managing her estates on her own account. On 19 March 1226, just twelve days after her husband’s death at Salisbury castle, Ela performed homage to the king for the lands from her inheritance.79 Four days later, she resigned custody of the royal 70

Chronica Magistri Rogeri de Houedene, ed. W. Stubbs, 4 vols (RS, 1868–71), iv. 13; GEC, xi. 379. List of Sheriffs, 152. Ela’s inheritance also included thirteen knights’ fees in Somerset. See Book of Fees, i. 427, 429 (1235–36). William (I) Longespée also served as sheriff of Somerset in 1217. See List of Sheriffs, 122; Carpenter, The Minority, 31. 72 According to William le Breton, King John had lost the earl of Salisbury’s support when he attempted to seduce Ela, while Salisbury was in captivity overseas in the wake of the disastrous battle of Bouvines in 1214. See Carpenter, The Minority, 6, 30. 73 Ibid., 27. 74 CPR 1216–25, 550. 75 Ann. Mon., i. 65–6 (‘Annales de Theokesberia’). 76 For Salisbury’s leading role in the Gascon campaign, see Carpenter, The Minority, 376–8. 77 CPR 1216–25, 587. 78 Flores Historiarum, ii. 294–5. 79 RLC, ii. 103; Women of the English Nobility and Gentry 1066–1500, ed. and trans. J.C. Ward (Manchester, 1995), no. 86. These letters patent referred to lands in Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire, Berkshire and Surrey. 71

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castle of Salisbury to Simon of Hale, an experienced royal servant, who also now received the keeping of the county of Wiltshire, with the backing of Hubert de Burgh and his supporters, the bishops of Bath and Salisbury.80 It is difficult to establish whether Simon enjoyed any connections with Wiltshire before this; he had, however, served as both under-sheriff and sheriff of Yorkshire during the early 1220s, and held lands in Lincolnshire.81 It is possible that Ela had not yet offered herself as a candidate for office because she was faced with a serious legal dispute in the aftermath of Salisbury’s death. The late earl’s rival, Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford, was keen to settle a longstanding score. By Easter 1226, Hereford had already brought an action against Ela over the castle and honour of Trowbridge in Wiltshire which King John had unjustly seized from his family and bestowed on the earl of Salisbury.82 The suit was eventually settled by compromise in 1230, whereby the two parties divided the honour between them.83 If Ela had been overlooked for office in the spring of 1226, the situation had changed dramatically by the following year. On 22 January 1227, the king transferred Salisbury castle, together with the shrievalty of Wiltshire, to the widowed countess during his pleasure.84 As the leading tenant-in-chief in the county whose husband had provided such crucial, albeit sometimes controversial, support for Henry III’s government, Ela emerged as a strong candidate for office in spite of her sex. Evidence for Ela’s high standing in royal favour is provided by the king’s regular gifts of venison to her throughout the late 1220s,85 including one in September 1227 to celebrate the forthcoming nuptials of Mary, a daughter of the late earl.86 The grant awarding Ela custody of Wiltshire was made, like that to Simon of Hale, in the presence of Hubert de Burgh and the bishops of Bath and Salisbury, suggesting that her appointment apparently met with their approval. This is rather surprising in view of the affront that she had suffered at the hands of de Burgh’s nephew in 1225. In so far as more recent events were concerned, Ela might well have been prepared to let bygones be bygones. We should not forget that Ela’s dead husband and Hubert de Burgh had previously enjoyed a close political alliance throughout the early 1220s.87 More cordial relations between Ela and de Burgh are suggested by a charter that she issued early in her widowhood, in which she declared her intention to found a nunnery at Lacock in Wiltshire, and which de Burgh witnessed.88 Ela’s Another letter patent was issued in May 1226, informing the keeper of the honour of Plympton (Devon) that Ela should also have full seisin of the lands pertaining to her inheritance in Plympton. See RLC, ii. 111b. For Ela in possession of lands in Dorset, Suffolk, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Somerset, see also Book of Fees, i. 378, 391 (1226–28), 420, 421, 427, 429, 447 (1235–36), ii. 742 (1242–43). For the earl’s final illness and death, see Flores Historiarum, ii. 297–8. 80 CPR 1225–32, 25. For the influence of the bishops of Bath and Salisbury in de Burgh’s regime, see N. Vincent, Peter des Roches: An Alien in English Politics 1205–38 (Cambridge, 1996), 226. 81 Book of Fees, ii. 1033, 1068, 1074, 1086, 1089; as sheriff of Yorks, 1439; List of Sheriffs, 161. 82 CRR, xii, no. 2646. For John’s arbitrary disseisin and the lengthy dispute over Trowbridge, see J.C. Holt, Magna Carta (Cambridge, 2nd edn, 1992), 166, 170–1, 206–7, 360, 495; Carpenter, The Minority, 30, 195. 83 CRR, xiv, no. 751. 84 CPR 1225–32, 108–9. 85 RLC, ii. 43, 200; CR 1227–31, 556; CR 1231–34, 99, 266, 497. 86 RLC, ii. 200. 87 Carpenter, The Minority, 204, 244, 250, 271–4, 317, 319, 325, 332–3, 345, 349, 365, 377, 399. 88 Lacock Abbey Charters, ed. K.H. Rogers (Wiltshire Record Soc., 34, 1979), no. 1.

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appointment might also have arisen out of the crown’s concern that Wiltshire should remain firmly in loyalist hands. Other leading local landholders in 1227 included the earl of Hereford, with whom Ela was in dispute, and the earl of Pembroke.89 Significantly, both earls were growing increasingly dissatisfied with de Burgh’s regime; later that year, they formed an alliance with the earls of Chester, Cornwall, Derby, Gloucester, Warenne and Warwick, and wrote to the king, attacking the justiciar and raising the spectre of civil war.90 Ela retained possession of the shrievalty of Wiltshire until 1228 when John of Monmouth was appointed in her place.91 The circumstances surrounding Ela’s removal from office on this occasion remain obscure, although legal records reveal that she was possibly suffering from ill health in the spring of that year.92 Unlike Simon of Hale, whom Ela had replaced in 1227, John of Monmouth was a fellow Wiltshire landholder.93 He also possessed estates in Herefordshire,94 and played a leading role in the affairs of the Welsh Marches.95 Indeed his employment in royal service in Wales during the crisis of 1230–3196 might help to explain the king’s willingness to reconsider Ela as a candidate for the shrievalty of Wiltshire. On 16 April 1231, Ela secured custody of the county of Wiltshire and of the castle of Salisbury for a second time in return for a fine of 200 marks.97 The king ensured that Monmouth was amply compensated for his losses in May when he received the castle of Chepstow (Monmouthshire), and in the following October when he received custody of the castle and county of Hereford.98 The grant of office that Ela received in 1231 differed from that in 1227 in being made for the term of her life, rather than simply during the king’s pleasure.99 This represented a substantial concession on the part of the crown, and provides evidence of her high personal standing and prestige. Life-grants were usually awarded to leading curiales, such as Ralph fitz Nicholas, the king’s senior steward, and Stephen of Seagrave, a senior royal justice.100 As Ela’s grandfather, father and husband had all enjoyed custody of Wiltshire in the past, however, there was a distinct danger that the appointment of a widowed heiress might be seen as recognition of hereditary principle. To counter this, and safeguard the crown’s interests in the long term, Henry III clearly laid down in the grant of April 1231 that neither the countess nor her heirs possessed any legal claim to the castle and the county by hereditary right (nichil juris hereditarii poterit ipsa comitissa vel heredes sui vendicare in custodia

89

For the lands of these earls and their successors in this county, see, for example, Book of Fees, i. 421–2 (1235–36), ii. 722–3, 724–5, 744–5 (1242–43). 90 Vincent, Peter des Roches, 265–6. 91 List of Sheriffs, 152. 92 CRR, xiii, no. 566. 93 See Book of Fees, i. 421–2 (1235–36), ii. 716, 718, 720, 734–5, 747 (1242–43). 94 See, for example, ibid., ii. 800, 808, 809n., 815 (1242–43). 95 CPR 1225–32, 270, 273, 353, 412. 96 Ibid., 427, 428, 435, 453; CR 1227–31, 586. 97 CPR 1225–32, 431. 98 Ibid., 435; CR 1227–31, 601. 99 It should be noted, however, that two letters patent were issued to Ela on 16 April 1231. The first simply granted Ela the custody of the county of Wiltshire during the king’s pleasure, but the second expressly granted Ela both the castle of Salisbury and the county of Wiltshire ‘for her whole life’ (tota vita sua). See CPR 1225–32, 431. 100 D.A. Carpenter, ‘The decline of the curial sheriff in England 1194–1258’, EHR xci (1976), 11–13.

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predictorum comitatus et castri predicti).101 Furthermore, the countess was even required to issue a charter to this effect.102 The hereditary principle had become a more pressing issue in 1231 because Ela’s son and heir, William (II) Longespée, was fast approaching his majority.103 From the crown’s point of view, and perhaps even from Ela’s, a grant of office for life offered one way of countering any future ambitions that her son might entertain towards the county of Wiltshire, and also towards Ela’s lands during her lifetime. As soon as he came of age in 1233, William (II) tried to claim investiture of his mother’s earldom of Salisbury, but was refused it by the king.104 Subsequent events were also to prove that the precautions taken by the king to emphasise the non-hereditary nature of Ela’s shrievalty in 1231 had been extremely judicious. In 1237–38, after Ela had surrendered control of the county for the final time, William (II) Longespée brought a legal case against the crown, whereby he claimed the custody of the castle of Salisbury and county of Wiltshire in fee as his right by inheritance through his mother and her ancestors.105 The king replied by pointing out that an inquisition by jury in his father’s reign had established that Ela had not enjoyed possession of the castle and county in fee.106 Ela’s appointment in 1231 also came under scrutiny and, of course, showed that Ela had received the castle and county in her widowhood only by royal grant.107 Even though Ela was sheriff of Wiltshire for a number of years, the nature and extent of the responsibilities that she fulfilled as sheriff are much more difficult to trace than those of Nicholaa de la Haye. It is important to remember that she held office during a time of relative domestic peace, and was not personally involved in any dramatic military confrontations which might have attracted the attention of contemporary chroniclers.108 The exchequer records do, however, reveal that Ela, like her husband before her, left most of the duties associated with her office to male under-sheriffs.109 The manner in which she maintained fairly close supervision over their activities is suggested by her frequent residence in the county.110 It is also indicated by the fact that John Dacus (or Le Daneis), a Wiltshire knight who appeared at the exchequer on Ela’s behalf at Michaelmas 1227, Michaelmas 1231 and

101

CPR 1225–32, 431. Ibid., 431. See also Bracton’s Note Book, ed. F.W. Maitland, 3 vols (London, 1887), iii. no. 1235; Women of the English Nobility and Gentry, no. 121. 103 He had received custody of lands from his wife’s inheritance, then in Ela’s custody, in March 1230. See CR 1227–31, 307. 104 W.L. Bowles and J.G. Nichols, Annals and Antiquities of Lacock Abbey (London, 1835), 167–8; Sanders, English Baronies, 112. 105 The record of the case began: Willelmus Lungespeye peciit uersus dom. regem custodiam castri Sarisbirie et comitatus Wiltescire in feodo et ut illam que ei descendit hereditarie ab antecessoribus suis scilicet a Comite Patricio et Willelmo filio suo et de Ela filia ipsius Willelmi matre ipsius Willemi Lungespeye. … See Bracton’s Note Book, iii. no. 1235; Women of the English Nobility and Gentry, no. 121. 106 Bracton’s Note Book, iii. no. 1235; Women of the English Nobility, no. 121. 107 Bracton’s Note Book, iii. no. 1235; Women of the English Nobility, no. 121. This did not discourage him from pursuing his claim in the 1240s. See CPR 1232–47, 331–2. 108 There is no evidence, for example, that Ela was drawn into Richard Marshal’s war in 1233–34. 109 See List of Sheriffs, 152. 110 The royal gifts of deer, timber and building materials that Ela received from the king between 1231 and 1236 either came from and/or were directed towards properties in Wiltshire. See CR 1227–31, 478, 556; CR 1231–34, 99, 162, 216, 266, 497; CR 1234–37, 29, 127, 232, 243, 245. For Ela at Salisbury castle, see CR 1231–34, 249. 102

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Michaelmas 1234,111 possessed strong ties of personal service with the countess and also served as her estate steward.112 Ela only really played a more visible, direct role in local government towards the end of her time in office. In 1235–36, the collectors of the king’s aid in Wiltshire stored the money that they collected in Salisbury castle, and allocated £42 0s 4d to the countess.113 Most importantly, the pipe rolls reveal that Ela accounted at the exchequer in person for the first time at Michaelmas 1236.114 When Ela resigned her custody of the county in the winter of 1236–37, it was in order to realise a long-term personal ambition to enter her religious foundation at Lacock.115 Negotiations to this effect between Ela and her son had been under way since February 1236 when an agreement was drafted between them, whereby William (II) guaranteed Ela’s gifts to Lacock abbey, while Ela undertook to surrender all her lands, rents and rights to him on All Saints Day (1 November).116 The settlement was finalised on 22 July 1236 at Lacock when Ela reiterated her promise to surrender her lands and William clarified his obligations.117 Conclusion In conclusion, traditions of lordship and status transcended gender in determining the appointments of Lady Nicholaa de la Haye and Ela, countess of Salisbury, as sheriffs. Both women successfully took advantage of their positions as noble heiresses whose grandfathers, fathers and husbands had enjoyed impressive records in royal service in the localities, notably as castellans or sheriffs, to forge their own public careers. The independent legal standing that Nicholaa and Ela enjoyed as widows who were, in theory at least, free from male tutelage, and their positions as tenantsin-chief, were also important considerations behind their elevation to office. Nevertheless, it was undoubtedly the powerful personalities that these women possessed which ultimately helped them to rise to prominence during the difficult years of King Henry III’s minority and the early years of his adult rule.

111

List of Sheriffs, 152. See also Memoranda Rolls 16–17 Henry III preserved in the Public Record Office, ed. R.A. Brown (London, 1991), no. 112; CRR, xv, no. 1403. 112 The Hungerford Cartulary: A Calendar of the Earl of Radnor’s Cartulary of the Hungerford Family, ed. J.L. Kirby (Wiltshire Record Soc., 49, 1994 for 1993), no. 462. See also Lacock Abbey Charters, nos. 6–7; Women of the English Nobility and Gentry 1066–1500, no. 99. He continued in her son’s service, following Ela’s entry to Lacock. See Lacock Abbey Charters, nos. 17, 18A, 262. 113 Book of Fees, i. 421, 424. In 1235, for example, she became entangled in a complicated jurisdictional dispute with the abbess of Romsey over which pleas pertained to the shrievalty of Wiltshire and which pertained to the hundred of Whorwellsdown. See CRR, xv, no. 1070. 114 E 372/81, m.12d; List of Sheriffs, 152. 115 A new sheriff was appointed on 3 January 1237. See CPR 1232–47, 172. For Ela’s foundation of an abbey at Lacock, see Lacock Abbey Charters, no. 1; CPR 1225–32, 328; Bowles, Annals and Antiquities of Lacock Abbey, 171; S. Thompson, Women Religious: The Founding of English Nunneries after the Norman Conquest (Oxford, first publ. 1991, repr. 1996), 170–1, 224, 244. 116 Lacock Abbey Charters, no. 9. See also ibid., nos. 10–11. 117 Ibid., no. 12. For a slightly different interpretation of this document, see Thompson, Women Religious, 170. See also Lacock Abbey Charters, nos. 13–18A. Ela had taken the veil at Lacock by spring 1238 and continued to receive gifts from the king. See CR 1237–42, 39, 41, 94.

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King and Lord: The Monarch and his Demesne Tenants in Central Nottinghamshire, 1163–1363 David Crook

In the thirteenth century the kings of England were well on the way to becoming the executive heads of what later came to be known as the nation state, ruling the kingdom with the advice of their leading men, employing a growing number of administrators and judges, and levying national taxes to finance their wars. However, although their own demesne was by the late twelfth century much reduced in extent from the time of the Domesday survey,1 the number and importance of the manors which were part of it for at least a significant proportion of the thirteenth century was still significant. The king was an important manorial lord in the same way as his barons, knights and esquires were lords of their own manors. He could only expect to be a successful ruler if he was adept at managing the expectations of those of his subjects who were of political or military importance, or whose service to him in other ways demanded reward, and his demesne provided him with one of the main means of doing this. For the same reasons, he also needed to maintain and increase his income, not only by taxing his subjects but also by exploiting his demesne, in a period when it was coming to be acknowledged as having a status marking it out from the rest of the realm, and over which the king had relatively unbridled rights. As R.F. Hoyt pointed out, more effective exploitation of the royal demesne began under Henry II, and under John and during the minority of Henry III it ‘emerged for the first time as a crown endowment specially subject to unhampered royal will and annexed to the office, rather than merely belonging to and disposable by the person of the king’.2 I want to explore, in a small geographical area, some of the tensions between the king’s role as lord to the tenants of his manors, his need to use all the resources at his disposal to be a successful ruler, and the aspirations of some of his own tenants to manage their own affairs. There are in the thirteenth century few local sources bearing on these problems, and very little evidence which gives a detailed insight into the attitudes and opinions of the king’s tenants themselves. These matters have to be approached mainly through the central government’s own archives held in The National Archives, despite the difficulties of doing so through those sources.

1

J. Green, ‘William Rufus, Henry I and the Royal Demesne’, History new ser., lxiv (1979), 337–52; R.S. Hoyt, The Royal Demesne in English Constitutional History, 1066–1272 (Ithaca, NY, 1950), 84–91. 2 Ibid., 94–107, 143.

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We need to ask what they reveal about the reactions of the tenants to what the king did, and what those actions imply about their attitude to his lordship. In the thirteenth century royal manors were most frequently administered by the sheriff of the county in which they lay, and their bailiffs, who accounted for their issues at the exchequer, although there was a growing tendency for their tenants to account for their own farms.3 The only individual royal manor whose relations with the crown have been explored in detail so far is Havering in Essex, by Marjorie McIntosh.4 For Havering there are more local sources than usual, and the manor itself was atypical because of its relatively close proximity to the royal courts at Westminster, and its economic role as a supplier of goods and services to the city of London through the market at Romford. There is also important work by Hoyt and E.M. Hallam on other royal demesne manors during the thirteenth century, and there are outline histories of crown manors like Basingstoke in Hampshire and Godmanchester in Huntingdonshire, as well as the details provided by the Victoria County History for some counties.5 This study is centred on the history of some places in central Nottinghamshire, in particular the soke of Mansfield, the most important of the five Anglo-Saxon sokes of Domesday, which stretched across the county from the Derbyshire border in the west to the Trent in the east.6 Most of the places in the soke in 1086 had probably already been royal estates for some time prior to the Domesday survey, and many were to remain so for most of the period until the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when they became, against the expressed wish of some of their inhabitants, parts of major aristocratic estates.7 In the Anglo-Norman period there was a presumption that the monarch would pay at least an occasional visit to the town of Mansfield, the main settlement in the area and the centre of the soke, because Henry I granted a sergeanty tenancy at nearby Cuckney for the service of ‘shoeing the king’s palfrey when he lay at Mansfield’, and in the 1130 pipe roll there is substantial expenditure on ‘making the king’s chamber at Mansfield’.8 However, thirteenth century England was too sophisticated and too large a kingdom to be governed by a ruler making periodic visits to his main estates to hold court and make dispositions of lands. An instructive contrast in the first half of the thirteenth century is with the Welsh principality of Gwynedd, where Llewelyn ap Iorworth continued, as far as we can tell, to stay not only in his castles and favoured monastic houses, of relatively recent foundation, but also visited his demesne estates in the traditional fashion of Welsh rulers, staying to hold a llys or court, dealing with local administration and legal disputes. For these visits, he must

3

On shire administration, H.M. Cam, The Hundred and the Hundred Rolls (London, 1930), remains essential. 4 M.K. McIntosh, Autonomy and Community: The Royal Manor of Havering, 1200–1500 (Cambridge, 1986), part i; and her ‘The privileged villeins of the English ancient demesne’, Viator vii (1976), 295–328. 5 Hoyt, Royal Demesne; E.M. Hallam, Domesday Book through Nine Centuries (London, 1986), chapter iv; F.J. Baigent and J.E. Millard, A History of the Ancient Town and Manor of Basingstoke (Basingstoke, 1889); J.A. Raftis, A Small Town in Medieval England: Godmanchester 1278–1400 (Toronto, 1982). 6 Much of the Mansfield material has been collected and published in D. Crook, ‘The community of Mansfield from Domesday Book to the reign of Edward III’, part i, TTS lxxxviii (1984), 14–38; and part ii, in ibid., lxxxix (1985), 16–29. 7 A.C. Wood, ‘A petition relating to the manor of Mansfield’, TTS xlii (1938), 70–84. 8 Book of Fees, i. 150; PR 31 Henry I (London, 1833), 10.

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have used houses at his manors, such as the recently discovered llys at Rhosyr in south-west Anglesey (Ynys Mon), one of five estates held on the island by the princes of the house of Aberffraw (Aberffro).9 Although John and Henry III still had a court of law which accompanied them when they travelled, the court coram rege, its business was small and restricted in scope, if not in importance, compared with the bench, established at Westminster by the 1190s and legally fixed there by Magna Carta, and the eyres held in county towns. Particular rulers could take a special interest in the development of areas where they retained extensive estates of their own which could be used as the basis of patronage. In the 1160s Henry II appeared to take such an interest in developing his demesne in central Nottinghamshire. The area was north of the county town of Nottingham and south of the main body of lands of the honour of Tickhill, itself permanently in royal hands from the early twelfth century, which dominated the north of the county. Nottingham’s existing importance before the Norman Conquest had been confirmed by the creation of a castle and a French borough there by the Conqueror, and it was visited reasonably often by the Anglo-Norman rulers and their Plantagenet successors. The area immediately to the north was of much less obvious importance. Then, in 1163–64 Henry founded the Augustinian priory of Newstead a few miles to the south of Mansfield. In 1164–65 he established a royal residence and later, in 1176–80, a park, at Clipstone, to the north-east of the town. Clipstone was not part of the royal demesne in 1086 but had become so in the reign of Henry I.10 Both these buildings, and particularly Clipstone, became places of resort for some of the monarchs in the following two centuries, at the expense of Mansfield itself, which probably had no manor house; it certainly did not have one in the fifteenth century.11 The creation at Clipstone of an ‘out-of-town’ palace ended the need ever to stay at the manor itself when passing through the area, while the priory at Newstead was also able occasionally to provide accommodation for the monarch.12 The creation of the house and park at Clipstone roughly coincided with the separation of neighbouring Edwinstowe from the Mansfield soke, after which it became important in its own right, and soon had its own manor court rolls.13 The royal manor in the village of Warsop, lying to the north-east of Clipstone park and divided into three lordships,14 also provided accommodation occasionally. The main attraction of the area to the kings was not the existence of major demesne manors but the royal forest, which by 1227 was much reduced in size and came to be more firmly centred on the Newstead-Mansfield-Clipstone-Edwinstowe-Warsop

9

For an act of Llewelyn there, see K.L. Maund, Handlist of the Acts of Native Welsh Rulers, 1132–1283 (Cardiff, 1996), no. 140. See also A.D. Carr, Medieval Anglesey (Llangefni, 1982), 20; R.R. Davies, Conquest, Coexistence and Change: Wales, 1063–1415 (Oxford, 1987), 253–62. 10 The History of the King’s Works, II, The Middle Ages, ed. H.M. Colvin, 2 vols (London, 1963), 918–21. 11 By the early fourteenth century, Mansfield also contained a rectory manor created as the result of the grant of the parish church to the bishop of Lincoln by William Rufus in 1093: Regesta Regum AngloNormannorum, 1066–1154. Volume I; Regesta Willelmi Conquestoris et Willelmi Rufi, 1066–1100, ed. H.W.C. Davis (Oxford, 1913), no. 337. 12 In September 1290 Edward I stayed there for about four days: Itinerary of Edward I, i. (List and Index Soc., 103), 130. 13 It accounted separately for the aid of 1169, and was farmed separately by 1194: PR 15 Henry II, 63–4; PR 6 Richard I, 95; Crook, ‘The community of Mansfield’, i. 14–15, 34. 14 The Sherwood Forest Book, ed. H.E. Boulton (Thoroton Soc. Record Ser., xxiii, 1965 for 1964), 58–9.

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area.15 Its name changed from ‘Nottingham forest’ to ‘Sherwood forest’ in the pipe roll accounts from 1177. The king visited Nottinghamshire in person in 1175 and imposed swingeing forest amercements on the major barons, following the revolt of 1173–74, and clearly took at least an occasional personal interest in his forest in the county. In 1189, as part of his settlement prior to departure on crusade, Richard I granted Nottinghamshire to his brother, John count of Mortain, and it is evident that John took a great interest in it during the following five years. In 1194, immediately after his return from crusade and captivity, Richard was drawn to the area by the need to take Nottingham castle from the rebellious John’s adherents, and immediately after the successful conclusion of the siege visited Clipstone and the forest, which, according to Roger of Howden, ‘pleased him greatly’. A few days later he met the king of Scots there and on the following day, which was Palm Sunday, rested there.16 The relative frequency or infrequency of royal visits to the area seems from the first to have been a significant factor in the relationship of the rulers with their local tenants. The personal presence of their lord led groups of his local tenants to approach him. The first such occasion when this occurred was probably on or about 19 March 1200, when King John accepted a fine of fifteen marks by the men of Mansfield for them to be allowed to have their common of pasture in Clipstone park as they had been accustomed to do before it was enclosed by Henry II.17 It is possible that a discussion at the soke court led to the appointment of representatives to go the short distance to see the king at Clipstone. Their initiative must have resulted from the knowledge that their lord was visiting the area for the first time since his coronation less than a year before, and perhaps therefore especially amenable to their requests. They may well have had opportunities to deal with him in person during the period of his control over the county, and similar approaches are known to have been made subsequently to other rulers, mainly in the early fourteenth century. John was a frequent visitor to Clipstone. He was there in the summer of 1212 when the revolt of Llewelyn ap Iorworth began, and the arrival of the news from Wales is traditionally associated with a meeting on the northern edge of Clipstone park at a tree whose successor is still known as the ‘parliament oak’.18 Henry III, however, was a far less frequent visitor to Clipstone than his father, uncle and grandfather. He was a creature of southern England, born in Winchester, fond of his southern palaces, and, especially in his maturer years, when his continental campaigns had come to an unfruitful end, apparently reluctant to stray from his beloved Westminster and the shrine of the Confessor. In that respect his rule is more reminiscent of that of Henry VI than of his restless Norman and Plantagenet forbears and immediate successors. It is not certain that he spent even a single night at Clipstone during the whole of his reign, although he passed through on visits to or from the north in July 1244, December 1251 to January 1252, and August 1255.19 There was significant expenditure on his residence there, but it served only as a useful stagingpost on northern journeys, and he stayed more at Warsop and at the manors of two 15 D. Crook, ‘The struggle over forest boundaries in Nottinghamshire, 1218–1227’, TTS lxxxiii (1979), 35–45. 16 Chronica Magistri Rogeri de Houedene, III, ed. W. Stubbs (RS, 1870), 240, 243. 17 Rotuli de Oblatis et Finibus, 63; PR 2 John, 18–19: Fines facti coram rege. 18 W. Horner Groves, The History of Mansfield (Nottingham, 1894), 11–12. 19 T. Craib, Itinerary of Henry III, 1215–1272 (1923), NA:PRO Reading Room, 177, 223–4, 247.

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local knightly families, the Cressys of Hodsock (in 1244, 1251, 1252) and the Foliots of Grimston and Wellow (in 1227, 1228 and 1229), than he did at Clipstone.20 In 1251, when he visited Clipstone on his way to celebrate the marriage of his daughter to the young Alexander III of Scotland, the accommodation had to be rapidly made ready by repairing the wall in the king’s chamber at the foot of his bed and creating a private chamber for the queen’s use, but his itinerary suggests that it was used only briefly, if at all.21 These occasional visits provided little opportunity for the tenants to approach him. During Henry’s reign they had largely to direct their demands through the same channels that were available to other, often non-royal, manors, through the offering of fines and dealings with the exchequer. The single exception was in January 1230, when the men of Mansfield secured confirmation of their rights to forest materials for house and hedge building by letters close addressed to forest officials from Lincoln.22 The king had only just reached there after leaving Newark, east of the soke on the great north road, along which he was returning from York. The chronology of his itinerary suggests that news of Henry’s sojourn at Newark reached the men of the soke, who decided to approach him; having just missed him at Newark, they then presumably followed him to Lincoln. On several occasions in Henry’s reign the men of the manor and soke of Mansfield took grievances to the government, beginning early in the minority during the war against Louis of France and the rebel barons. In January 1217 the regent William Marshal visited Nottingham to make financial arrangements to shore up the war effort in the east midlands, where the king’s cause was maintained by Philip Marc, sheriff of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire and keeper of Nottingham castle. Marshal handed the manor and soke of Mansfield over to Adam of St Martin, a Flemish household knight long in the service of John as count and king, and one of the few recipients of an annual money fee (£25) during his reign.23 By January 1219 St Martin and his bailiffs had evidently done something to offend the men of the soke of Mansfield by interfering with their established customs. They offered the king a fine of 20 marks to be allowed to hold their lands in the same way that they had held them under King John. They were not to be forced to perform services and customs other than those they had previously performed, and Marc was to allow the men of the manor to hold their lands on those terms, and to prevent St Martin from vexing them.24 Marc had himself in 1223 to be ordered not to levy uncustomary aids, tallages and exactions from the men of Bulwell, a royal manor he himself held, and in 1219 he possessed Edwinstowe on the same basis as St Martin held Mansfield. Without strong governmental direction, the tenants could have expected little assistance from him.25

20

Ibid., 71, 84, 177–8, 233–4. CR 1251–53, 8; CR 1242–47, 214. He was at Warsop on 4 August 1255: C 60/52, m.3. CR 1227–31, 281–2. 23 Crook, ‘The community of Mansfield’, i. 24; S.D. Church, The Household Knights of King John (Woodbridge, 1999), 23, 35, 64, 79n., 84, 92n., 127, and ‘The Knights of the Household of King John: A Question of Numbers’, TCE iv, 151–65. 24 C 60/11, m.7; PR 3 Henry III, 98. Much of what is known of this and subsequent episodes involving the men of Mansfield was first explored in Crook, ‘The community of Mansfield’, i. 14–38. 25 J.C. Holt, ‘Philip Mark and the Shrievalty of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in the Early Thirteenth Century’, TTS lxvi (1952), 20. 21 22

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The royal court was at Westminster when the fine was made, and so the tenants must have chosen and sent representatives there. Again they probably did so at the soke court, which by the mid-thirteenth century was held three-weekly on market day,26 although until 1234 it may have been held as often as fortnightly.27 The presence in the east midlands, for the first time for a decade, of the king’s justices in eyre, may have encouraged them to expect firmer royal control and an improvement in political conditions.28 They may even have been consciously making use of the provisions of the 1217 version of Magna Carta, which some of them may have heard being read in the county court. Chapter 10 stated that all vills were to have their liberties and free customs, and chapter 11 that no man should be compelled to perform more service for a free tenement than was due from it.29 They were developing quite an exalted idea of their status, revealed more clearly in documents from later in the century, and seem to have been asserting that the liberties granted to the realm in general should be enforced in their particular interest. Such a fine was not unprecedented in the area. As early as 1182 the men of the soke of Dunham paid £40 to Henry II for confirmation of the liberties they had had in the reign of Henry I.30 Like the men of Mansfield in 1219, the tenants of Dunham had sought to maintain customs observed in an earlier reign. At Mansfield, it apparently took much of the year to bring Adam de St Martin into line. The initial order seems to have been ineffective, since on 20 June 1219 Marc was ordered to take the manor into the king’s hand, and allow no chattels and rents to be taken from it until further notice.31 This evidently brought a complaint from St Martin, because on 5 August Marc was ordered to give him the issues of the manor and the corn for the previous year, but in such a way that the men of the manor would not suffer a nuisance. On 22 August it was ordered that the soke be restored to him, to sustain him in the king’s service, but with the proviso that he was only to take his rightful rents and issues without destruction or waste of the men or woods of the manor.32 St Martin may have been chastened by these events, because he retained the manor apparently without further complaint until the general resumption of royal demesne manors by the king’s council in June 1222. Marc was allowed to retain Edwinstowe, formerly part of the soke,33 while St Martin was compensated by an alternative allocation in Lincolnshire.34 Following Hoyt, David Carpenter identified during the minority ‘a growing sense . . . that the royal demesne manors formed a corpus of land peculiarly attached to the crown’.35 The legal treatise formerly attributed to Henry de Bratton, but now generally supposed to have been begun by someone else in the late 1220s or early

26

Crook, ‘The community of Mansfield’, ii. 17, 27. CR 1231–34, 588–9. 28 D. Crook, Records of the General Eyre (PRO Handbook no. 20, 1982), 75. 29 W. Stubbs, Select Charters (9th edn, rev. by H.W.C. Davis, Oxford, 1913), 342. 30 PR 28 Henry II, 18. 31 C 60/11, m.3. In an exchequer schedule drawn up a few years later (E 163/1/8A) it was noted that Mansfield had been taken into the king’s hand ‘on account of the offences (gravamina) committed by Adam’ against its men. 32 RLC, i. 397b, 398b. 33 PR 5 Henry III, xxxvi, lvii–lxi, 73; PR 6 Henry III, 40, 42; D.A. Carpenter, The Minority of Henry III (London, 1990), 268–70, 279–89, covers the whole resumption process in detail. 34 RLC, i. 504. 35 Carpenter, The Minority, 285–6. 27

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1230s, gives some support to the assumptions of the men of Mansfield in their struggle with Adam de St Martin. It states that some of peasants on the royal demesne, those called glebae ascripticii, free men who performed villein works because of the nature of their tenements, and who used the little writ of right close rather than normal royal possessory writs, were not removable from their tenements, no matter into whose hands the manor fell, as long as they could pay their dues.36 However, the demesne had to continue to provide a source of patronage. In 1223, soon after the soke of Mansfield was removed from St Martin’s hands, the berewick of Skegby on its far western boundary, one of the three central components of the Domesday soke, was turned into an independent manor, held by a fee-farm rent of £4 4s 4d, for Godfrey Spigurnel, the man responsible for sealing the king’s writs, as a reward for his long service. This was not a sudden act, because in 1207 Spigurnel had purchased from King John for twenty marks a charter granting him five bovates (a quarter of the village) and a mill for a fee-farm of 20s. This substantial holding had already been excluded from paying tallage in 1209, and in 1214 Spigurnel was exempted from attending the soke court.37 He founded a dynasty which continued to provide crown servants for a time.38 The crown tenants in Skegby were thus permanently removed from the manor and soke, although they long continued to claim ancient demesne status.39 The king could still dispose of his demesne as he wished. There is no evidence as to what the men of Mansfield and Skegby may have thought about it. Their power to influence what happened to their manor and soke was still very limited, despite their recent success. They had not so far even tried to secure the privilege of paying their rents direct to the exchequer through their own representatives. This practice was not particularly rare in John’s reign, and it provided, as Hoyt pointed out, opportunities for communal action and responsibility. The men of the manor and soke of Mansfield are unlikely to have been involved in the attempts by the county communities of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire between 1218 and 1227 to restrict the area of forest in the two counties under the terms of the Charter of the Forest.40 They were at the core of the forest in Nottinghamshire and could not expect to be excluded from whatever was retained within its boundaries. Nevertheless, Godfrey Spigurnel, who had so recently taken Skegby out of the soke, was able to ensure that the site of his new manor house there was excluded from the forest, which reached only to the other side of a small adjacent stream. The next assertion of their communal identity was in the almost unprecedented step they took in August 1227, to secure from the king, at Westminster, a charter granting a market to themselves.41 Henry had only in January that year begun to issue charters in perpetuity. Market charters were almost invariably issued to the lords of private manors, not by the king to the men of his own manors. Only two previous market grants are known to have been issued to groups

36

Bracton de Legibus et Consuetudinibus Anglie, ed. G.E. Woodbine, translated with revisions and notes by S.E. Thorne, 4 vols (1968–77), ii. 37: glebae ascripticii, quis tali gaudent privilegio quod a gleba amoveri non poterunt, quamdiu solvere possunt debitas pensiones, ad quoscumque pervenerit dominicum domini Regis. 37 Crook, ‘The community of Mansfield’, i. 16. 38 D. Crook, ‘The Spigurnels of Skegby’, Nottingham Medieval Studies xxi (1977), 50–70. 39 Rot. Hun., ii. 27. 40 Crook, ‘The struggle over forest boundaries in Nottinghamshire’. 41 CChR 1226–57, 54.

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of royal tenants. The first was that by King John in 1215 to the men of Corfe in Dorset, settled just outside his castle there. That grant was by letters patent, not a charter, and it was not until 1248 that the men of Corfe received a charter.42 The second was in 1219, when the government of Henry III granted one, and a two-day annual fair, to the king’s men of Melksham in Wiltshire.43 When Romford market in Havering was authorised by a royal writ in 1247, no charter was issued, simply an instruction to the sheriff to proclaim it publicly in full county and hundred courts and to hold the market each Wednesday with all its liberties and customs. The creation of its fair in 1250 was announced by a similar instruction stating that the king wished one to be held.44 It is interesting that, when Mansfield was given an annual fair by Richard II in 1377, it was initiated by letters close to the sheriff ordering it to be proclaimed, but a week later the tenants obtained an exemplification of the writ by letters patent.45 The Romford market was probably not new, to judge by the wording of the writ, but nor probably was that in Mansfield. There is no evidence to show how this communal market in Mansfield worked, but presumably it was managed by the bailiff of the manor, but to whom its profits accrued is not clear. It did not last for long. The note of the issue of the charter on the charter roll is cancelled and annotated, in a slightly later hand, with the explanation that this had been done because the charter had been surrendered.46 This annotation almost certainly resulted from the grant of the manor and soke to Henry de Hastings in 1238.47 Hastings was the husband of the youngest of the co-heirs of John le Scot, the last non-royal earl of Chester, who died in 1237, and the grant of Mansfield, along with the smaller soke of Oswardbeck, which had been a component of that of Mansfield in Domesday, was part of the crown’s attempt to manage the demise of the Chester earldom and satisfy the claims of the co-heirs to its lands.48 The use of Mansfield as a means of satisfying the Hastings claims had a certain logic, for it had been a target of the earl of Chester in the civil war of the 1140s, perhaps because it would help to link his estates in Lincolnshire with Cheshire. It was granted to Ranulph II by King Stephen in 1146, and then recovered when he was arrested in a court coup. He was granted it again by Henry of Anjou in 1153 to attract his support, but Henry’s grant lapsed with Ranulph’s death later in the year, leaving Mansfield in the royal demesne throughout the remainder of the twelfth century. It is unlikely that, as lord, Hastings approved of the control of the market by the men of the manor, and it seems certain that this was the reason why this almost unique arrangement came to an end. The grant to Hastings did however apparently spare Mansfield from many of the effects of the reforms of 1236, which saw most demesne manors leased to individual keepers. This had a marked effect at Havering and elsewhere, and led to complaints

42

RLP, 127b; CChR 1226–57, 334; Crook, The Community of Mansfield’, i. 26, 37. On markets in general, now see http://ihr.sas.ac.uk/cmh/gaz/gaxweb2.html, an excellent database of grants to 1516. RLC, i, 392b. 44 CR 1242–7, 536; CCR 1247–51, 236. 45 SC 8/126, no. 6252; CCR 1377–81, 99; CPR 1377–81, 59–60. 46 C 53/19, m.5; CChR 1226–57, 54: quia reddita fuit carta. 47 CPR 1232–47, 224. 48 The best account of this is R.J. Eales, ‘Henry III and the end of the Norman earldom of Chester’, TCE i, 100–27; see also R. Stewart-Brown, ‘The end of the Norman earldom of Chester’, EHR xxxv (1920), 26–53. 43

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by the men of some of the affected manors.49 Hastings held the manor and soke at the old farm for seven years, until 1245, and his tenure caused at least one other dispute with his temporary tenants. In 1247 the king’s escheators north of the Trent, then holding the king’s demesnes and escheats in Nottinghamshire, were instructed to rectify the results of an extent of the soke of Mansfield made during Hastings’s tenure, which had stated that the men of the soke paid an annual tallage of ten marks. The men had evidently complained that that they had never been accustomed to pay tallage except when it had been levied generally on the royal demesne. The result was that it was not considered equitable or consonant with reason (nec est equum vel racioni consonum) that they should have to pay unaccustomed tallage, so in future they were to be free from payment of the annual ten marks.50 Hastings had clearly been extracting an annual levy from the men of the soke, and its removal must have resulted from their complaint. It was not the only demesne manor thus affected. In 1242 the men of Brampton, near Huntingdon, also held by Hastings from the king, attacked his bailiffs and the men of the local sheriff sent to help them levy a tallage. The resulting hearing before the king’s council went in favour of Hastings, but the justice Roger de Thirkleby ruled that he could not tallage the men of the manor except when the king tallaged his demesnes in general.51 In another case heard in the Bench in 1249–50, five tenants of Chalgrove in Oxfordshire argued that the manor was not ancient demesne and that they were not liable to pay tallage to their current lord, John de Plessis, earl of Warwick, when the king tallaged his demesne throughout England. They succeeded when an inquest jury confirmed that Chalgrove had never been royal demesne but had been part of the honour of Wallingford, and the earl had to agree never to levy tallage in future.52 Hastings made a lease of some lands in Mansfield during his tenure of the manor, which the crown confirmed in 1255.53 He also clearly tried, as a private lord, to introduce customs not to the liking of the conservative tenants, who used communal action to overcome them. At Havering the king himself tried in 1246 to introduce two new customs to the manor, merchet and the custody of minor heirs. Despite the protests of the tenants, the royal keeper of Havering continued to demand them until 1251, when the tenants brought a formal complaint against the levying of all personal dues before the king himself.54 There was nothing unusual in the tenants of crown manors being subject to dues like merchet or heriot, or to changes in customs in royal manors. During the 1242 Brampton case before the council, the jurors asserted that heriot and merchet and other villein services were rendered there in the reign of Henry II, but they did not know whether they had been given under John.55 The men of Mansfield leased their own manor for the first time in 1257, when many royal manors were demised for terms of five to seven years at increased farms in an attempt to ease a growing financial crisis.56 There were payment problems after 1259, and the remainder of what was due was not finally accounted for until a

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

McIntosh, Havering, 26–7; Hoyt, Royal Demesne, 156–61; E 372/82, rot. 9; 83, rot. 8; 84, rot. 1. C 60/44, m.9; CR 1242–47, 505. CRR, xvii, no. 16; Hoyt, Royal Demesne, 222–5. CRR, xix, nos. 399, 1649. CPR 1247–58, 399. Ibid., 105; McIntosh, Havering, 37. Hoyt, Royal Demesne, 223–5. E 371/20, mm.1–2; Crook, ‘Community of Mansfield’, i. 29.

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decade later. During the political strife in the counties in the early 1260s, the royal sheriff of Nottinghamshire was opposed by a baronial keeper of the county, Richard Foliot of Wellow and Grimston, who apparently extorted 40s from the men of Mansfield. This gave rise in 1261 to a complaint from them which the exchequer attempted to follow up in 1262.57 The result was a memorandum entered on the exchequer memoranda rolls in the autumn of that year that they were to hold their manor as they had previously held it, and at the same farm, until the king and his council should ordain otherwise.58 A year later Foliot changed sides and became a prominent royalist, and was involved in the negotiations for the Mise of Amiens in December 1263 to January 1264. In 1268 the king granted him a market and fair at Wellow, and the men of the soke of Mansfield were probably prominent among those who in 1275 complained to the Ragman commissioners that he had taken unaccustomed tolls from men of the king’s demesne who were not merchants.59 It is worth noting in passing that the villagers of Wellow had a communal seal, which was used in 1250 for two charters issued by four of them with ‘all the community of the vill of Wellow’.60 The royal tenants of Mansfield are not known to have had a seal of their own. The problems encountered in paying the farm in the years after 1257 were not apparently so serious as those experienced by the tenants of Brill in Buckinghamshire, one of the other royal manors leased at that time. In August 1259 the king, if we can interpret literally the heading of a plea roll, sat with the baronial justiciar Hugh Bigod during a session at Woodstock when Bigod’s special eyre heard the long list of seventeen complaints by seventeen men and women of Brill about the ‘trespasses, extortions and injuries’ of the three bailiffs of the vill, themselves tenants of the manor.61 It is the only occasion in the reign when we can be fairly sure that the king had to sit and listen in person to the complaints of a group of his manorial tenants. They consisted of alleged wrongs to particular individuals, some of which are worth mentioning because they provide a unique opportunity during the reign of Henry III to understand the sort of abuses which troubled the tenants of crown manors. The main elements were financial misdealings, especially those involving sums imposed as amercements, the manipulation of the inheritance of tenements, and the alteration of established customs. They included: unfair administration of an amercement imposed by the king’s steward for a breach of the assize of ale; charging a pledge four times as much as the amount imposed on the person pledged and who failed to pay; keeping a fine taken from someone who damaged corn without compensating the victim; amercing a servant who accidentally blinded a horse belonging to his master at a rate of nearly twice the value of the horse, and yet not paying any compensation to the owner; failure to repay a debt of 48s, owed to a tenant couple, so impoverishing them and rendering them incapable of paying the king’s farm;

57

For the details, see Crook, ‘Community of Mansfield’, i. 29–30. E 159/37, rot. 1d; E 368/37, rot. 2. 59 Rot. Hun., ii. 303. 60 The Registrum Antiquissimum of the Cathedral Church of Lincoln, iii., ed. C.W. Foster (Lincoln Record Soc., 29, 1935), 311–13, nos. 973–4. 61 JUST 1/1187, rot. 7d; E.F. Jacob, Studies in the Period of Baronial Reform and Rebellion (Oxford, 1925), 44–7, 344–9; D.A. Carpenter, ‘English Peasants in Politics, 1258–1267’, Past and Present 136 (1992), 3–42, reprinted in his The Reign of Henry III (London, 1996), esp. 332. 58

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taking animals, grain and domestic utensils from a tenant to an extent greater than that needed to pay the farm of the tenement, and yet still evicting and imprisoning the tenant; appropriating money collected from a tithing in preparation for the view of frankpledge, and two years later distraining a horse for non-payment of the money and charging heavily for its redemption; seizing the domestic utensils of a poor woman from her house and selling them to pay an amercement; ejecting a younger son from a tenement given to him by his father during his lifetime, and, when his father died, taking a heriot of a pig and yet evicting him from the tenement in favour of his elder brother; imposing a fine for carrying hay beyond the mowed meadow of the lord, whereas this was the normal custom; taking 20s for allowing a tenant to be reseised of a tenement from which he had been ejected, and then not allowing him to have it; and accepting repeated payments from three tenants for quittance of suit to the court of Brill, but nevertheless distraining them to perform it and amercing them for default. The tenants alleged that these activities had so impoverished them and the other tenants of Brill that they could scarcely pay the farm. The defendants asserted that everything they had done since they had taken custody of the manor from the king had been according to the custom of the manor, and they put themselves on a jury of its men. That jury then proceeded to make several more general complaints against them, which are even more illuminating than the original individual complaints, revealing financial extortion against the men of Brill, presumably to make a profit on their lease. The first was that William son of Simon had made a fine of half a mark before the eyre justices at Newport Pagnell for the chattels of a hanged man; he had appropriated the chattels to himself but had distrained the men of Brill for payment of the fine, as well as concealing the house of the hanged man, which should have escheated to the crown. Two of the bailiffs had also been amerced a mark for a debt of their own in the court of William de Valence, but had compelled the men of the manor to acquit them of it. Also, the vill of Brill had been amerced half a mark before the justices of the forest, and Ralph son of William distrained them to pay a mark, which he took from them. The bailiffs jointly had assessed every tenant of the manor to pay their expenses in going to London and staying there to render their account. If the bailiffs gave a gift at the exchequer for having a respite on their account or for a favour, they distrained the tenants to acquit them of it, although the tenants themselves were not allowed any respite in rendering the farms of their lands. William son of Simon was said once to have summoned the court of Brill for a particular day and, when the tenants fully came after being summoned, he absented himself and refused to hold it on that day; instead he held it on a different day without further summons, and nevertheless amerced the tenants of Burstall 10s 6d for default. Nigel son of Simon had been to Burstall two years before and assaulted some poor tenants there, and afterwards, when he found that they had nothing whereby they could be attached, he said that three of them had beaten him, so he amerced them 2s in the court of Brill. The complainants therefore recovered their losses, the bailiffs lost their custody of the manor and were committed to gaol for trespass and to make satisfaction for the damages. The manor was handed over to six of the tenants to hold until Michaelmas,62 and, because the bailiffs were in arrears of their farm owed to the

62

Their appointment was enrolled: CPR 1247–58, 651. By June 1259 the manor was in the hands of another keeper: CR 1256–59, 396.

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king, their lands in the manor were to be taken into the king’s hand. The tenants of Brill were using the opportunity provided by the justiciar’s special eyre to achieve their objective. They would not have been able to obtain a writ of monstraverunt, because the farmers were acting on the king’s behalf and the manor was still part of the royal demesne.63 The substance of their complaints were probably of the types which would have been made on such occasions, but which were not normally recorded in this way. At Mansfield the sums owing from the 1257 lease were eventually paid off in 1269, after which the manor was held by the escheator north of the Trent until 1275, when it became part of the dower of Queen Eleanor under the king’s agreement with Alfonso X of Castile. It was therefore excluded from the experiment of 1275–83, in which the royal lands in each county were placed in the hands of three salaried royal stewards, Ralph of Sandwich, Thomas de Normanvill and Richard de Holebrok, in place of the local escheators.64 In 1281, together with another manor, Linby, Mansfield was leased to two men who can, as a result of the survival of a list of tenants and rents in 1292, be identified as the two leading tenants, Hugh of Radmanthwaite and Ralph the Clerk of Mansfield.65 In 1292 the manor was again in arrears in payment of the rents, and was in the sheriff’s hands until 1299, when a new lease was given to Ralph the Clerk and the new steward of Sherwood forest, William of Dogmersfield, a former servant in the royal household, who had taken up residence in the area as a result of his appointment, and became the sole lessee in 1306.66 After that year the manor and soke were controlled by this one man and his officials, even though the titular lord was sometimes someone other than the king. He seems to have been able to keep the exchequer satisfied for a long period, and also defended the integrity of the soke on the king’s behalf.67 From 1312 to 1327 it was held by John Comyn II, son of the murdered rival of Robert Bruce, and after his death at Bannockburn by his widow and son. The Comyns were not partially resident lords like St Martin or active absentees like Hastings; they merely drew the income from the manor. The single surviving court roll of 1315–16 does not even mention their lordship over it. The court is consistently described as the king’s, and William of Dogmersfield is active as his bailiff.68 From 1327 onwards, with a short break, Mansfield was part of the dower of the dowager queen, Isabella, and her lordship was equally nominal.69 By then the manor and soke and its former members were securely classified as ancient demesne, which was listed separately in the Nottinghamshire assessments for the lay subsidies of 1327, 1332 and 1334, and subsequently.70 63

The writ seems to have been available by the 1260s, when it is included in a Luffield priory writ register: Early Registers of Writs, ed. E. de Haas and G.D.G. Hall (Selden Soc., lxxxvii, 1970), lv, 46–7. 64 J.R. Maddicott, ‘Edward I and the lessons of baronial reform: local government, 1258–80’, TCE i, 21–3. I am grateful to Sandra Raban for drawing my attention to this. 65 SC 6/1089/19, m.A; SC 2/196/9. Two of the other tenants, Antony Bek, bishop of Durham, and William of Stainsby, a Derbyshire knight, were of higher status, but had smaller holdings and did not take part in local life in Nottinghamshire. On Stainsby, who was very active just over the boundary in Derbyshire, see D. Crook, ‘Hardwick before Bess: the origins and early history of the Hardwick family and their estate’, Derbyshire Archaeological Journal cvii (1987), 41–54. 66 Crook, ‘Community of Mansfield’, i. 30–1. 67 KB 27/170, rot. 74; R. Thoroton, History and Antiquities of Nottinghamshire (1677), 462. 68 Nottinghamshire Archives, DDP 17/1; Crook, ‘Community of Mansfield’, ii. 17, 27. 69 CCR 1341–48, 618. 70 E 179/159/4, rots. 3–4; E 179/159/5, rot. 13; The Lay Subsidy of 1334, ed. R.E. Glasscock (London, 1975), 233–4.

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During the later thirteenth century the customs of the manor came to be confirmed or established for the first time, and they did exhibit a degree of independence. In 1273 it was established, after examination by the bailiff, that tenants of the manor and soke should be able to dispose of their land in the court by attorney if they wished, and in 1302 a jury of men from the soke confirmed before the king’s justices of the bench that tenants of the soke could dispose of land in fee simple by their own will without the license of the king or his bailiff. The form of surrender and re-grant in the soke court was maintained, as can be illustrated from the court roll of 1315–16.71 The custom of the manor was partible inheritance between male heirs, and between female heirs if males were lacking. The first firm proof of this comes from an inquisition post mortem of one of the tenants made in 1289, but there is no reason to doubt that it was of long-standing.72 The rule was embodied in the manorial customs, which were first written down either in 1273 or, probably more likely, 1308, although none of the surviving manuscripts can be dated before the sixteenth century.73 The customs begin with the assertion that the tenants of both sexes are free of blood and may marry who they choose. This notion of freedom of blood was common on ancient demesne, and on alleged ancient demesne manors like the abbot of Burton’s manor of Mickleover in Derbyshire, during the thirteenth century.74 Edward I’s visits to Clipstone were a little more frequent and lengthy than those of his father, and included one extended period of residence. In 1279, 1280 and 1300 he was there probably for one or two days, and in 1284 for four. In 1290 he was there for over a month in September and November, because an important parliament was held there in October, and then because of the onset of the terminal illness of the queen.75 During his reign there appear to have been no great issues between the king and his tenants in the Mansfield district, and there certainly seems to have been no attempt to approach him while the whole government apparatus was at Clipstone during the parliament. The concerns of Edward II in the middle period of his reign, between Bannockburn and the war against Thomas earl of Lancaster in 1322, meant that he spent much more of his time at Clipstone palace and in the Sherwood forest area than any king had for more than a century. His presence there brought the manor court within the verge of the king’s household, and at least one session was cancelled as a result, while the marshalsea court held some of its earliest recorded sessions at Clipstone.76 The famine at its height in 1315–16 must have placed severe demands on the production of what was a poor area for agriculture. Partly as a reaction to the shortage of household supplies, an enclosure called a ‘peel’ was erected in 1316–17 at the western end of Clipstone park, which when fully developed a few years later produced grain and quartered significant numbers of livestock.77 It will be recalled 71

Crook, ‘Community of Mansfield’, ii. 20–1, 28; KB 27/170, rot. 74; Nottinghamshire Archives, DDP 17/1; Thoroton, Nottinghamshire, 462. 72 C 133/53, no. 7; Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, ii. no. 708. 73 Crook, ‘Community of Mansfield’, ii. 20–1, 28 n.51. The very similar customs of Edwinstowe were written in 1308. 74 D. Crook. ‘Freedom, villeinage and legal process: the dispute between the abbot of Burton and his tenants of Mickleover, 1280’, Nottingham Medieval Studies xliv (2000), 121–40. 75 Itinerary of Edward I, i. 293–6. 76 Nottinghamshire Archives, DDP 17/1, m.3; E 37/2, rots. 3–5, 6–9d onwards; JUST 1/686, rot. 47d. 77 D. Crook, ‘Clipstone Park and “Peel” ’, TTS lxxx (1976), 35–46; for its function as a fortification, see D. Crook, ‘ Clipstone Peel: Fortification and politics from Bannockburn to the treaty of Leake, 1314–1318”, forthcoming in TCE x.

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that the original enclosure of the park had elicited complaints, and the creation of the peel led to complaints from the men of Mansfield Woodhouse, Warsop and Clipstone, who were all affected by it. When the king was staying at Clipstone in January 1317 they presented him with a petition complaining of the loss of common and their rights of husbote and heybote, which had been confirmed to them in 1230. In reply Edward agreed to confirm those rights but would not restore their common, although he did exempt them from punishment if their beasts strayed through gaps in the fence. The men had to wait for further satisfaction until immediately after Edward’s fall in 1326–27. Edward III was the last king to be confronted with direct demands from his local tenants that he should exercise his royal power on their behalf. His relations with them in the early days of his reign in 1327 and 1328 are reminiscent of those at the beginning of John’s reign in 1200. The king’s men of Clipstone and Mansfield Woodhouse, together with John of Sutton, lord of the private manor in Warsop, complained about the effects of the extension of Clipstone park in three different ways.78 Initially in April 1327 the men of Clipstone petitioned the king’s council with complaints of loss of pasture and fallen leaves and ferns, used as fertiliser, as a result of the building of the peel, and in the following month an inquest held by the chief forest justice at Warsop upheld their claims.79 This did not apparently solve the problem, and on 14 January 1328 a deputation of six of the men with others came before the king in person when he was visiting Clipstone.80 He conceded alternative pasture for that which had been lost and restored the old rights to leaves and ferns in the park, whose custody he placed in the hands of one of the communal leaders, and most of the peel was decommissioned as part of the settlement. In May 1327 the men of Mansfield Woodhouse petitioned the king’s council complaining that Edward II had ten years previously enclosed about 200 acres of Woodhouse Wood and about 100 acres of waste in the park, depriving them of pasture for their beasts and due profits, and an inquest held at Warsop on the same day as the one concerning Clipstone again confirmed what they said.81 The same deputation as represented the men of Clipstone came before the king on the same day, 14 January 1328, at Clipstone, and the king ordered that the enclosing ditch and hedge be removed and their pasture and profits be restored.82 It may also have been in 1328 that the king’s ancient demesne tenants of Mansfield and Edwinstowe petitioned him and his council, stating that from time out of mind they had been quit of contributing to the expenses of knights attending parliament, of poundage and all other ‘tallages and assessions’, and that the sheriff and others were now distraining them to pay various charges which they were not accustomed to render as part of the services due for the tenements they held of him.83 Their conservatism had not moderated, but the endorsement shows that the petition was not accepted by the king on this occasion. Finally, in 1363, when he was hunting

78

For Sutton’s complaint, see SC 8/15, no. 704. C 145/105, no. 14; CIM 1307–1349, no. 961; Abstracts of the Inquisitions Post Mortem and other Inquisitions relating to Nottinghamshire, III, 1321–1350, ed. T.M. Blagg (Thoroton Soc. Record Ser. vi, 1939), 101–2. 80 CCR 1327–30, 244; ‘Clipstone Park and “Peel” ’, 40–1. 81 SC 8/260, no. 12968; C 145/105, no. 17; CIM 1341–1417, no. 964. 82 CCR 1327–30, 260. 83 SC 8/161/8004: the endorsement shows that the petition was not accepted. 79

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in Sherwood forest with the captive John II of France, Edward released his men and tenants of Clipstone from an annual render for taking ferns in the park, imposed by Edward II.84 The last recorded visit to Clipstone by a monarch took place thirty years later, and by the early sixteenth century the palace had been allowed to fall into ruins. The history of a single manor, no matter how detailed, can only illustrate a small part of the general relationship of thirteenth century kings with the men of their own manors. Two pieces of substantial research now are needed. The first is an analysis of the history of all the major manors in crown hands for all or part of the period when the concept of ancient demesne was being defined in the royal courts, and an examination of the causes and effects of occasions when concerted action was taken in respect of significant groups of them, like that already undertaken by David Carpenter on the resumption of royal demesne in 1222. Chronologically the next stages appear to be an examination of the work of Walter de Burgh and Warner Engayne as managers of the bulk of the crown estate in the years after 1237, and the leasing arrangements of 1257 and their possible relationship to the rather puzzling complaint of the king against the baronial council in 1261 that ‘the king’s own tenants are more aggrieved and treated worse than others of the realm’.85 A detailed study of the management of the royal demesne by the stewards of 1275–83 would also be appropriate. This work needs to be done to the same level of detail as it has been for the fifteenth century, a period in which the history of the royal demesne has, since the work of B.P. Wolffe in the 1960s and 1970s,86 long been recognised to have been a major and continuing political issue. Secondly, a detailed and systematic study of the development of tenure in ancient demesne in the mid- and later thirteenth century, including the quite extensive case law, is needed to build on the interim accounts of the process by Hoyt and Hallam. Only when this has been done will we have a better understanding of the relationship between the crown and its own tenants in the thirteenth century.

84

CChR 1341–1417, 178; C 81/396, no. 26086; Chronicon Henrici Knighton, ii, ed. J.R. Lumby (RS, 1895), 118–19. The charter and the privy seal warrant were dated at Nottingham castle, but doubtless arose from his presence in Sherwood. 85 E.F. Jacob, ‘The complaints of Henry III against the baronial council in 1261’, EHR xli (1926), 567; N. Denholm-Young, Collected Papers (1946), 128; Hoyt, Royal Demesne, 167–9. 86 B.P. Wolffe, The Royal Demesne in English History (London, 1971); The Crown Lands 1461–1536 (London, 1970).

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Aberffaw, house of, princes of 127 Acre, Palestine, knights hospitallers at 77 Acre, Martin fitz 100 Acton Burnel, Shropshire, parliament at 93 Aguillon, William, steward of Pevensey 105 Ailundel, Nicholas 84 Alexander II, king of Scotland 129 Alfonso X, king of Castile 136 Amiens, Mise of 134 Anjou, Henry of 132 Anstey, Richard of 32 Archives and record keeping continental 21, 28, 29 English, royal chancery keeper of 42 comparison with continental archives 18, 19, 28, 29, 44–7, 66, 69 exchequer 3, 21, 24, 25 origins 2, 3, 17–18, 19–20, 24, see also Treasury sophistication of 19–21, 34, 66 weaknesses 3, 29, 43, 48, 50 episcopal 42 French, royal 29, 44–8 growth of 1, 2, 17–18, 24–5, 68, 72, 102 layettes des chartres 45 monastic 27, 47 papal 20, 27, 30, 31 searches of 21, 67 difficulties of 3, 22, 67, 76 survival of records 21, 27–30, 31, 33, 35, 46, 58 Arras, Hugh castellan of 117 Articuli super Cartas 64, 71, 81 Assize commissions 97–8, 99, 101, 102, 103–7, 108, 110 justices 97–8, 103–7, 108, 110

proceedings 97–8, 99 sessions held in Cornwall 103 Devon 103 Dorset 103 Kent 101 Leicestershire 101 Lincolnshire 101 Norfolk 101 Shropshire 99 Somerset 103 Baldwin, archbishop of Canterbury 39–40 Bannockburn, Stirlingshire 136, 137 Basingstoke, Hampshire, manor 126 Bath, bishop of, see Wells Baynard, Roger, justice of gaol delivery 108 Bean, J. W. M. 95 Beard, Peter 84 Beaumont, Henry de, earl of Warwick 122 Beverley, Yorkshire 38 Bigod, Hugh, justiciar 134 Thomas, guardian of the peace 106 Blois, Peter of 20, 39, 40 letter collection of 20 Blundevill, Ranulf de, earl of Chester 122, 132 Bohun, Humphrey de, earl of Hereford 121, 122 Boniface VIII, pope 3 Boxley, Kent, abbey of 38 Boyland, Richard 101 Bracton, Henry of 12, 33, 99, 130 chancellor of Exeter cathedral 103 Bradley, Suffolk 106 Brampton, Cambridgeshire 133 Brand, Paul 46 Brattleby, Lincolnshire, barony of 111, 112, 116, 118

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Braudon, Master Renaud de 63 Bréauté, Falkes de 118–19 Breton, John le keeper of the peace 106 Brill, Oxfordshire 134, 135 tenants 134–6 Bruer, William de la 100 Buckminster, Adam of 116 Bulwell, Nottinghamshire, manor 129 Burgh, Hubert de 66, 121, 122 justiciar 14, 118, 119, 122 Raymond nephew of 120, 121 sheriff 14 Burgh, Walter de 139 Burnell, Robert, chancellor of England 77, 78 Burstall, Buckinghamshire, tenants 135 Burstwick, Yorkshire 54 Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire, abbot of 137 Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, liberty of 106 Caisneto, Margaret de 115 Cambridge, Cambridgeshire 99 Camville family 113 lands 118 Camville, Gerard de 112, 113, 114, 116 Richard de 113 Thomas 100 Canterbury, Kent archbishops of cartulary 41 see Baldwin; Pecham gaol 100 monastic archive at 27 monks of 39–40 letter to 39 St Augustine’s abbey, cartulary 47 Cantilupe, William de 14 Carpenter, D. A. 14, 130, 139 Cartae Antiquae rolls 36, 40, 43 origins of 37–8 Carte Baronum (knights’ fees) 28, 30 Cartularies 18, 19, 29, 33, 35, 42, 47, 48 see also Canterbury; London; Walsingham Castles castellanship of 14, 115, 120–1, 122, 123

see also Chepstow; Corfe; Dover; Hereford; Lincoln; Nottingham; Salisbury; Tickhill; Trowbridge; Windsor Caux, Matilda de 112, 116 husband of 112 Chalgrove, Oxfordshire, manor 133 tenants 133 Champagne, France 29 Chancellor of England 4–5, 32, 36, 90, 114 see also Burnell; Coutances; Kilkenny; Walter Chancery English royal 1, 4–6, 24, 31, 83 clerks and scribes of 20, 30, 32–3, 36, 39–40, 42, 43, 48, 56 development of 5, 40–1, 49, 55–6 duties of 4, 30, 50, 51–2, 63 enrolment 18, 19, 48, 98 origins 34, 36–8, 41–3, 49, 67–8 hanaper 36 keeper of 55 independence of 5, 50, 51, 53, 54–6 consequences of 56–60, 62–9 letters, see Letters close; Letters patent rolls 2, 22, 36–8, 40, 42–3, 50–1, 67–8 calendars of 49, 87–8 purpose 66–7 see also Cartae Antiquae; Charter; Fine; Close; Patent; Liberate; Originalia see also Wardrobe French royal 3, 30, 44, 48 comparison with English chancery 18, 19, 66, 69 Norman 34 papal 18, 41, 48 Chaplais, Pierre 17 Charrun, Guischard, steward of bishop of Durham 105 Charter of the Forest 131 Charter rolls 1, 35, 37, 38, 44, 51, 66, 132 origins 3, 34, 36, 39–40, 42, 43, 50 Charters 1, 30, 35, 36, 40, 42, 63, 65, 131–2 Anglo-Saxon 18 enrolment of, see Cartae Antiquae rolls; Charter rolls Frankish collections of 18, 23 French 46, 47

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Index Inspeximus 33, 41 private 39, 123 witness lists 57 see also Henry I; Henry II; Louis VII; Philip II; Richard I Chauncy, John de, treasurer 71, 76, 77, 86 Chepstow, Monmouthshire, castle 122 Chester, Cheshire 58, 79 earls of, see Blundevill; Gernon; Scot Chichester, Sussex, gaol 105 Chirographs 27, 40 feet of fines 35, 41, 43 Chishill, John of, treasurer 76 Chroniclers/chronicles Barnwell abbey 115, 116, 117 Battle abbey 39 Brakelond, Jocelin of 37 Devizes, Richard of 114 Diceto, Ralph de 28 Dunstable priory 77, 115, 117 Elmham, Thomas of 47 History of the Dukes of Normandy and Kings of England 115, 117 History of William the Marshal 33, 115, 117, 118 Howden, Roger of 28, 128 Map, Walter 20, 31, 32 Newburgh, William of 113 Paris, Matthew 74 St Albans, Gesta Abbatum 39 Waverley abbey 58 Wendover, Roger of 111 Clanchy, M. T. 2, 3, 17, 18, 49 Clare, Gilbert de, earl of Gloucester 122 Clarendon, Constitutions of 27 Clipstone, Nottinghamshire 129, 138, 139 palace 127, 128, 137 park 127, 128, 137, 138 tenants 139 Close rolls 1, 24, 34, 35, 36, 48, 50–1, 66, 90, 91 Colchester, Essex 108, 109 abbey 38 gaol 105, 106, 108 Collingwood, James 75 Commissions, see Assize; Gaol delivery; Patent rolls Comyn, John (II) 136 Confirmatio Cartarum 71, 81

143

Contrabrevia 23–4, 25, 30, 36, 51–2, 65 Corfe, Dorset, castle 132 Cornwall Richard, earl of 120, 122 writ 37 Coutances, Walter of, chancellor of England 4 keeper of the great seak 41 Cowick Ordinance 86 Crakehall, John de, treasurer 75 Cressy, family 129 Cret, Rosa 99 Crook, David 100 Cuckespill, William, keeper of chancery archive 42 Cuckney, Nottinghamshire 126 Cumin, family 99 Dacus, John 124 Denham, Buckinghamshire 105 Derby, earl of, see Ferrers Derbyshire 112, 126, 131 royal forest 112 Devon 98, 99, 103, 109 keeper of the peace 105, 106 Dogmersfield, William of, steward of Sherwood forest 136 Domesday Book Nottinghamshire sokes in 126 see also exchequer Dover, Kent, castle 111 Droxford, John, keeper of the wardrobe 81, 82, 84, 85 Dublin, Ireland 34 Dunham, Nottinghamshire, soke 130 tenants 130 Durham, bishop of, steward of, see Charrun East Dereham, Norfolk 104 Edward I, king of England 3, 8–9, 54, 63, 83–6, 87, 107, 137 debts 71, 76–7, 79, 81 letters 71 marriage 74 opposition to 71, 80–2 wars 6, 58, 61, 71, 78, 80–1, 82 Edward II, king of England 65, 137–8, 139 Edward III, king of England 5, 58, 138–9

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Edwinstowe, Nottinghamshire 127, 129, 130 tenants 138 Eleanor of Castile, queen of England 136 Eleanor of Provence, queen of England 58 Ely, bishop of, sister of 111 Engayne, Warner 139 Erneis, William fitz 113 Essex 98, 105, 108, 109 keeper of, see Southchurch; Tany; Zuche sheriff of 38 Evesham, Worcestershire 83 Exeter, Devon 37, 107, 108 bishop of, see Stapledon cathedral, chancellor of, see Bracton gaol 100 Exchequer English royal 1, 2, 4, 30, 31, 33, 34, 43, 48, 62 accounting process 6, 21–5, 36, 50–2, 58–61, 65, 68, 82–5 reforms 7, 9, 71, 72–5, 76–81, 84 strains upon 8, 71, 72–3, 75–9, 80–2, 85 barons 24, 37, 38 Black Book 28 Dialogus de Scaccario 3, 6, 9, 17, 21, 27, 32, 71, 72 Domesday Book 3, 19, 27, 29–30, 38, 125, 126, 132 location of 6, 81, 82 Red Book, see Swerford rolls 22, 28, 29, 38, 72, 75, 79, 86 growth of 23, 25, 27, 72–3 See Jornalia; Memoranda; Pipe; Receipt table (counting board) in 22 writs of 25 see also Treasury; Wardrobe; Writs Irish 34 Norman 21, 34, 38 Eye, Suffolk, gaol, delivery of 108

Richard, keeper of the peace 134 Forgery 31, 34, 39 Fougères, Stephen de 20 ‘Four Knights’ system, see Assize; Gaol delivery; Keepers of the Peace France, king of 74, see also Louis VI; Louis VII; Louis IX; Philip II; Philip IV Frescobaldi, family 81, 82 Fréteval, France 45

Fécamp, France 38 Feet of Fines, see Chirographs Ferrers, William de, earl of Derby 122 Filliol, John 105 Fine rolls 22, 23, 35, 36, 43, 50–1, 54–5, 66 Foliot, family 129 Gilbert, letter collection of 20

Hale, Simon of sheriff of Wiltshire 121, 122 sheriff of Yorkshire 121 Hallam, E. M. 126, 139 Harding, Alan 105 Hastings, Henry de 132, 133, 136 Haudlo, Nicholas 105

Galbraith, V. H. 2, 17, 37, 42 Gant, Gilbert de 115, 117 Gaol delivery 13 commissions 99–100, 102, 103–4, 100, 107–9, 110 political influences on 101, 104, 106–7 justices 98, 101, 103, 105, 107–9 proceedings 98–9, 106, 109–10 sessions held in Devon 98 Essex 98 Hampshire 98 Wiltshire 98 Geneva 42 Genoa, merchants of 77 Geoffrey, archbishop of York 111 Gernon, Ranulph de, earl of Chester 132 Glanville, Ranulf 46 Glasgow 63 Gloucester 99, 107 earl of, see Clare Godmanchester, Huntingdonshire, manor 126 Gorski, Richard 14 Goudhurst, Kent 63 Grey, Richard de 66 Grimston, Leicestershire, manor 129 Guildford, Surrey 56, 109 Guyotjeannin, Olivier 66 Gwynedd 126

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Index Havering, Essex 132, 133 manor 126 royal keeper of 133 Haye family 113, 114 Haye, Lady Nicholaa de la 15, 111, 112–19, 120 husbands, see Camville, Gerard de; Erneis, William fitz Richard father of 112 Richard son of 116, 118 Idonea his daughter 118 sheriff of Lincolnshire 112, 115–18, 119, 123, 124 support for King John 115–18 Hébert, Michel 50 Henry I, king of England 126 coronation charter 28 letters 33, 34, 35 writs 39 Henry II, king of England 10, 25, 36, 72, 113, 127, 130 charters 24, 37, 39, 42, 43, 44 legal reforms of 32 letters 31, 32, 33, 38, 40 rebellion against 40 seal 39 sons of 20, 24, 45 letters closed addressed to 24 will 28 writs 29, 37, 45, 47 Henry III, king of England 6, 42, 53, 58, 76, 122, 128–9, 131 baronial opposition to 8, 71, 73–5, 101 continental campaigns 8, 74 half-brothers of 74, 75 letters 67 minority 7, 80, 111, 124, 125 government of 73, 116, 118, 120, 132 proposed conquest of Sicily 8, 73 Hereford, Herefordshire castle 122 earl of, see Bohun Hocclyne, Bedfordshire 104 Hodsock, Nottinghamshire, manor 129 Hogham, Master Richard de 84 Holebrok, Richard de, royal steward 136 Holt, J. C. 116 Horkeley, Robert, justice of gaol delivery 108

145

Hoyt, R F. 125, 126, 130, 131, 139 Hulme, St Benet of, Norfolk, abbey of 47 Huntingfield, William of 117 Ilchester, Somerset 43 gaol 107 Isabella of Angoulème, queen of England 136 Jenkinson, Hilary 83 John, king of England 11, 14, 19, 43, 54, 67, 68, 72–3, 115–16, 120, 121, 131, 132 adherents 128 civil war against 73, 111 count of Mortain 112, 114, 128 letters 35, 36, 43 seal 36, 41 John II, king of France 139 Jornalia rolls 80, 82–5, 86 Justice, royal courts 35, 40 common bench 9, 10, 55, 65, 107 general eyre 9, 11, 13, 97, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 109 king’s bench 1, 9, 107 see also Assizes; Gaol delivery fines of 23, 72 oyer and terminer 10, 107 plea rolls 10–11, 23, 35, 37, 98 reforms 32, 72 see also Justices; Keepers of the Peace; Legal Treatises; Writs Justices 14, 23, 33, 104 enrolment by 37 nature of 12 Norman 38 see also Assize; Gaol delivery Keepers of the Peace 101, 105–6 see also Southchurch; Tany; Zuche Kent, eyre justices in 104 sheriff of 111 Kilkenny, William of, chancellor of England 4 Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey 43 Kirby, John, treasurer 71, 76, 78, 79, 86 Quest 79 Kyme, Simon of 116

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Lacock, Wiltshire, abbey of, 121, 124 Lalou, Élisabeth 67 Lancaster, county of 84 Thomas earl of 137 Landon, Lionel 37, 38 Langley, Norfolk, abbey of, Brother Thomas of 104 Langton, Walter exchequer operations under 72 keeper of the wardrobe 79, 85 treasurer 81, 85, 86 Lascelles, Thomas de 84 Law, see Justice Le Mans, France 39 Lee, Devon 99 Thomas of 99 Legal Treatises Bracton 10, 130–1 Glanvill 10, 11, 46 Mirror of Justices 107, 108 Lench, Peter of 88 Margery wife of 88 Letter collections, see Blois; Foliot; Salisbury; Tewkesbury Letters, English royal 5, 23–5, 28, 30, 47, 51, 56 close 1, 43, 51, 53, 63, 65, 68, 107, 129, 132 enrolment of 20, 35, 36, 44, 45 patent 1, 33, 43, 47, 55, 63, 65, 76, 84, 107, 118, 120, 132 production processes of 39–40, 41, 44 registers 18, 19, 48 sealed 31, 57, 58, 63, 65 see also Charters; Henry II; John; Close rolls; Patent rolls; Richard I French royal 45, 47 papal 27, 31 Liberate rolls 2, 24, 34, 35, 36, 50–4 cited examples 53 Linby, Nottinghamshire, manor 136 Lincoln 115, 119, 129 battle of 117, 118 bishop of, see Sutton castellan of 112, 114 castle 111, 113–19 constableship of 112 cathedral, dean and canons of 116 sub dean of 23

Lincolnshire 113, 117, 121, 130 sheriff of, see Haye; Marc; Moulton; Pointon shrievalty of 15, 112, 114–16, 118, 119 Llewelyn ap Iorworth 126, 128 London 56, 58, 63, 98, 109, 118, 135 bishop of 24 city 126 Henry II’s charter to 28 Holy Trinity priory, cartulary 37 mayor 105 Master David of 24 Newgate, prisoners of 105 New Temple 3 Tower of 3 Longespée, Ela, countess of Salisbury 15, 111, 119–24 sheriff of Wiltshire 119, 121–4 Longespée, William, earl of Salisbury 118–21 claim to Lincoln castle 118–19 marriage of daughter Mary 121 sheriff of Wiltshire 119, 120, 122 Longespée, William the younger 123, 124 claims to shrievalty of Wiltshire 123 Louis, eldest son of King Philip II 115, 117, 120, 129 Louis VI, king of France 44 Louis VII, king of France 44, 45 Louis IX, king of France 74 Lovetot, John 105 Lynn, Godfrey of 99 Clarice his wife 99 Madox, Thomas 6, 17 Magna Carta 55, 69, 76, 77, 98, 115, 116, 127, 130 effects upon financial policy 73 Maitland, F. W. 10, 13, 98 Manors, royal improvements to 127–8, 137–8 monarch’s role as lord of 125, 126–8, 132–3, 138 officials 15, 126, 129–31, 134–6, 139 tenants aspirations and grievances 125–6, 129–31, 133–5, 136, 137, 138 monarch’s relationship with 15, 128–9, 131, 134, 137–9

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Index Mansfield, Nottinghamshire 128, 130, 133 manor 126, 129, 131, 136 market and fair at 132 Ralph the clerk of 136 soke 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134 tenants 134, 137, 138 Mansfield Woodhouse, Nottinghamshire 138 Marc, Philip 130 keeper of Nottingham castle 129 sheriff of Derbyshire 129 sheriff of Lincolnshire 115, 116 sheriff of Nottingham 112, 116, 129 March, William, treasurer 71, 76, 79, 80, 81, 86 Markets and fairs, see Mansfield; Romford; Wellow; Marshal, William (I), earl of Pembroke, regent 117, 129 nephew of 117 Marshal, William (II), earl of Pembroke 122 Mattel, Master Philip 63 Maxwell-Lyte, H. C. 17 McIntosh, Marjorie 126 Meekings, C. A. F. 11, 76, 100, 106 Melksham, Wiltshire 132 Memoranda rolls 6, 7, 22–3, 75, 80, 134 Meung, Bernard de, formulary 46 Mickleover, Derbyshire, manor 137 Middlesex 98, 109 sheriff of 24 Middleton, Richard 104 Mills, M. H. 6–7, 75–6, 78, 81 Monmouth, John of castellan of Chepstow and Hereford castles 122 sheriff of Hereford 122 sheriff of Wiltshire 122 Morris, W. A. 13, 14, 87–8, 116 Mortmain licences fines paid for 94–5 nature of transactions licensed 89, 90, 93, 94 petitions for 88–90, 93 process for obtaining 12–13, 87–95 role of inquisitions ad quod damnum 89–92, 93, 94–5 purpose of 12, 87, 95–6

147

types of licence granted 88, 94 types of recipient 87, 93 see also Statutes Moulton, Thomas of, sheriff of Lincolnshire 116 Narbonne, merchants of 77 Neville, Hugh de 54, 58 New Forest, Hampshire 58 Newark, Nottinghamshire 117, 129 Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire 104, 135 Newstead, Nottinghamshire, priory of 127 Nicholas, Ralph fitz, royal steward 122 Nigel, Richard fitz 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 30 Dialogue, see Exchequer Tricolumnis 27 Norfolk 115 prisoners of 104 Normanvill, Thomas de, royal steward 136 Northampton, Northamptonshire 118, 119 Nortier, Michel 19, 44, 45 Norwich, Norfolk 109 bishop of, attorney of 104 Holy Trinity church 104 Nottingham 129 castle 114, 128 keeper of, see Marc Nottinghamshire 15, 112, 126, 127, 128, 131, 133, 136 royal forest of 112, 131 sheriff of, see Marc shrievalty of 134 Oliver, Jordan 100 Originalia rolls 23, 30, 35, 50–1, 66 Ormrod, W. M. 8, 83, 85 Oswardbeck, Nottinghamshire, soke 132 Oxford, Provisions of 74, 75, 98 Palmer, R.. C. 55 Pandulf, papal legate 120 Paris, France 46, 69 Parliament 77, 89, 90, 92, see also Acton Burnell; Westminster Patent rolls 35, 48, 50–1, 66, 68, 105 cited examples 102 commissions enrolled upon 35, see also Assize; Gaol delivery

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Pateshall, Martin of, royal justice 11 Patrick, constable of Salisbury 119 sheriff of Wiltshire 119, 122 Patrick, William fitz, earl of Salisbury, sheriff of Wiltshire 119, 122 Pecham, John, archbishop of Canterbury 95 Pembroke, earl of, see Marshal Perche, Thomas, count of 117 Perleben, Mabil 99 Michael son of 99 Peter, Geoffrey fitz, justiciar 68 Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, abbot of 105 Pevensey, steward of 105 Peverel, Hugh, keeper of the peace 105, 106 Philip II (Augustus), king of France 19, 30, 46 charters 44, 45 clerks of 45 mandates 44 Philip IV (the Fair), king of France 69 Pickering, Yorkshire, forest 66 Pipe rolls 3, 6, 8, 20, 23, 26, 27, 29, 30, 35, 41, 53, 124 accounting process 21, 22, 35, 38, 61, 73, 76, 78, 79 cited examples 28, 72, 73, 76, 114 corrections to 25 fines for enrolment of private charters on 39 reforms to 76, 78, 80 see also Winchester Pisa, merchants of 77 Plessis, John de, earl of Warwick 133 Plucknett, T. F. T. 95 Plumbergh, Laurence, justice of gaol delivery 108 Poore, Richard le, bishop of Salisbury 121 Pointon, Alexander of, sheriff of Lincolnshire 116 Poole, R. L. 17 Preston, Gilbert 101, 105 Prestwich, Michael 71, 81, 82, 83, 85 Prinz, William le 100 Pugh, R. B. 98, 100, 104, 106, 108 Quatt, Shropshire 99 Quincy, Saer de, earl of Winchester 122

Radmanthwaite, Hugh of 136 Ragman commissioners 134 Ralegh, William of, royal justice 11, 103 Ramsay, Sir James 7 Reading, Berkshire, abbot of 104 Receipt rolls 6, 22, 27, 53, 61, 79, 80, 84 cited example 72, 75, 83 Record keeping, see Archives Retford, Nottinghamshire, manor 66 Rhosyr, Anglesey 127 Rhuddlan, Denbighshire 58 Riccardi of Lucca, bankers 77, 78, 79, 81 Richard, earl of Cornwall 120, 122 Richard I, king of England 1, 8, 45, 72, 73, 120, 128 charters 38, 39, 41, 112–13 crusade and captivity 41, 114 fleet of 113 letters 33, 36, 41 seals 38, 41 writs 28, 33 Richard II, king of England 132 Richardson, H. G. 17, 32, 34, 36–7 Robert Bruce, king of Scotland 136 Robert le clerk 99 Roches, Peter des, bishop of Winchester 68, 118 Rodestan, William de, bailiff of Woodstock 83 Roger, royal almoner 39 Rolls comparison with registers 42, 45–6, 48 private nature of 26, 38–9, 48 usefulness 3, 42, 48, 66–7 see also Cartae Antiquae; Charter; Close; Fine; Jornalia; Justice; Liberate; Memoranda; Originalia; Patent; Pipe; Receipt Romford, Essex, fair 132 market 126, 132 Round, J. H. 6, 36, 37, 113, 115 St Albans, Hertfordshire, charter of 39 St Martin, Adam of 129, 130–1, 136 bailiffs of 129 St Victor, Paris, register of letters 45, 46 Salisbury, Wiltshire bishop of, see Poore castle 120–1, 122, 123, 124

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Index cathedral of 120 earls of, see Longespée; Patrick John of 32 letter collection of 20 Sandwich, Ralph of, royal steward 136 Savoy 42 Peter of 42 Scharlet, Walter 104 Scot, John le, earl of Chester 132 Scotland 3, 71 wars 58 William of 28 Seagrave, Stephen of, royal justice 122 Seals exchequer 23, 32 great 32, 49, 51, 63, 64, 65 controls 4, 5 keeper of 41 letters 58 griffin 65 officials 65 of Henry II 39 of Richard I 38, 41 private (privy) 5, 50, 57, 58, 63, 64, 69, 83 keeper of 65 royal 31 secret 58, 63, 64, 69 signet 58, 63, 69 Serland, Geoffrey de 116, 117–18 Sheriffs 47, 106 castellanship of royal castles, see Castles county farms of 6, 13, 75, 77, 78, 79 duties of 6, 13, 33, 83, 114, 116, 123–4, 126 financial responsibilities 7, 14, 23–5, 52, 75–6, 81, 115 family claims to 112–14, 119–20, see also Haye; Longespée female 15, 111–12, 115–16, 121–2, 124 semi-hereditary nature of 15, 112, 116, 119, 122–3, 124 under-sheriffs 121, 123 Sherwood forest 128, 137, 139 steward of 136 Shrewsbury, Shropshire 93 Sicily, rulers of 19 Henry III’s plan for 73

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Simon, Nigel son of 135 William son of 135 Skegby, Nottinghamshire tenants 131 manor 131 Southchurch, Richard, keeper of the peace 106 Spigurnel, Geoffrey 131 Stacey, R. C. 7–8, 72 Stafford, Staffordshire, gaol 100 Stapledon, Walter, bishop of Exeter 3 Statutes De Justiciariis Asignatis 107 Exchequer 77 Mortmain 87–8, 95 Rhuddlan 78 Stepney 81 Stenton, D. M. 10–11, 12 Stephen, king of England 21, 132 letters 33 Stephen, Ralph fitz 112 Stubbs, William 6 Suffolk, prisoners of 104 Sugur, abbot, register of correspondence 45, 46 Sutton, John of 138 Sutton, Oliver, bishop of Lincoln 42 Swerford, Alexander of 21, 28, 30 red book of 28 Tany, Richard de, keeper of the peace 105, 106 Taunton, Peter de 84 Taxation 7, 8, 75–81, 83–6 Tewkesbury, Alan of, letter collection of 20 Thanet, Kent 115 Thirkleby, Roger of 133 Tickhill, Yorkshire, castle 114 honour 127 Titchfield, Hampshire 56 Tonbridge, Kent 104 Tout, T. F. 1, 2, 4–6, 13, 15, 17, 74, 83, 84 Tower, Nicholas 104 Traditon, Robert, parson of 99 Treasurer, of the exchequer 53, see also Chauncy; Chishill; Crakehall; Kirby; Langton; March

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Treasury, royal 6, 74, 75, 80, 82, 83, 85 safekeeping of documents in 3, 27, 28–30, see also Archives whereabouts of 6 Treaties 19, 28, 30 Le Goulet 45 Winchester 28 Trent, River 126, 136 Trowbridge, Wiltshire, castle 121 honour 121 Ulster, Emeline, countess of 87 Valence, Aylmer de, bishop elect of Winchester 75 William de 135 Vaux, Oliver 104 Venice, merchants of 77 Walecote, Hugh de 84 Wales 122 wars 58, 78, 80, 105 Wallingford, Berkshire, honour 133 Walsingham, Norfolk, cartulary 47 Walter, Hubert 3, 39, 41 archbishop of Canterbury 41, 67 chancellor 3, 41, 43, 67–8 dean of York 39 justiciar 3, 41, 67 Wanborough, Wiltshire, chapel of St Katherine of 87 Wardrobe, English royal financial functions 4, 5, 52–4, 58–62, 71, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80–3, 85, 86 Edwardian reforms 78, 81–4 keeper of 54, 60, 74, 77 records 5, 50, 53, 54, 59–62, 64, 65, 83, 85 relationship with chancery 5, 52–4, 58–9, 60, 62 with exchequer 51–4, 58–60, 80 see also Exchequer; Treasury Warenne, William de, earl of Surrey 122 Warren, W. L. 25 Warsop, Nottinghamshire 127, 128, 138 manor 138 Warwick, earl of. See Beaumont Weber, Max 26

Welbe, Richard le 105 Wellow, Nottinghamshire, manor 129 market and fair 129, 134 Wells, Jocelin of, bishop of Bath and 121 Westminster 5, 50, 56, 57, 68, 81, 82, 98, 130, 131 abbey 3, 53, 58, 88, 128 law courts 11, 65, 68, 126, 127 Odo of 58 parliament at 63, see also Parliament Provisions of 74 Wilkinson, Bertie 5 Willard, J. F. 83 William I, the Conqueror 127 William the Lion, king of Scotland 28, 128 William, Adam son of 100, 104 Ralph son of 135 Wiltshire 15, 98, 100, 124 royal justices in 120 sheriff of 121, see also Hale; Longespée; Monmouth; Patrick shrievalty of 111, 121, 123 Winchester, Hampshire 6, 27, 58, 128 bishop of 105, see also Roches steward of 105 bishopric of 75 earl of, see Quincy 117 pipe rolls 68 Windsor, Berkshire, castle 58 Wintreshull, William of, steward of bishop of Winchester 105 Wolffe, B. P. 139 Woodstock, Oxfordshire 134 Worcester, Worcestershire, bailiffs of 65, see also Rodestan Worcestershire, general eyre of 11 Writs 1, 14, 24, 27, 30, 35, 47, 55, 58 Anglo-Saxon 19 Angevin 34 financial 32, 33, 34, 35 computate 23, 24–5, 29, 31, 51–3, 58–60, 62, 64–5 liberate 23, 29, 30, 31, 45, 51–4, 58–60, 62, 64, 83, 84–5 perdono 29 judicial 3, 9, 10, 11, 14, 34, 35, 45 de cursu 32, 50, 55–6, 58, 65, 68

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Index of grace 33 of peace 32 numbers of 10, 29, 32, 33, 55–6 military summons 33, 45 monstraverunt 136 return of 9, 33, 47 see also Henry I; Henry II; Mortmain licences; Richard I

York 54, 58, 63, 81, 82, 129 archbishop of, see Geoffrey dean of, see Walter Yorkshire 84, 120 sheriff of 51 Zuche, William le, keeper of the peace 106

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