The Pipe Rolls and the Adoption of Demesne Farming in England

Abstract

IT iS generally accepted that the management of landed estates in England changed radically between the mid-twelfth and the mid-thirteenth century with the introduction of demesne farming: manors were run by the landlord's local officers, answerable to him for all receipts and expenses, instead of by lessees who paid a predetermined annual rent. But even detailed studies of individual estates have failed to reveal much of the chronology of the change. Where they exist, private estate-accounts provide indisputable evidence; it is through these, for example, that we know that the estates of the bishop of Winchester were mostly under direct management by I208.1 But probably very few estates produced such written accounts in the early thirteenth century, and of these fewer still have survived: there is no other estate from which we have complete accounts before I 240 covering all the manors in its possession.2 A good deal of scattered evidence from individual places certainly survives. A document in the cartulary of Beaulieu Abbey, for instance, provides for an agreement over tithes of Little Faringdon (Oxfordshire) to come into effect when its demesne lands there, leased to men of the vill from Michaelmas 12I3, come under the abbey's direct management once more.3 But evidence of this sort, although valuable, is too haphazard to give us an overall picture. The present article attempts to provide this from the published Pipe Rolls of the Royal Exchequer from I I 55 to I 2 I 6.4