The Winchester Pipe Rolls and Medieval English Society

Abstract

The Winchester Pipe Rolls and Medieval English Society. Edited by RICHARD BRITNELL (Woodbridge: Boydell P., 2003; pp. 213. N.p.). THE Winchester pipe rolls (so-called from their resemblance to the pipe rolls of the royal Exchequer) record the cash receipts and expenditure and details of demesne exploitation of the manors belonging to the see of Winchester, together with comparable information about a number of boroughs, from 1208–9 to 1454–5, and when, in the latter year, registers replaced rolls, the change in format entailed no change in content. After many moves from repository to repository, they are housed in the Hampshire Record Office at Winchester. The rolls were known to Maitland, who in the 1880s noted their potential as a source for jurisdiction, but, as Richard Britnell points out in the masterly first chapter of the present volume, their use did not take off in the study of economic and social history until the opening decades of the twentieth century. Then, however, as both local historians and those with wider interests concentrated their attention on the effects of the Black Death of 1348–9 on rural society, the rolls themselves became a focus of study. The Winchester estate, being a very large estate of an ecclesiastical owner and not the small estate of a lay owner, was untypical of medieval English estates in general. Moreover, it was confined to the south of England, and among southern counties, Hampshire had more of the bishop's manors than any other. But the pipe rolls begin earlier than any other enrolled manorial accounts known to us and survive in numbers (191 down to 1454–5) unparalleled elsewhere; and, most unusually, they relate to an entire estate. These features mean that they are uniquely important for the quantitative study of economic and social trends in the middle ages which was pioneered by Lord Beveridge, greatly enlarged by Michael Postan and Jan Titow, who deployed it brilliantly in discussion of the neo-Malthusian interpretation of population change, and subsequently refined by David Farmer, a towering figure in the statistical treatment of medieval prices, wages and yields. In the age of the computerised data-set, it has been continued and diversified by many, but most notably by Bruce Campbell. To the present volume, Campbell contributes an important chapter setting the Winchester estates in their geographical and institutional context and suggesting ways in which the pipe rolls may now appropriately be used.