Farmer turned to the unrivalled information found in the Winchester accounts. To do this, statistics on fundamental matters like population growth, prices, rents, wages and crop yields were needed, and to obtain these researchers such as W. However, it was only in the middle decades of the twentieth century that the pipe rolls came into their own, as historians became dissatisfied with the largely disconnected local investigations that had characterized the field up to that point, and sought instead to chart and understand the broader shape of medieval economic and demographic change affecting the country as a whole.
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The pipe rolls attracted surprisingly little attention in works published in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decade or two of the twentieth century, though there were notable exceptions to this, such as a series of important early contributions to the classic debate on the economic consequences of the Black Death of 1348–9. This volume originated in a conference held in 1999, and several of the papers present findings from major research projects based on the documents.Īs Richard Britnell’s introduction to the volume demonstrates, the story of historical study of the Winchester pipe rolls is inseparable from the wider story of the development of English medieval economic and social history as a field of research. Although the later fifteenth and sixteenth century records continue to provide a sizeable and important source, the essays in The Winchester Pipe Rolls and Medieval English Society follow historiographical tradition by concentrating on the riches contained within the first two centuries of the pipe rolls. Thereafter the series of rolls runs with some gaps until 1454–5, from which date the accounts were recorded in large registers rather than rolls.
The records were modelled on the royal administration, and the earliest relates to the accounting year 1208–9. The individual accounts that make up a pipe roll also provide detailed documentation of the management of the demesne within each manor, that is, of the land farmed directly by the bishop. Each bulky pipe roll consists of a summary of income and expenditure during the Michaelmas to Michaelmas accounting year from each of the bishop of Winchester’s 50–60 manors, properties which were dotted across seven counties of southern England. As a source for economic and social history between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries they are without equal, since even documents of roughly comparable structure and purpose cannot offer anything like the same quantity and variety of information, or coverage of such a long chronological period. The Winchester pipe rolls are among the very greatest monuments to medieval English administration and record-keeping.
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