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1. The Fine Rolls of Henry III: the origins and development of the rolls

1.1. Fines and the Fine Rolls

One of the chief treasures of The National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office) is the great series of rolls on which the English royal Chancery recorded its business, a unique resource for historians without parallel in the rest of Europe. Of these rolls, the fine rolls are the earliest. The charter, close and patent rolls are usually thought to have started at the point from which they begin to survive, that is from around the start of John’s reign in 1199. ¹ The fine rolls likewise survive from this point but they almost certainly had an earlier life, one which stretched back at least to the 1170s. ² The fine rolls are equally distinctive in function. Their companion rolls recorded the written instruments which the Chancery was issuing, charters on the charter roll, letters patent on the patent roll and letters close on the close roll. ³ The fine rolls, by contrast, recorded offers of money to the king for concessions and favours, a fine in a general sense being an agreement made with the king to pay a certain sum of money for a specified benefit.

The earliest surviving fine rolls, or what became fine rolls, had no settled heading. That found on the roll for John’s first year is ‘offers received, oblata recepta’, ⁴ that for year three is ‘roll of offers received, rotulus oblatorum receptorum’, ⁵ that for year six ‘roll of fines received, rotulus finium receptorum’ ⁶ and that for year nine (1207–08) ‘offers of the court, oblata curie’. ⁷ After 1207–08 the rolls are lost until thar for year fifteen (1213–14) where the heading is ‘roll of fines’, ⁸ as it is also in the roll for year seventeen. ⁹ In varying shapes and sizes, ‘roll of fines, rotulus finium’, with the relevant regnal year, is almost exclusively the only heading found in the rolls of Henry III. ¹⁰

This fixing of the title as a roll of fines was probably influenced by changes of terminology within the rolls themselves. While the terms ‘fine’ and ‘offer’ feature in the early headings, neither word, with a few exceptions, actually appears in the body of the rolls. Instead individuals are said simply to ‘give’ money to the king. The first entry on the roll for John’s first regnal year is typical: ‘Walter son of Godfrey gives (dat) the king fifty marks to have custody of the land and heir of Robert de Wateleg’’. ¹¹ In the rolls from 1213–14 onwards, however, entries of the old ‘dat’ type are now interspersed with those where an individual ‘has made fine with the lord king, finem fecit cum domino Rege’. This continues to be the case throughout the reign of Henry III and doubtless helps explain why the title of the roll becomes ‘roll of fines’ rather than ‘roll of offers’, ‘fine’ appearing in the body of the roll where ‘offer’ rarely does. ¹²

This change in terminology between 1207–08 and 1213–14 was accompanied by a further development in Chancery practice, one which enables the fines to be dated, if only indirectly. This change involved making a note in the record of each fine of the accompanying letter to the sheriff ordering him to take security for payment. Since such letters concluded with clauses giving their place and date of issue, we can get a fairly good idea from 1213–14 onwards as to when fines were actually made. ¹³ All this is in contrast to the situation down to 1207–08 where even when accompanying letters were included, they were usually left without their place/date clauses.

The inclusion of related letters with their place-date clauses clearly testified to the Chancery’s desire to record more exact information. Was that also the reason for the introduction of the ‘finem fecit’ formula, or were ‘finem fecit’ and ‘dat’ virtually synonyms, with their choice reflecting no more than the whim of individual clerks? ¹⁴ The same question arises in respect of the ‘fines and offers, fines and oblata’ which, as we have seen, both feature in the headings to the early rolls. It certainly seems that, in some contexts, fines and oblata could mean the same thing. Although from 1213–14 onwards the heading to the rolls is nearly always ‘roll of fines’, when the Exchequer entered the fine roll debts on the pipe roll it always did so under the heading ‘new offerings, nova oblata’. ¹⁵ In a broad sense, it also seems that ‘dat’ entries were regarded as fines just as much as ‘finem fecit’ ones. After all, the roll becomes a ‘roll of fines’ despite the fact that ‘dat’ appears far more frequently than does ‘finem fecit’. Sometimes, moreover, an offer which begins ‘dat’ or ‘dant’ (as in that of the men of Berkshire for custody of their county’s forest in 1221) is described as a fine in the body of the entry. ¹⁶ Likewise when marginalia begin to appear in the rolls describing the subject matter of entries (a development discussed below), a proffer in ‘dat’ form can be described in the margin as a ‘fine’. In February 1224, for example, the marginal note to an entry beginning William, son of Daniel Butler, ‘gives the king’ 15 marks for seisin of a mill has the marginal annotation ‘The fine of William, son of Daniel Butler’. ¹⁷

Yet this is not the whole story. The author of the Dialogus de Scaccario, the great book about the working of the Exchequer written in the late 1170s, made a distinction between ‘offer’ and ‘fine’. The former was an entirely voluntary payment for an immediate or future benefit. The latter was in some degree involuntary, the example given being that of relief, the payment necessarily made by an heir to succeed to his inheritance. Although one could negotiate, or try to negotiate over the level of a fine, one was, to a greater or lesser degree, compelled to make it. ¹⁸ The question thus arises as to whether the ‘fine’ and ‘dat’ entries found in the rolls from 1213–14 reflect this distinction in the Dialogus. ¹⁹ The answer is both yes and no. It is certainly a striking fact that from 1213–14 reliefs and other payments to enter inheritances, as Paul Dryburgh has shown, are almost universally accorded the ‘finem fecit’ formula. ²⁰ Indeed, in one such case the clerk deliberately altered ‘dat’ to ‘finem fecit’. ²¹ ‘Finem fecit’ also appears in cases where money is promised for the king’s grace or for the pardon of some offence, which would also seem to come within the Dialogus’s definition of fines since, like reliefs, if in a different way, they were hardly entirely voluntary. ²² When Magna Carta in 1215 stigmatised all ‘fines which have been made unjustly and against the law of the land’ it was surely thinking of payments of these types. ²³ The involuntary element may also explain why ‘finem fecit’ usually appears in payments for respite or attermination of debts owed the crown, and why it appears too in fines from widows to stay single or marry whom they wish. In both these cases the fines were clearly forced, to some extent, from those making them by threat or fear. ²⁴ By contrast, it is equally true that nearly all the ‘dat’ entries in the rolls seem to be voluntary offers, for example for licenses to have market and fairs, or for writs to pursue legal actions. ²⁵ The huge increase in the offers for writs in the Henrician rolls is one reason why the ‘dat’ entries become so predominant.

This distinction between the involuntary ‘finem fecit’ entries and the voluntary ‘dat’ ones is not, however, clear cut. Most strikingly the finem fecit formula becomes normal in the numerous payments for possession of wardships, an area which the Dialogus specifically placed in the voluntary offer category. ²⁶ What then can one conclude? There was certainly a sense in which all the promises of money on the rolls were fines. However, ‘dat’ was generally used for voluntary offers, by far the most numerous becoming those connected with writs to pursue legal actions. The ‘finem fecit’ entries can be characterised in various ways. The great bulk of them, excluding fines for wardships, were to some degree involuntary. Most of them also related to the king’s tenurial or ‘feudal’ rights, being connected with relief, marriages, and wardships, which is why the category embraced fines which the Dialogus put in the voluntary category. ²⁷ It would be wrong to say that the distinction between the ‘dat’ and ‘finem fecit’ entries entirely matched that between business which was routine and that which was important and specially touched the king. The offers of money in 1227 for new and renewed charters clearly came into the latter category yet the great majority began with the ‘dat’ formula. ²⁸ There is, however, some truth in the division.

This brings us on to a wider question which is how fines (using the term now to cover all the proffers on the roll) were actually made, a subject on which there is unfortunately no direct contemporary comment. At the bottom of the scale, the routine fines for which there was a fairly settled charge, like those for writs of pone securing a place for a lawsuit at a particular court, were probably made simply with the Chancery staff. ²⁹ At the top, there must have been many fines which were negotiated directly with the king and or his leading ministers. In the rolls covered by this volume, given that the king was only nine on his accession in October 1216, the ultimate responsibility rested initially with the regent William Marshal, earl of Pembroke. Until the introduction of the king’s own seal in November 1218, it was the Marshal’s seal which was used to authenticate royal letters and he remained their usual witness down to his resignation in April 1219. ³⁰ Thereafter the job of witnessing the letters (which meant acting as their ultimate authority) was taken over by the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, though initially he had to work closely with Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, the king’s tutor, and Pandulf, the papal legate. It was not until the end of 1223 that the king himself entered part of his regal powers and began to witness the letters, although the fact that these were often still authorised by Hubert or witnessed in his presence shows that he remained very much in control of government. ³¹ He did, however, now have to work with the bishops of Bath and Salisbury whom Archbishop Langton had placed at his side as the price of their alliance. ³² These were certainly structures where one can imagine a great deal of debate about the fines, and of this there are indeed signs in the rolls. Thus in 1227 an offer by Peter des Roches, very much persona non grata with Hubert de Burgh, was first obstructed and then failed to secure all that Peter wanted. ³³ There are equally signs of disagreement under John where several offers appearing on the rolls, presumably through the agency of ministers, were later rejected by the king. ³⁴

1.2. The Fine Rolls, the Originalia Rolls and the workings of royal finance

In the fine rolls, as we have seen, individuals are said to ‘give’ money to the king. Although this would seem to indicate that they were paying cash down, in the very great majority of cases they were doing nothing of the kind. Rather, the sums on the roll, whether given or fined for, were monies merely promised to the king, which still had to be collected. The king, moreover, did not receive this money directly. Rather it was collected by, and paid into, the Exchequer at Westminster. How then was the Exchequer to know what money to collect? The answer is that copies of the fine roll were sent to it in instalments through the year. This is why in the rolls there are intermittent notes (sometimes in the margin, sometimes in the body of the text) ‘hinc mittendum est ad scaccarium’, ‘from here it is to be sent to the Exchequer’, which signified the point at which the last instalment had been dispatched, and a new one had to be prepared. A typical note from October 1219 reads: ‘From here it is to be sent to the Exchequer and what is above has been delivered to the Treasurer [of the Exchequer] by the hand of R. de Neville’, Ralph de Neville being the keeper of the seal and the man in day to day charge of the Chancery. ³⁵ The copy of the roll sent to the Exchequer was called the ‘originalia roll’. ³⁶ A surviving fragment of such a roll for 1195–6 is one piece of evidence for the early existence of the fine rolls. ³⁷ On receipt of the originalia roll, the Exchequer transferred the debts to the ‘summonses’, the list of debts which it sent twice annually to the sheriff for him to collect and pay into the treasury. It also copied the debts onto the pipe roll (the annual record of the audit of all money owed to the crown) where they were placed, county by county, under the heading ‘new offerings, nova oblata’. ³⁸ On the apparently rare occasions where a fine was paid direct to the king (usually into either his Chamber or Wardrobe) a note was added to the fine roll stating that the fine in question should not be sent to the Exchequer. This meant that the debt would not be placed on the originalia roll. ³⁹

1.3. The growth of non-fine business on the Fine Rolls

The introduction of the finem fecit formula and the routine appearance of writs with their place/date clauses were not the only changes seen in the fine rolls from the last years of King John. ⁴⁰ They also witness the beginning of a process which, continuing apace under Henry III, was to transform the nature of the rolls. This was the increasing inclusion of material unrelated to fines but nonetheless of importance to the Exchequer. ⁴¹ Thus the rolls come to include letters about such things as the rates of debt repayment, the taking of land into the king’s hands on the death of a tenant-in-chief, the seizure of land in cases of rebellion, the taxation levied on the royal demesne (including the Jews), and the terms of appointment to sheriffdoms and the custody of manors. Sometimes, when the relevant letters were addressed to the sheriff or another official, the intention, it may be supposed, was to keep the Exchequer informed of them through a copy on the originalia rolls. ⁴² In other cases, where the letter was addressed to the Exchequer in the first place, it was probably entered on the fine roll rather than the close roll because of a growing belief that the former was the more appropriate roll for that type of Exchequer business. ⁴³ This also had the advantage of reducing the size of the increasingly unwieldy close rolls, a problem also tackled by hiving off onto the liberate roll, introduced in 1226, all writs related to the expenditure of money. ⁴⁴

2. The form of the Henrician Fine Rolls

In form, the fine rolls of Henry III are much like those of King John’s last years. As with all the Chancery rolls, a new set was opened each regnal year, so the Henrician rolls run from 28 October (the date of Henry’s first coronation) to 27 October. They were written in Latin on membranes of parchment in Chancery cursive hands, the membranes being sewn end to end (much of the stitching is contemporary). In the roll for John’s first year, the membranes are only 19.5 to 22.5 centimetres (cm) wide, but they thereafter expand, those for 1213–14, and 1215–16 varying in width between 32 cm and 37 cm, roughly their size under Henry III. The membranes could also vary in length, although usually within comparatively narrow limits. For example, the 13 membranes of the roll for 1228–29 are between 46 cm and 56 cm long, with a fairly uniform width of 34–35 cm. The total length of the roll is 648 cm or 21 and a quarter feet. ⁴⁵

After the recovery from the civil war in which the reign began, the rolls down to 1234 are usually between 9 and 13 membranes in length, containing between roughly 300 and 500 separate items of business, as the following table shows, while those from 1234–1248 are longer and contain 400–800 items of business. In certain years, often when the king spends time on the Continent, more than one roll is employed during a single regnal year, one being kept in Chancery and the other or others itinerating with the king. In its English translation, the roll for 1229–30 includes some 35,000 words. Some later rolls have 10,000 words more.

Much more research is needed before a detailed comparison can be made between the rolls of John and Henry III in terms of volume, type and value of business. The table below is offered for what it is worth, and it should be born in mind that John’s early rolls have much narrower membranes than those which became prevalent later. It is safe to say, however, that the financial value of fines under John was far greater than under his son, a reflection of the reduced power and scope of royal government after Magna Carta and the 1215–1217 civil war. This is a subject which the project hopes to investigate more fully in due course. ⁵⁵

3. The duplicate rolls

Like other Chancery rolls in the minority of Henry III, and the last years of King John, the fine rolls were written in duplicate. The contents of the two rolls are largely the same, and any significant variations have been noted in this edition. It is clear that the duplication was accomplished by one roll being copied from the other. ⁵⁹ Thus the second roll omits cancelled entries found on the first roll, yet incorporates many of its amendments. Many but not all, for it is equally clear that it was the first roll which was the main working copy. Thus changes made after the second roll had been drawn up were often included on the first roll but not the second. ⁶⁰ As a result of these differences, the second roll, although sometimes written more carelessly, ⁶¹ has a neater appearance than the first one, lacking the alterations and having smaller gaps between entries and fewer changes of ink and hand. The impression is that the first roll was entered up at much shorter intervals than the second roll, a conclusion which further study of the paleography may be able to amplify. ⁶²

The fact that duplicate rolls go back to John’s reign shows that they were not produced by the special circumstances of Henry’s minority. ⁶³ Their function was doubtless to provide back up in case of loss or damage, but there may have been more to it than that. A further possibility is that the rolls were associated with different ministers. At the Exchequer there were thus two copies of the pipe roll made each year, one the treasurer’s and the other the chancellor’s. Likewise there were two memoranda rolls (largely though not entirely with the same business), one drawn up by the king’s remembrancer and one by the treasurer’s. ⁶⁴ In respect of the fine rolls, it may be that the first roll was the king’s roll and the second the chancellor’s. On the first roll were recorded the fines in the order in which they were made, whether with the king, or one of his ministers. In practice, in the minority, this was the roll of the regent, William Marshal, and after his resignation in 1219 the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh. ⁶⁵ The second roll was that of the chancellor and his deputy, the keeper of the seal, being drawn up both for reasons of status and to monitor what was going on. In the minority, while the chancellor was Richard Marsh, bishop of Durham, the day to day head of the office was the keeper of the seal, Ralph de Neville. ⁶⁶ When Neville, now bishop of Chichester as well as keeper, heard assizes at Shrewsbury in 1224 it was on the second fine roll that the amercements he imposed were recorded. ⁶⁷ This does suggest it was peculiarly his roll. It is also of interest that the second roll sometimes omits the ‘from here it is to sent to the Exchequer’ entries. ⁶⁸ Presumably this was partly because, by the time the roll was copied, the dispatch of the originalia roll had already taken place, but it may also be because the person who made the delivery was usually Neville himself. He had no need to be reminded on his own roll of what he knew he had done. ⁶⁹

There was one occasion where really significant differences opened up between the first and second fine rolls, the original and the copy. This happened in Henry III’s ninth year, 1224–1225, and relates to an important change in the form of the fine rolls, namely the replacement of marginalia, which simply indicated the county to which an entry belonged, with ones which indicated the entry’s subject matter and or beneficiary. In the early minority of Henry III, both the patent rolls and close rolls had gained subject/person marginalia, a reform perhaps of Ralph de Neville. ⁷⁰ This put them out of line with the fine rolls which, since the earliest to survive, had marginalia that simply indicated counties. There was a logic to that when the fine rolls had merely been a list of debts. What the Exchequer needed to know was to which sheriff it should send the demand for payment, and in which county section of the pipe roll it should enroll the debt. It became less easy to justify this practice when the fine rolls came to include writs dealing with all manner of concessions as well as a range of business unconnected with fines. Even in respect of fines, a mere note of county would be no help if a search was being made for a fine made by a particular person, as happened in 1221 when the clerks had to go through John’s rolls for the 500 mark fine of Robert de Ferrers to marry Joan daughter of William of Buckland. They found it, but their task would have been easier had the marginal note referred to ‘fine of Robert de Ferrers’ rather to the counties where Joan held land. ⁷¹

Gradually, during the 1220s, fine roll marginalia did begin to give more information. Those in the roll for 6 Henry III, 1221–1222, are still almost entirely of the county type, but by the time we get to the eighth year, 1223–1224, they are now leavened with a good number of subject/person entries, in part because of the desire to identify writs concerning individuals caught up in the fall of Falkes de Bréauté. What is noticeable, however, is that the second roll was actually more enthusiastic about the change than the first. Thus, for example, in entries from July 1224 the second roll replaces the first roll’s ‘Yorkshire and Lincolnshire’ with ‘for Gilbert de Gant’ and its ‘Oxfordshire’ with ‘fine for grace’. ⁷² In the next year, 1224–1225, this divergence between the rolls becomes what almost seems open conflict. It is quite clear that the second roll is still copied from the first. Cancelled entries are omitted, alterations incorporated and even a correction made to maintain the first roll’s order. ⁷³ But when it came to the marginalia the clerk of the second roll now declared independence, replacing many of the county type with those of the subject/people variety. ⁷⁴ Thus, at the very start, ‘Nottinghamshire’ is replaced by ‘concerning land to be taken into the hands of the king’ and ‘Yorkshire’ with ‘concerning the manor of Harewood committed to W. archbishop of York’. ⁷⁵

This ‘war of the rolls’, if such it was, terminated in the second roll’s victory. As late as April 1225 it still knew its place, in characteristic second roll fashion omitting the first roll’s ‘from here it is to be sent to the Exchequer’ entry. ⁷⁶ But there was already a sign of the first roll’s eclipse because its marginalia had ceased altogether, that for 25 March being the last. ⁷⁷ This was followed by even more dramatic symptoms of decline. Between 14 April and 14 June the first roll has both less detailed and fewer entries (45 as against 56) than those found on the second roll. ⁷⁸ It also omits entries cancelled on the second roll, a complete reversal of the previous order of things. ⁷⁹ In fact, the end was nigh, for the first roll’s entry for 14 June is its last. That entry comes at the bottom of a membrane, but there is no indication that another membrane was ever attached. By far the likeliest hypothesis is that the roll was abandoned. Thereafter, until the end of the regnal year, the second roll, stood alone, possessing all the characteristics of the first roll, including the very ‘from here it is to be sent to the Exchequer’ type of entry it had previously omitted. ⁸⁰ County marginalia continued to feature but they were outnumbered, 85 to 75, by those of the person/subject variety. This was the future. Person/subject marginalia predominate, sometimes by a great margin, throughout the subsequent Henrician rolls.

It is difficult to be sure how to interpret this sequence of events. Clearly a decision had been made, most likely by Neville, to introduce person/subject marginalia to the fine rolls. Perhaps the clerk of the first roll for 1224–25 had simply failed to get the message. Or perhaps Neville, with more control of the second roll (if that was the chancellor’s), introduced the reform there first. Whatever the truth, the reform shows the desire to improve the rolls as working documents. There may also have been logic behind the retention for certain entries of the old county marginalia. Although the subject needs further investigation, and there was certainly no absolute rule, the impression is that these were mostly employed for straightforward fines (like those for writs to initiate and further legal actions) which the clerk knew would be going onto the originalia roll. This was the reason, along with the omission of much non-fine business, why the marginalia in the originalia rolls remained largely of a county type, and thus of help to the work of the Exchequer. ⁸¹

The last duplicate fine roll was almost certainly that for 11 Henry III, although all that survives is one damaged membrane covering business in December 1226 and January 1227. ⁸² We can be fairly clear this roll was the last because in 1227 all the other duplicates bar one were brought to an end. They were abandoned, moreover, not at the end of the regnal year in October but in its middle. The early parts of the duplicate close roll and patent roll for 1226–1227 look just like their predecessors. ⁸³ Indeed, the regnal year saw the introduction of two entirely new duplicates, the first to match the liberate roll, which was created in October 1226 to record the writs dealing with expenditure formerly on the close roll, ⁸⁴ and the second to match the charter roll inaugurated when the king began to issue charters in January 1227. ⁸⁵ But the effort was not maintained. Within a few months, in the duplicate liberate, patent and close rolls, the marginal annotations, describing the content of the writs, cease to be entered; in the liberate roll from 10 December, in the patent roll from 21 December, and on the close roll from 9 February. ⁸⁶ Then the rolls themselves come to an end. The last entry on the liberate roll is for 1 February, on the close roll for 5 March, and on the patent roll for 13 March. Both the close roll and liberate roll entries terminate at what may have been the bottom of membranes, but there is no sign that further membranes ever followed. The patent roll entries terminate with 2.8 cm still left of the membrane, which is in any case unusually short, 33 cm as against the 50 cm of its predecessor. It looks as though the rest of the membrane was cut off for re-use once it was known that the roll was to be abandoned.

The decision to abandon the duplicate rolls was taken, therefore, sometime after 13 March 1227, the date reached by the copyist of the patent roll, the copyist of the close roll having, at that point, only got as far as 5 March and of the liberate roll as far as 1 February. Why? The answer almost certainly relates to Ralph de Neville’s new confidence in his position. Until Richard Marsh’s death on 1 May 1226 he had been a deputy. Marsh, moreover, was sensitive about his own status. Indeed, on one occasion he upbraided Neville for failing, in a letter, to address him as chancellor. ⁸⁷ In these circumstances, a decision by Neville to abandon the duplicate rolls might well have been taken by Marsh as an attack on his authority. Marsh’s death changed the situation completely. Neville immediately became chancellor (he is found bearing the title from 17 May 1226), ⁸⁸ and had the authority to create the liberate rolls at the start of the next regnal year. There was then a further improvement in his situation. In January 1227 the last restrictions on the powers of Henry III were removed, which meant that charters could be issued and curiales be rewarded for their faithful service. ⁸⁹ Neville’s own reward came on 12 February 1227 when he received a charter, witnessed by five bishops, which granted him the Chancery for life. ⁹⁰ The abandonment of the duplicate rolls a month or so later is too close to be a coincidence. Now master in his house, and enjoying excellent relations with the king and the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, Neville saw no point in putting his clerks through the labour of making the copy rolls, all the more so since the introduction of the liberate and charter rolls had increased their number from three to five. Although the second rolls, or at least the second fine roll, had been the chancellor’s roll, there was no need, in the new situation, to bother about such distinctions. The duplicate charter rolls, presumably because of the importance attached to charters, continued for a year or so (part of one survives for 1228–29), ⁹¹ but then they too seem to have been abandoned. Thirteenth-century bureaucrats were, therefore, masters of the rolls, not their unthinking servants. They questioned their utility and fought against their multiplication. There, was, of course, nothing new in that. The Dialogus de Scaccario records how the Exchequer of Henry II had first introduced and then abandoned the copying of the lists of debts sent out to the sheriffs for collection (the summonses), the ‘labour involved proving overpowering’. ⁹²

4. The historical context and interest of the Henrician Fine Rolls

The fine rolls of King Henry III (1216–1272) are central to the study of politics, government and society in a reign which saw the implantation of Magna Carta into English political life and the beginnings of the parliamentary state. ⁹³ The rolls reveal what the king was prepared to give his subjects and what his subjects wanted from the king. The social range of those involved in making fines expanded during the reign, as did the type of the concessions for which they paid. Earls, barons, knights, freemen, peasants, women (particularly widows), Jews, ecclesiastics and ecclesiastical institutions, towns and townsmen are all found in the rolls. The fines made by magnates and ministers for major favours (for example the concession of marriages and wardships) are a vital source for the workings of royal patronage. ⁹⁴ The fines made for exemption from knighthood and local office cast important light on the aspirations and changing structures of the gentry. ⁹⁵ The gigantic expansion in payments for writs to initiate and further legal actions is key evidence for the widening scope of the common law. ⁹⁶ The fines to set up new markets and fairs reveal the commercialisation of the economy, as those for permission to create new private parks and warrens show rising social aspirations. ⁹⁷ The new material which enters the rolls (and some of the old) makes them a major source for the death of tenants-in-chief, the running of local government, ⁹⁸ the exploitation of the royal demesne, the taxation of towns, the position of the Jews, and (through orders for the seizure of land), the course of politics in periods of crisis. Throughout, the rolls are full of evidence of family relationships and social networks, the last through the long lists of backers which those making fines had sometimes to supply. ⁹⁹

All this material is on the rolls without them losing their intimate relationship with the king. On the roll for 1207–08 there is the extraordinary offer of 200 chickens made by the wife of Hugh de Neville to be allowed ‘to lie one night with her lord, Hugh de Neville’. ¹⁰⁰ Was she John’s mistress and were the two of them joking about what a night back with Hugh would be worth, the answer a ridiculous 200 chickens? On the roll of 1242–43 we have an example of Henry III’s rather more benign sense of humour. In the ship sailing home from Gascony, ‘having a joke’ (ludendo) at the expense of his clerk, Peter the Poitevin, he invented and recorded on the fine roll a whole series of risible debts which Peter supposedly owed: ‘five dozen capons for a trespass in the ship; 28 casks of wine from the arrears of the wine which he bought for the use of the king at Mussak where he dreamed he saw the emperor Otto’ and so on. Henry was careful, however, not to let the joke go too far. Doubtless after Peter had been baffled and perhaps alarmed by the sight of his obligations, Henry ordered them ‘Peter not looking’ to be crossed out with the result that they never reached the originalia roll and the Exchequer. ¹⁰¹

The rolls for the years 1216 to 1234 have a particular interest. ¹⁰² They cover an extraordinary period of English history which saw the winning of the civil war raging at John’s death, the restoration of government shattered by the hostilities, the conflict over the king’s recovery of his castles and shrievalties in 1223–24, the rebellion of Falkes de Bréauté, the establishment of Magna Carta, the ending of the king’s minority, the expedition to Brittany in 1230, the fall in 1232 of the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, the ascendancy of Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, the civil war which resulted from Peter’s flouting of Magna Carta, and finally the restoration in 1234 of lawful, consensual rule. The first of Henry’s rolls, running from 28 October 1216 to 27 October 1217, is a pathetic affair, only two membranes long and with a mere twenty-four items of business. It reflects, of course, the critical political situation after John’s death. With the new king a minor only nine years old, the government was headed by the regent, William Marshal earl of Pembroke. His government was fighting for its life against Louis, eldest son of the king of France, to whom the insurgent barons had offered the throne. The war situation at the start of the reign is itself reflected in the very first fine on the Henrician rolls, that from a former rebel, Robert Arsic, to be released from prison in return for serving the king henceforth with three knights for a year. ¹⁰³ The capitalised heading at the start of the first membrane ‘ROLL OF FINES OF THE FIRST YEAR OF KING HENRY, ROTULUS FINIUM ANNI REGIS HENRICI PRIMI’, is in elegant, elongated letters, taller than those found at the start of any earlier or later roll, surely an act of both defiance and of reassurance, a statement that the first year of King Henry was not going to be his last. ¹⁰⁴ Later, with Henry securely on the throne, bureaucracy and boredom took over and the rolls were often left without headings at all. ¹⁰⁵ It may also be significant that the heading to the first roll speaks simply of King Henry, not King Henry son of King John, later a common formula, as though the clerk was trying to distance the reign of the son from that of the father. ¹⁰⁶ Certainly the tall capital letters which proclaimed Henry’s first year contrast strikingly with the minuscule lower case ones which tried almost to conceal John’s last one. ¹⁰⁷

The growing size of the rolls is testimony to the recovery of government after the end of the war in 1217. The length of the roll for 1218–19 (12 membranes and 442 items) is partly related to business generated by the nationwide visitation of the king’s justices which began in November 1218, an important step in the restoration of royal authority. ¹⁰⁸ After the Marshal’s resignation in April 1219, a month before his death, control of central government was given to the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, though initially, as we have said, he shared power with Peter des Roches and Pandulf, the papal legate. The rolls of 1220–21 and 1221–22 have the letters related to another major initiative, the resumption into the hands of the king of the manors of the royal demesne. ¹⁰⁹ That these letters are on the fine roll, when they have nothing to do with fines, is a good example of the increasing range of business which the rolls contain. Likewise it is on the roll for 1223–24 that we find the letters ordering the seizure of the lands of Falkes de Bréauté and his associates before and after Falkes’s rebellion. ¹¹⁰

It was in January 1227 that the last restrictions on Henry’s power were removed, which meant he could now issue charters and confirmations. The fine rolls show how the king profited from the move, since they contain numerous proffers from individuals and institutions for such concessions. ¹¹¹ This is one reason why the roll for 1226–27, with twelve membranes and 398 items of business, is another long one. In 1230 the king launched his long awaited expedition to Brittany in the hope of recovering at least some of the Angevin empire. Here the arrangements for the collection of the scutage levied for the expedition, which are found on the fine rolls, throw considerable light on England’s social structure and the much debated question as to how far barons were still able to control their tenants by knight service, which, put another way, is to ask how far England in this period was still ‘feudal’. ¹¹² The fine rolls show that William de Warenne, earl of Surrey, was keen to exercise such control, for the king allowed him to collect the scutage from his tenants and pay it in to the Exchequer, rather than the sheriff doing it for him, something which involved getting money from men in Warwickshire, Essex, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Buckinghamshire, Surrey, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Yorkshire and Sussex. ¹¹³ Clearly Warenne believed his ‘feudal’ authority over his far flung honour was still very much intact.

Underlying this whole period down to 1234 was one major question, the future of Magna Carta. ¹¹⁴ To win the war and then secure the peace the minority government, completely reversing John’s policy, had issued new versions of the Charter both in 1216 and 1217. It had also, in 1217, issued an entirely new Charter governing the running of the royal forest. In 1225, in return for a great tax, the king issued final and definitive versions of both. The Charters were now part of the law of the country, but this did not mean they would be obeyed. Indeed, during the abrasive regime of Peter des Roches between 1232 and 1234, the whole future of the Charters seemed at stake. ¹¹⁵ The fine rolls have vital information on the course of politics in these years, including the explosive letter in which the king effectively disseised Gilbert Basset, unjustly and without judgment, of Upavon in Wiltshire in clear breach of Magna Carta. ¹¹⁶ They equally have the letters in which the government took action against Richard Marshal, earl of Pembroke, after he had broken with the bishop’s regime, letters which are a key source for the composition of the earl’s affinity and the extent of his wider support. ¹¹⁷ More generally, the rolls have important evidence bearing on how far some of the most important clauses in the charters were obeyed, including those which promised a radical reduction in the size of the royal forest, ¹¹⁸ protected widows against forced re-marriage, ¹¹⁹ and fixed the relief (that is the inheritance tax) of an earl and baron at £100 and a knight at £5.

5. The value of fines by regnal year, 1216–1234

It is a thankless task to extrapolate annual revenue from the fine rolls. Many fines, for example, might have been made in the king’s wardrobe or have been granted free of charge, or, as is recorded in 1232–33, made with the king’s chief ministers, in this case the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, and so would not be entered on the fine rolls. ¹²⁰ Moreover, there are many occasions on which fines were made, entered on the fine roll and then subsequently attermined, respited, or pardoned – processes that could be eked out over several years or, indeed, generations – meaning that the king would never have received anything like the total annual values listed below. ¹²¹ Nevertheless, it is possible to give an estimate of the value of the fines as recorded in the fine rolls. The table below provides the annual value of fines for the first eighteen years of Henry’s reign and, as a comparison, those for the surviving fine rolls of John printed in Rotuli de Oblatis et Finibus in Turri Londinensi asservati tempore Regis Johannis, ed. T.D. Hardy (Record Commission, 1835). While these figures should be reasonably accurate, they are approximations and are subject to future revision.

6. The publication of the rolls

Despite their compelling interest, the fine rolls of King Henry III have never been properly published. Whereas those of King John appeared in full Latin text, edited by Thomas Duffus Hardy, under the auspices of the Record Commission, in 1835, those of King Henry were only afforded a series of excerpts, selected exclusively on the basis of genealogical interest, which ran to some 10–15% of the content of the rolls. These were edited by Charles Roberts and published in two volumes by the Record Commission in 1835–36, under the title Excerpta e Rotulis Finium in Turri Londinensi asservatis Henrico Tertio Rege A.D. 1216–1272. ¹²³ There was no subject index and the indexes for people and places were completely inadequate. ¹²⁴ Consequently the use made of the fine rolls by such historians of the reign of Henry III as E.F. Jacob, R.F. Treharne and Sir Maurice Powicke, writing between the 1920s and 1950s, was limited to the printed Excerpta. ¹²⁵ The briefing paper circulated at the first meeting of the Public Record Office Consultative Committee on Publications, which met on 27 November 1947, observed that ‘Among Chancery Records a full text of the Fine Rolls, Henry III is still needed to supersede the Record Commission’s Excerpta’. This was considered amongst ‘the most outstanding needs’. ¹²⁶ J.C. Holt took a similar view. I well remember him stressing the importance of the Henrician fine rolls and the need for a new edition, when, setting out on research, I went to him for advice in the early 1970s. Since then scholars have indeed entered the archives and sought to mine the original rolls, but they have confined themselves to their own particular interests and not attempted any kind of consistent and comprehensive analysis of the material. The almost complete absence of work on the legal evidence in the rolls is particularly striking. For those without Latin and palaeography the resource has remained completely unusable.

After an abortive attempt in the mid-1970s, by Dr. David Crook at the then Public Record Office, to make a calendar of the rolls, it was Dr. Louise Wilkinson who conceived the project which has at last led to their publication. A committee was formed consisting of Wilkinson, David Carpenter of King’s College London’s History Department, Harold Short, Director of King’s College’s Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH), and David Crook and Aidan Lawes of The National Archives (TNA). Mr Lawes, Academic Publications Manager at TNA, was particularly clear on the importance of parallel print and electronic publication. This group put together a bid to the Arts and Humanities Research Board (now Council) seeking funding for a three-year project which would publish the rolls down to 1248, a second (ultimately successful) bid being envisaged for another round of funding which would carry publication down to the end of the reign in 1272. The bid was successful and work began in April 2005.

From the start, the guiding principle of the project has been to make the fine rolls as usable and available as possible to as wide an audience as possible. To that end, the Latin text has been turned into English. Although this has been done in a way comparable to that found in the great series of Chancery roll calendars published by HMSO in the last century (hence the title Calendar of Fine Rolls for the Reign of Henry III for the new series), the English rendering is in fact much fuller than that found in many PRO calendars, and amounts almost to a full translation. Within the translation, another departure from old PRO practice, all place names, and toponymic surnames, where identifiable, have been modernised, with a record of original forms being kept in the index. There are also full indexes of persons, places and subjects. Publication in book form is complemented by publication of the translation and indexes on the Project’s website where the text, encoded electronically, is also linked to a sophisticated search engine and digitised images of the original rolls. The form of reference is the same whichever version is used. ¹²⁷