Baronial Accounts, Incomes, and Arrears in the Later Middle Ages

TE ACENT historians of the medieval aristocracy-tired of the well-worn paths < of constitutional struggles and political manceuvres and prompted perhaps 1 by current concern with balance of payments and national indebtednesshave increasingly turned their attention to noble incomes and expenditure, to the financial aspects of the political success or failure of the baronage, to the costs of bastard feudalism, and to investigating the possibility of their own crisis of the aristocracy.2 The line of investigation is, clearly, an interesting one; but unfortunately the documentation for such a study is lacking both in quality and in quantity. In the first place, the financial records of the English nobility have survived in a very haphazard and unsatisfactory fashion: thus, to mention only a few obvious examples, singularly few accounts of more than local interest have survived for such important figures as Henry of Grosmont, the first duke of Lancaster, for Richard FitzAlan, the wealthy earl of Arundel and leading royal creditor,3 or for the politically powerful Thomas of Woodstock.4 Even when they survive, baronial account-rolls, like royal receipt and issue rolls, do not yield their secrets readily or rather do not provide easy or convenient answers to the questions which the historian asks of them. Nor does the perversity of medieval accounts end here, for it has recently been suggested that even the figures which are scrupulously based on the account-rolls may themselves be misleading, for