Holford mapping the medieval countryside 2014-06-17
1.
2. • AHRC funded research project for online publication and
dissemination of the medieval English inquisitions post
mortem,
• Jan. 2011- Dec. 2014
• Department of History, University of Winchester, and
Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London
• Inquisitions post mortem (IPMs): nature, publication history
and historical value
• Online publication: our project
• Rationale
• Approach
• Findings
5. Inquisitions post mortem
• Sworn enquiries into the lands held at their deaths by direct
tenants of the crown (tenants-in-chief)
• Survive from about 1236 to 1660 (when feudal tenures were
abolished) in more-or-less continuous series at the National
Archives
• Usually created by escheator
• Designed to record and enforce royal feudal rights, especially
• Wardship, when a tenant died and their heir was not of full legal
age
• Primer seisin and relief, when an heir was of full age
• Related documents:
• Proofs of age
• Assignments of dower
6. Inquisitions post mortem
• Most contain information on:
• What lands and tenements the tenant held
• The nature of the tenant’s legal interest or estate
• Of whom the lands were held and by what feudal services
• What they were worth
• Sometimes a single valuation, sometimes a detailed itemization or
extent
• When the tenant died (systematically recorded only from 1342
onwards); the identity of their heir; and the heir’s age
• Names of the jurors who were present
• Many also describe
• Grants of land made by or to the tenant
7.
8.
9.
10.
11. Publication history
• Calendars (CIPMs), i.e. translation-cum-summary
• Four stages:
1. 1898 to 1955, covering period 1485 – 1509 (Henry VII)
2. 1904 to 1988, covering period 1236 – 1399 (Henry III – Richard II)
3. 1987 to 2002, covering period 1399 – 1422 (Henry IV and V)
4. 2003 to 2010, covering period 1422 – 1447 (Henry VI, part)
• 1447-85 and 1509 onwards still unpublished (except for some
local history society publications)
• Various omissions in stages 1-3 and changes of editorial policy
over 1-4
14. Historical value: core elements
• Descent of manors and property: county histories from 16th
cent. to Victoria County History;
• Landed society (aristocracy and gentry): estates; wealth;
marriages and marriage settlements; attitudes to inheritance
and family; changes and social mobility
• Economic and agrarian history: size and composition of
estates; relative importance of arable/meadow/rents etc./
regional variation and changes over time; landscape and
settlement history
• Demography: life-expectancy; seasonality of mortality; fertility
and replacement rates
• Government: changing nature and enforcement of royal
rights; interaction of central and local systems; manipulation
of the system; role of the jurors
16. Historical value:
reliability
• ‘the single best source for reconstructing both the
institutional and economic geography of the country’
• ‘the single greatest available compendium of information
on the unit value of land’
• ‘no other contemporary source is as informative’ [on
common rights]
• ‘the single most useful source for analysing the scale,
nature, and value of seigneorial milling’
• Reasons for these judgements?
17. Historical value: reliability
• Impossible to take a black-and-white approach
• Mapping and statistical analysis can reveal a great deal about
the limitations and idiosyncrasies of the IPMs
• Barns in Hampshire
• Customary acres
• Mapping and statistical analysis at a large enough scale may
also be able to compensate for some of these limitations and
idiosyncrasies
18.
19. Mapping the Medieval
Countryside
• Grew out of the most recent bout of publication, 2003-10
• Original objective to continue calendaring 1447 onwards
• Calendaring in print form unsatisfactory:
• Audience: academic or wider local/family history, genealogy?
• Access
• Expense of the more recent volumes
• Scarcity of the older volumes
• Need for a full series to answer many research questions
• Analysis
• Rich information but often very laborious to extract from printed
calendars
• Limitations of the indexes: persons, places, and subjects
20.
21. • An initial solution: digitization
• Not the original documents: condition, size etc.
• Volumes 1-20 (1236-1399) and 2nd series 1-3 (1485-1509)
• Rekeyed and mounted on the project website and British History
Online essentially as plain text
• Volumes 1-2 available
• Limited functionality, not always easy to search for persons /
places due to variant spellings
• A long-term solution: full electronic calendaring
• Volumes 18-26 (1399-1447), i.e. those containing valuations and
extents
• Fully indexed using TEI XML markup
• Rich functionality
• A model: England on the Eve of the Black Death
22. • Database of manorial
extents 1300-49
• Statistical analysis
• GIS mapping
• Pioneered large-scale
analysis of IPMs as
key evidence for
economic and
agrarian change
23. New light on the precision
and reliability of IPMs
28. Our project…
• By 1399 the material is not as rich (decline of demesne
farming), but a similar approach is feasible
• c. 7000 documents, c.15000 holdings, c. 2500 manorial
extents 1399-1447
• Capture agrarian information from all IPMs, not just manorial
extents
• Capture other information as well
• Tenants’ estates in land
• Grants and enfeoffments: spread of entail and use
• Tenures and services
• Dates of death and heirs
• Administrative information (dates, types of writ, jurors –
enhancement of volumes 18-21 for 1399-1422)
29. • Agrarian changes (e.g. the shift from arable to pasture)
• Demography, inheritance, succession
• The ‘feudal system’
• Local and central government
30. Findings…?
• Data entry, analysis, and development of interface ongoing
• What follows is subject to revision – intended to illustrate the
possibilities of the resource
31. Estates in land
Estates in land,
1432-7 (by
number of
holdings, all
holdings)
Estates in land,
1432-7
(manors only)
36. Demography
• Possible explanations:
• Actual variations in mortality for various reasons (disease,
famine, war, etc.)
• Variations in the efficiency of the IPM process (possible that more
tenants-in-chief were identified at some times due e.g. to ‘fiscal
feudalism’)
• Outbreaks of plague/disease known from chronicles etc. 1420,
1427, 1433-4, 1438-9
38. ‘Shown to the jurors’: evidence
for literacy?
References to documents “shown/presented (etc.) to the
jurors”, CIPM vols. 1-21 and 2nd ser. 1-3, by volume
39. • Possible explanations:
• Changing practice at inquisitions (more documents were being
shown to jurors, which may imply more jurors being able to read
/ understand them)
• Changing documentary conventions (documents had been shown
to jurors before, but this practice was not commonly noted in the
IPMs before 1400 or after 1485. Such a change might still have
implications for jurors’ literacy)
• Changing calendaring practices (the IPMs do in fact refer to
documents being shown to the jurors, but the editors of some
calendars did not consider this important enough to include)