Research into the archives of All Souls College, Oxford

The following are extracts from a letter f rom Dr. Ralph Evans, who has recently begun a preliminary search into these archives. funded by the Trust.

I started by examining a few examples from the 1460s of the documents traditionally but misleadingly known as the rent rolls, which are the rolls on which the accounts .of the lessees and other local accountants were entered in more or less summary form each year. These examples give some impression of what I am likely to find.

The rent rolls do not survive from every year by any means. The enrolled accounts are rather formal financial statements, generally uninformative about local conditions, but they do contain occasional items of special interest. In 1468-9, for example, roughly half the rent of Scotney was remitted to the lessee because of the flooding by the sea of all the demesne lands, and the damage to his animals and crops. The date of the initial inundation is not given, but its effects persisted beyond the close of the accounting year at Michaelmas.

It is often the draft rent roll for a year which survives. It was the practice for the detailed bill of expenses which the lessees of some properties submitted, and on which their enrolled accounts were largely based, to be stitched to the edge of the draft roll. This procedure was not 7 f ollowed on all of the college's properties, but it was common on the Kentish estates. These bills, whether in Latin or in English, give a good deal of detail which is not found the more summary entries in the enrolled account. Some bills have been torn away and lost, leaving only the stitching or perhaps merely stitch-holes to show their former position. Thus the bills for Scotney and Ivychurch have been lost from the rolls for 1466-7 and the Scotney bill from that of 1469-70.

The difference between enrolled account and bill is well illustrated by the case of Scotney in 1460-1. The enrolled account gives an undifferentiated total of £14.16.1 f or "various repairs, costs and ditching and payments for sea-seats as appears in the bill", while the long bill attached gives extremely full details, in English, of these payments. Claims for the costs of labour and materials for maintenance of the buildings refer to the dwelling house, the kitchen, hall-house, the ost and oven, the lade, the little barn and another barn. Payments for ditching include topographical references, for instance for 60 roods between the pinfold and the pasture of Bromhill. The costs of walling on Ocolt Wall and Sondyland wall are detailed for each of seven weeks following midsummer. In this particular bill the seats paid are set out on the basis of acreage.

Details such as these are most promising. They should help a lot towards establishing histories of both reclamation, and of periods of climatic difficulties.