Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 1 (2005), p. 108

In response to the question which forms this book’s title, Raban’s answer is potentially yes, but in practice no. Since the distance between Domesday book and the hundred rolls extended beyond two hundred years, the complexity which the hundred rolls had to address rendered the standardization and compression of Domesday book impossible. The transformations during those two centuries, moreover, disallowed the completion of the project in any form – so this inquisition was abandoned leaving its imprint ostensibly for only a swathe across the Midlands with fragments from elsewhere (comprising in toto 56 hundreds and 13 towns and suburbs – p.92). In reflecting on these issues, Raban has produced the first comprehensive account of the administrative and organizational background to the hundred rolls of 1279–80.

Many readers of this journal will be familiar with the exploitation of the hundred rolls for the structures of landholding, composition of peasant society, and seigniorial extraction from the peasantry. Indeed, one of the most recent attempts has been published here (Barg, AgHR, 39, 1991). As well as considering the information in the hundred rolls in her analysis of the structure of landholding, Sandra Raban has long been reflecting on their production and this volume is the result of her mature consideration and is definitive – in so far as history review anyelucidation of the enigmas and complexities of the hundred rolls can ever be.

Despite the incorporation of a chapter on ‘Uses of the rolls’ and the evocative title of another, ‘An inquiring culture’, Raban’s principal purpose is a diplomatic study of the composition of the rolls and their administrative context. The ‘culture’ of inquiry relates to the proclivity of Edward I and his contemporaries abroad to acquire information by sending out justices to make local inquests, sometimes for specific purposes. Presumably here ‘culture’ denotes a bureaucratic imperative combined with a personal impulse stimulated by a general context of investigation at this time.

Confirmation is amply supplied that the embarkation on the survey was ill-conceived: there was apparently no ‘standard set of articles [of enquiry]’ (p.49); the project was too ambitious for the personnel available (p.36); and the justices collected information at their discretion and that of the jurors, which was difficult to digest (pp.90–1, 96). The surviving returns conceal the extent of the activity of the original commission, which might have been started more widespreadly. The survey was, however, quickly aborted and abandoned, often before the returns were committed to parchment.

Departing from the administrative history of the rolls, the final chapter recapitulates the significant contribution which analysis has made to the understanding of rural society at the zenith of the high middle ages. Here,the concentration is on peasant rents and services (Kosminsky, Kanzaka, Raban), the fortunes of estate management, comparing larger and smaller estate holders, and the regional distribution of the free tenantry. As interesting in this section, however, are the suggestions about inadvertent contemporary consequences of the rolls. The revelation of the magnitude of estates held by the church combined with its failure to show warrant might have occasioned ‘a distorted impression of ecclesiastical aggrandizement’ (p.123) which contributed to theimpulse to severity in the first statute of mortmain (1279). As another consequence, the rolls provided lords of small estates, not in the habit of record making, the opportunity to keep a copy of the survey (p.125). On the other hand, annotations that some lords were uncooperative perhaps illustrates a suspicion of a fiscal purpose (p.128). Moreover, caution should be exercised when deploying the rolls to examine social structure, for the interpretation given by the justices to small tenants is compressed, ambiguous and confusing (p.127). Nevertheless, the rolls provide one of the few available resources for perceiving the role of smaller estates (p.131).

In rehearsing the potential reasons for the survey, Raban concedes that there is no firm evidence of any single purpose. It is possible that, in the end, it must be ascribed to no more than an investigative preoccupation, although there may have been some fiscal motive and she believes that the focus had been diverted from land and tenurial structure in 1086 to franchises, liberties and rights in 1279–80 (p.41). The significance of that last influence, however, might seem to lose impact in theface of the 1274–5 inquest into those privileges and the inception of the quo warranto proceedings about the same time. If, as is asserted (p.89), the surveys in the rolls bear a resemblance to those in inquisitions post mortem, might we not be confronted by a general cadastral survey about The lordship of England (Scott Waugh)?

Categorizing this volume as an administrative history, in fact, does its author a disservice, for no one interested in governance and governmentality, literacy, lordship – indeed, the whole range of medieval English history –will be able to ignore this book, not least agrarian and rural historians who intend to exploit the information in the hundred rolls.