Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 2 (2020), p. 310

The Pipe Rolls of the Bishops of Winchester provide a familiar and remarkable source for historians of medieval agriculture. It has been estimated that they include 10,000 manorial accounts. Yet this sheer quantity provides its own problem both in studying the material and in their publication. Different approaches have been followed. We have editions of four complete pipe rolls (1209, 1211, 1303 and 1410) and a group from a single manor (Crawley). Now Dr Stone has provided an edition of 44 accounts for a single manor together with a scholarly introduction. This must be warmly welcomed by historians of both medieval agriculture and much else.

The bishopric of Winchester’s estates ran from Taunton to Southwark, from the Isle of Wight to north Oxfordshire, covering a variety of manors and agricultural areas. Esher, in Surrey, was an interesting but atypical example. While most of the bishopric estate was based on Anglo-Saxon grants, Esher was not acquired until 1245. It was bought by a bishop of Winchester to endow a new monastic foundation, and was then re-acquired by his successor, in order to provide a new residence near enough to London, Windsor and the court, vital for their political and governmental roles. He re-acquired Esher, but the Dorset sub-manor remained with the abbey. Esher’s documentary coverage thus began substantially later than on the other bishopric manors. It was never large or rich, and its soils were poor. Here demesne agriculture was given up and the agricultural land leased in 1365, much earlier than elsewhere on the estate, where this development was largely a product of the fifteenth century.

But this volume is much more than just a collection of 44 Esher accounts. The editor uses these and the other 53 accounts to provide a substantial introduction and account of the development of this manor, while each published account is given an introductory commentary, and the opportunity, in the course of the volume, to discuss a wide range of issues. Moreover, one of the great strengths of these records is their ability to provide a complete sequence of statistics with few gaps. The statistical appendices draw upon all the accounts, including those not published here and include arable acreage, livestock numbers, arable yields (supplementing Titow’s figures for the whole estate with those for rye and large and small oats), and listing goods and produce entering and leaving the manor.

Esher was an untypical manor within the bishopric estate. Its poor soils led to arable farming being dominated by rye and oats. It comprised a patchwork of demesne fields and scattered farmsteads with convertible husbandry. But despite these variations it also reflected some of the common arable trends on the estate as a whole: initial thirteenth-century growth, shrinkage at the end of the century, the early fourteenth-century crises of weather and pestilence, and subsequent consolidation at a lower level in the years leading up to the devastating impact of the Black Death. The response to this last crisis led to the end of demesne agriculture, but not before the accounts suggest its vulnerabilities in labour and management. Many of the bishop’s lands lay in the chalklands of southern England, and they were among the greatest wool producers in England. Here the lord maintained a flock, although not large and with long periods when no sheep were maintained, between 1266 and 1270, and from 1316 to 1335. Pigs were not kept on large scale on the bishopric estate and here there were none after 1282. Cows ceased to be kept in 1316. One unexplained curiosity was why the goatherd was moved from Farnham in 1321–7.

While the strength of these records is in the details of the lord’s demesne agriculture, they have much to show, as the editor makes clear, about the peasantry themselves. An appendix provides potted biographies of those who died during the Black Death of 1348–9. By working through all the accounts of a single manor, unusual documentation is revealed, as in the tithe returns for the parish in 1248 and 1335, which allow comparison of the relative importance of the various crops in peasant and demesne agriculture.

The manor had been acquired and developed as a residential site, so that in addition to information about the farm buildings, we learn of the investments in the lord’s housing. Having acquired the manor, the bishops lost little time in developing it. A new free-standing chapel was completed in 1268, although sadly the previous account dealing with most of the construction is missing. There were frequent indications of some of the buildings present and of occasional large-scale upgrading as in 1376 when over £100 was spent. This was a major episcopal residence accommodating bishops and their distinguished guests from royalty downwards. The accounts show traces of some of these visits, and of the buildings and their materials. This residential role was reflected in the landscape and the accounts through the vineyard and fishponds, swans and peafowl. Sadly, subsequent rebuilding in the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries and demolition, has meant that none of the buildings featured in these accounts have survived.

The records are published in translation, which greatly increases their accessibility. This volume should prove to be both a valuable source for the agrarian history of Surrey and of the wider country. It has a great deal to tell us about the worlds of the lord bishop and of his tenants. Its scholarly mixture of sources, introductory text and statistics should make this a valuable entry to medieval agrarian source materials, particularly when used in conjunction with the 1302 Pipe Roll covering the whole estate (ed. M. Page, rev. ante AgHR 45.2, p. 202). Together, they should allow students to engage with the sources both to examine a medieval manor and its evolution and to compare Esher with other manors on this great estate. This volume is an immense achievement, and it is hoped that its welcome publication may encourage further work on individual manors of the bishopric.