1. Ireland and the Fine Rolls

⁋1 This month Beth Hartland, Research Fellow on the Henry III Fine Rolls Project, investigates how fines may have been recorded in the English lordship of Ireland. 1

⁋2Many users of the Henry III Fine Rolls Project website will by now be familiar with the precocity of the English Chancery in having begun enrolling its material from at least 1199 onwards. 2 Whilst historians are divided over the exact date at which this enrolment began, 3 there is consensus surrounding the fact that the first extant Fine Roll (that for 1 John, 1199–1200), was not the first roll of fines produced by the English Chancery 4 and that the Fine Rolls were among the first of the English Chancery rolls to be compiled. Given this, and the existence of an extant Norman Fine Roll for 2 John (1200–1201), 5 which could have been part of a series which predated the intervention of English kings in Ireland in 1171–72, it is natural to consider the situation that pertained in Ireland. Did the administration based at Dublin also keep Fine Rolls? 6

⁋3Unfortunately the survival rate of records produced by the Dublin administration in the medieval period is extremely poor, due not only to the famous fire at the Four Courts in 1922, but before that to fire, rain and even theft. 7 When the Irish Record Commission undertook to publish the remaining records of Chancery (a volume that was produced in 1828) the earliest Chancery material then extant was a patent roll for 31 Edward I (1302–03) and a close roll for 2 Edward II (1308–09). 8 All the original Chancery documents produced during the thirteenth century and which had been stored at Dublin castle had already been lost. Had thirteenth-century Fine Rolls succumbed to this fate also? The content of the volume produced by Edward Tresham in 1828 forces us to conclude that they had not, as such rolls seem never to have been produced by the Irish Chancery. The volume edited by Tresham contains only material from Irish Patent and Close Rolls: there are no Charter, Fine, Liberate or Originalia Rolls among its fourteenth- through sixteenth-century contents. The impression this gives that the Irish Chancery never produced such rolls is confirmed by a memorandum recorded on the Close Roll for 2 Edward II. This records that ‘all the rolls of Chancery, with writs, inquisitions, bills and memoranda belonging to the said Chancery from the time of Master Thomas Cantok sometime chancellor of Ireland, up to the 28th year of Edward I, were by chance burnt in the abbey of Blessed Mary near Dublin in the great fire of the same abbey’, and proceeds to detail all the items which escaped that fire and to whom they were delivered for safe keeping, these being writs, bills, allowances, letters patent and so forth. 9 Instead, one can find evidence of writs of liberate, charters and fines on the calendared Patent and Close Rolls. The surviving Chancery rolls, as calendared by Tresham, then, demonstrate that the Irish Chancery did record fines. Considering the rolls for Edward I and Edward II, 10 these fines were predominantly for the purchase of writs – reflecting the dominance of this type of fine in the Fine Rolls produced by the English Chancery by late Henry III. 11 It was presumably because these rolls were composed under the authority of the Irish chancellor that the fines on them relate so heavily to the issuing of writs. Had these, and other, fines always been recorded on the Close and Patent Rolls?

⁋4This could only have been the case from the start of Chancery enrolment in Ireland, the earliest possible date for which is 1232, the year in which Ireland was given a Chancery by the king (or, rather, in which the Irish Chancery was granted to the English chancellor, Ralph de Neville, bishop of Chichester). 12 But we know from the English Fine Rolls that lists or schedules of fines made in Ireland must have been sent to the English Chancery on occasion, if not on a regular basis, before this. The Fine Roll for 17–18 John (1215–16) has 63 Irish entries largely split into two lists on membranes 9 and 8 of the roll, 13 and the Fine Roll for 9 Henry III (1224–25) has seven consecutive Irish entries. 14 This was not the usual distribution of entries relating to Ireland on the English Fine Rolls; generally speaking the entries relating to Ireland are sparsely distributed throughout these rolls. 15 The Irish entries on the Fine Roll for 9 Henry III in particular smack of a schedule having been sent to England, as these fines occur only on the duplicate roll where they are all noted as ‘Cancelled because on the Close Roll’. One imagines the schedule having been placed on the wrong pile for copying. Who was compiling these lists in Ireland?

⁋5One possibility is a clerk of the Dublin Exchequer. In England the system was for Chancery clerks to compile lists of extracts from the Fine Rolls which were then sent to the Exchequer where they were drawn up into Originalia Rolls which could then be used to help calculate what a sheriff ought to account for at his farm. 16 In Ireland, as in England, it was necessary for the barons of the Exchequer to know who owed money to the king for what, and lists of fines were probably compiled for this reason. The suggestion that a treasury clerk could have been responsible for this comes from the grant of the office of treasurer and chamberlain of the Dublin Exchequer to Peter de Rivallis in 1232. 17 This grant stipulated that Peter was to have a clerk whose job was to record the fines made before the justiciar of Ireland, and without whose presence the justiciar was not supposed to make fines. Such schedules of fines could easily have been communicated to the administration in England by a clerk on one of the regular despatches of treasure from Ireland to England. 18

⁋6An entry on the Norman Fine Roll for 2 John suggested that the English Fine Roll was the appropriate home for Irish fines. Beside an order to the justiciar of Ireland to cause Richard de Thwit to have land to the value of £25 sterling outside the king’s demesnes in exchange for the land of Thwit which the king had granted to Richard de Haracurt was a marginal note ‘that it ought to be written in the English roll’. 19 This may have been the case for those fines relating to Ireland made outside the lordship, but cannot have been the case for those fines made in the lordship with the justiciar. If generally recorded on any roll, such fines must have been recorded on the Justiciary Roll, as they were later in the thirteenth century. 20 Although we do not know when the justiciars of Ireland began to keep rolls of the business transacted before them, this must have been from an early date. Indeed, apart from the pipe rolls drawn up by the Dublin Exchequer from at least 11 John (1208–09) 21 and the occasional roll drawn up by itinerant justices, 22 the Justiciar’s roll may have been the only record of government business kept in the lordship prior to the establishment of the Chancery in 1232.

⁋7With the keeping of Fine Rolls arguably a very early feature of English administrative practice, it is worth pausing to consider why the practice of keeping of such rolls was not extended to the Irish lordship. My feeling here is that the volume of Irish business may simply not have been extensive enough to warrant the keeping of more than one roll. Alongside this the grant of Ireland as a lordship to John in 1185, under whose lordship the administration is considered to have begun, may have diverted administrative practice away from the royal path. These suggestions are not intended to detract from the important place held by the Fine Rolls in the royal administration in England especially in the early thirteenth century. But why were fine rolls not introduced when Ireland received its first chancellor in 1232? Here one can only conclude that the fine rolls had missed their chance. Initially confined to the recording of fines, even by the end of John’s reign the English Fine Rolls were beginning to incorporate non-Fine material, and by 7 Henry III (1222–23) non-Fine material outweighed actual Fines. 23 In Ireland the Exchequer may already have been recording such material on the Memoranda Rolls. 24 In both the exact rolls kept, and the information recorded on them, as in so many other ways, administrative practice in the lordship of Ireland was not a mirror image of practice in England.

Footnotes

1.
This Fine of the Month is drawn from a paper given at the 2009 Leeds International Medieval Congress. Back to context...
2.
See, for example, Nicholas Vincent, ‘Why 1199? Bureaucracy and Enrolment under John and his Contemporaries’ in Adrian Jobson ed. English Government in the Thirteenth Century (Boydell, 2004), pp. 17-48. Back to context...
3.
See David Carpenter, ‘In Testimonium Factorum Brevium’: The Beginnings of the English Chancery Rolls (forthcoming), passim. Back to context...
4.
Cf. H.G. Richardson, ‘The Origin of the Fine Rolls’, in The Memoranda Roll for the Michaelmas Term of the First Year of the Reign of King John (1199–1200), ed. Noel Blakiston with an introduction by H. G. Richardson (Pipe Roll Society, new series xxi, 1943), p. xxi. Back to context...
5.
Rotuli Normanniae in Turri Londinensi Asservati Johanne et Henrico Quinto Angliae Regibus ed. T. D. Hardy, vol 1, De Annis 1200–1205, necnon de anno 1417 (London, 1835). Back to context...
6.
One of the reasons which has been suggested for the precocity of the English Chancery in keeping rolls from so early a date is ‘the extraordinary strains placed upon kings whose lands stretched for several hundred miles from north to south, being divided from one another by language, custom and the physical barrier of the sea’ (quoted in Vincent, ‘Enrolment’, p. 20). The acquisition of the lordship of Ireland would have added to this burden. Back to context...
7.
For discussion of medieval Irish sources see Philomena Connolly, Medieval Record Sources, (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002). Back to context...
8.
Rotulorum Patentium et Clausorum Cancellariae Hiberniae Calendarium vol 1 Pars 1 Hen. II – Hen. VII [hereafter Tresham], ed. Edward Tresham (Dublin, 1828). The volume claims Chancery content from the reign of Henry II but these ‘Antiquissime Litere Patentes’ are not the fragment of a patent roll. Back to context...
9.
Tresham, no. 416. Back to context...
10.
It should be noted that, in researching this Fine of the Month, the later Irish Chancery rolls were not consulted and may show different results. Back to context...
11.
The same was probably true of the Fine Rolls produced by the English Chancery throughout Edward I’s reign. Without recourse to the original documents at TNA, however, this cannot be verified as the editors of the calendars of the Fine Rolls which took 1272 as their start date elected to observe guidelines which included the entire omission of payments for writs (Calendar of the Fine Rolls I, Edward I AD. 1272–1307, (HMSO, 1911), p. x. Back to context...
12.
Close Rolls, 1231–4, (HMSO, 1905), pp. 112-13. Back to context...
13.
Rotuli de Oblatis et Finibus in Turri Londinensi Asservati Tempore Regis Johannis, ed. T.D. Hardy (London, 1835), pp. 551–66. Back to context...
14.
CFR 1224–25, nos. 169–172, 174–177. Back to context...
15.
Take, for example, the distribution of the first and second entries relating to Ireland contained in the Fine Roll for 1 John. The first entry is located on membrane 17, sandwiched between fines for Northamptonshire and Norfolk above it and Shropshire and Lincolnshire below, and the second entry occurs on membrane 15. Back to context...
16.
For the Originalia Rolls see P. Dryburgh. ‘Originalia Rolls’ (http://www.finerollshenry3.org.uk/cocoon/frh3/content/about/originalia.html) Back to context...
17.
Patent Rolls, 1225–1232, (HMSO, 1903), pp. 493–94. Back to context...
18.
Cf. The Irish Pipe Roll of 14 John 1211–1212, ed. Oliver Davis and D.B. Quinn (Ulster Journal of Archaeology 3rd series, iv, supplement, 1941), p. 3. Back to context...
19.
Rotuli Normanniae, p. 77. Back to context...
20.
See, for example, Calendar of the Justiciary Rolls, 1295–1303, ed. James Mills (Dublin, 1903), p. 11. The earliest Justiciary Roll extant in 1922 was that for 1278 (Connolly, Medieval Record Sources, p. 25. The earliest Justiciary roll to survive to modern times is that for 1295. Back to context...
21.
Cf. Irish Pipe Roll of 14 John, p. 3. Back to context...
22.
Prior to the establishment of the Chancery in 1232, itinerant justices were appointed for the lordship in 1221, 1228 and 1230 (H.G. Richardson and G.O. Sayles, The Administration of Ireland (Dublin, 1963), pp. 132–33). The earliest roll of itinerant justices extant in 1922 was that for 1252 (Connolly, Medieval Record Sources, p. 25). Back to context...
23.
Cf. Paul Dryburgh and Beth Hartland ‘The Development of the Fine Rolls’ (http://www.finerollshenry3.org.uk/cocoon/frh3/content/month/fm-10-2007.html). 2.1, para 2. Back to context...
24.
Cf. Paul Brand, ‘Records, Administrative’, in Sean Duffy ed. Medieval Ireland An Encyclopedia (London, 2005), pp. 400–02. Back to context...