• Home
• Project Information
• Fine Rolls
• Style Book
• Commentary
  • Introduction to Reign
  • Introduction to Rolls
  • Originalia Rolls
  • Technical Introduction
  • Heads and Headings
• News
• Help
• Fine of the Month
• Book Publication
• Blog
• Conference
• Podcasts
• Related Papers

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.