The ‘Resource Curse’ of Mediaeval English State Finance, C.1155–1453

Historians of medieval England have a wealth of documentary sources at their disposal, especially concerning royal finances. The Pipe rolls, summaries of the annual audits between the king and his revenue collectors, survive in relatively unbroken sequence from as early as 1155. The first part of this chapter will set out how historians have mined this rich seam of material to establish administrative and accounting practices, chart the changes in the size and sources of royal revenues over time, and reconstruct the political background to the transition from a ‘domain’ state to a tax state. However, the wealth of the surviving primary sources can lead to complacency and, indeed, obscure the sometimes fundamental gaps in our understanding of how royal finance actually operated in practice. For instance, kings often paid their expenses by issuing anticipatory tallies drawn on collectors of local revenues. The records thus record the issue of the tally and its subsequent presentation by the collector when his accounts were audited but they are not at all concerned with its journey between these two points. It is clear from anecdotal references that these tallies were often not honoured for months or years, during which time they could be transferred on an informal secondary market at a discount; but this is (mostly) invisible in the Exchequer records. The second part of the chapter will therefore attempt to delimit the boundaries of our knowledge about the interactions between English state finance and the wider financial system.