Introductory

The importance of Edmund of Walpole's abbacy in a number of respects was discussed above. The period is also notable because to it belongs the first detailed information about the convent's system of estate management and financial control. The information is in sixty-six manorial and obedientiary accounts, together with some accounts of the obedientiaries’ officials. They survive in copies preserved in the abbey's ‘Kempe’ register, BL MS Harley 645, ff. 193–9, 252–3, 260–5. The accounts fall into two chronological groups: the first and largest group is of accounts dated variously from 1247 to 50; the second group is of those dated 1256–61. These accounts are far from a complete survey of the abbey's estates in the mid-thirteenth century. They are only of 21 of the 250 or so manors and vills belonging to the convent and, since most of the manors covered were among the most prosperous, the picture they give may not be quite representative of the convent's total holding. Nevertheless, they are an invaluable source for the history of the administration of the abbey's estates and of its economy, and more generally for the history of accounting in the middle ages.

Paul Harvey, in a ground-breaking and learned paper, has subjected the palaeography and codicology of the accounts to exhaustive study, besides speculating about their purpose and establishing their importance in the history of accounting methods. Originally, the accounts were copied on to bifolia, that is, large sheets of parchment which had been folded to form two folio-sized leaves. These bifolia were probably then assembled to form a booklet which by the end of the fourteenth century was bound into the ‘Kempe’ register, which is an impressive folio-sized volume containing copies of miscellaneous documents of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It appears that the earlier group of accounts (those for 1247–50) was copied by six scribes and the later group (those for 1256–61) by three scribes. A few other documents relating to St Edmunds’ financial situation in the mid-thirteenth century were copied into spaces by other scribes: among them is the résumé (f. 199) of the abbey's debts to Florentine merchants and other creditors which provides valuable evidence about the abbey's indebtedness but falls outside Paul Harvey's remit.