One Monday evening, in late 1997, Chris Pickford, then Bedfordshire County Archivist, invited a group of members of Bedford National Trust Association to visit Bedfordshire and Luton Archives and Record Service to look at two sixteenth-century documents relating to Willington which, with the help of Samuel Whitbread, had been purchased for the collections. Chris opened a cardboard box, and I saw that it was full of rolls of parchment and wondered about the lives of the men who had written them some 600 years ago. So began a long programme of research which has led to the production of this volume for the Bedfordshire Historical Records Society.

Transcribing and translating manor court rolls is an absorbing task; the handwriting, some of it very beautiful, but much of it almost illegible, is often cramped and sometimes faded and dirty. Then there is the language; Latin, of course, but with its use of Medieval abbreviations, words and phrases. Inevitably many records have been damaged and destroyed over the centuries. They may be crumpled, torn, or just not there at all, and the collections of documents which remain may give a limited historical picture. But whatever the problems, when there are eureka moments and when a difficult puzzle has been solved there is cause for celebration. There is considerable satisfaction in deciphering documents written by people with very different lives to ours but with similar human feelings.

No accounts or manor court rolls exist for Willington before 1382. Although we have no evidence to indicate why manorial records before this date have not survived, many manorial records elsewhere were destroyed during the rioting in 1381 known as the Peasants’ Revolt. This account ends, not in 1540, when important changes of land-holding and estate management occurred as a consequence of the dissolution of the monasteries but in 1522, because significant changes took place in Willington soon after this date, and the years that follow are part of a different story.

The writing of this volume would not have been possible without the preservation of documents by the Duke of Norfolk and the Duke of Bedford. His Grace the Duke of Norfolk gave his kind permission for me to visit the Archives at Arundel Castle to study original texts, for which he holds the copyright.