Valuations of ecclesiastical property in inquisitions post mortem
This paper presents the results so far of ongoing research into the
valuations of ecclesiastical institutions found in the inquisitions post
mortem (ipms) undertaken on the orders of the English royal government,
primarily those of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. These
valuations are copious and, because they relate to institutions which are
valued in other contexts, it is possible to assess their reliability. Since the
income of churches was made up in large part of tithes, in turn related to
agricultural productivity, the valuations have the potential to indicate
economic prosperity generally, and not only the size and wealth of the
individual ecclesiastical institution.1 The paper explains the process by
which the valuations were made and their purpose and argues that
valuations may be used to further our understanding of regional variations
in wealth and the economic trends in this period.
Surviving ipms date from 1236 to c. 1640. They were the royal inquiries
taken on the estates of tenants in chief of the Crown, usually after they
had died but also when the tenant had forfeited his estates as a
punishment for felony, or if he or she were incapacitated. Inquiries
following the death of a tenant were usually initiated by writs of diem
clausit extremum issued from the royal chancery, which could follow up
with further writs if additional information were required. The
information was provided, in theory at least, by local jurors, who were
asked a series of questions by the escheator or his subordinate at county
level. The questions were based on the instructions in the royal writ, and
there were also guidance documents such as the ‘articles of the escheator’
A point made by J.H. Denton in relation to the Taxatio of 1291-2: ‘The valuation of the ecclesiastical
benefices of England and Wales in 1291-2’, Historical Research, 66, no. 161 (October 1993), 231-250 (p.
231).
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or the ‘Extenta manerii’.2 The escheator, of course, also had his own
experience and understanding of what it would be useful to include in his
survey. The key questions set out in the writ were how much land the
tenant had held of the king and how much of others, by what service, how
much the lands were worth per year, and who the next heir was and his
age. Early forms of the writ sometimes spelled out what the value of the
land might be made up of, and the advowson of churches was sometimes
specified as an item. When each inquisition was complete it was returned
to the chancery along with the writ which had ordered it; and copies were
retained both in the chancery and the exchequer.
The inquisitions, accordingly, give copious information about land
ownership and use, buildings and amenities, land values, demography and
social life and customs. Ipms have attracted considerable scholarly
attention over the years, and interest in them has enjoyed a renaissance
recently with the publication of several more volumes of calendars of
fifteenth-century ipms and a volume of essays exploring the potential of
the source.3 The wider scope of historical interest in our own day is
reflected in the inclusion, in the recent calendars, of details passed over in
nineteenth-century ones, most obviously the manorial extents themselves
but also the names of the jurors. And more recent calendars also include
the valuations of churches, generally omitted earlier on.
Ecclesiastical patronage rights were included in ipms because they were a
form of property, heritable and transferrable along with land. In
particular, lordship of a manor often included the patronage (or
advowson) of the church within it. Not all manors were co-terminous
Waugh, S.L., ‘The origins and early development of the articles of the escheator’, in Thirteenthcentury England, 5: Proceedings of the Newcastle upon Tyne Conference, 1993, ed. P.R. Coss and S.D.
Lloyd (Woodbridge, 1995), pp. 89-114 and The Statutes of the Realm, I (Record Commission, 1810), 2.
242-3.
3
The Fifteenth-Century Inquisitions Post Mortem: A Companion ed. M. Hicks (Woodbridge, 2012).
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2
with parishes, of course; there might be several manors within one parish
or more than one parish church within a manor. The church in a manor
might be a dependency of a former minster, so not have fully parochial
status. Above all, many lay patrons had given away their rights of
advowson in the wake of the twelfth-century canon law reforms which
restricted the rights of the laity over the churches that they had formerly
regarded very much as their own. Many such churches came to be
appropriated by religious institutions or to form cathedral prebends.
Because of such grants, the amount of patronage in the hands of the laity
as a whole was not in direct proportion to the number of their manors or
the extent of their estates. Tenants in chief, however, enjoyed, in addition
to the patronage rights on their demesne estates, the right of presenting to
churches on their own tenants’ estates during periods of wardship. These
churches too were often valued in ipms in certain circumstances, as I will
explain later. All this means that thousands of ecclesiastical benefices are
valued in ipms.
Most of the ecclesiastical institutions mentioned were parish churches but
there were also the religious houses of their patronage and, increasingly
as the period progresses, the chantries of their foundation. When
reporting on rights of patronage, ipms usually also recorded the value of
the churches and religious houses concerned. A patron was not supposed
to have access to the spiritual income from a church, and was only
allowed to present the next incumbent to the bishop, but the point of
recording the value of the church or chapel in a royal inquisition must
have been to enable the king (and his advisers) to know how rich a
benefice was. This would inform any decision about whom to present if
the church fell vacant during the period of royal custody of the estates.
3
We know from the patent rolls that royal clerks were ‘matched up’ to
benefices on the basis of their value.
In addition, knowing the relative value of churches and religious houses
was of great importance when it came to partitions of estates between coheirs. There was also the requirement to assign dower to the tenant’s
widow, which included a share of the associated patronage rights.
Information about the value of religious houses might be included,
although the patron’s access to the material resources of a house was very
limited. At most, he might have custody of the temporal income of a
house during vacancies, or might claim entitlement to hospitality. Some
ipms would record the value of the house, or the number of inhabitants.
Thirteenth-century inquisitions in particular provided some details about
the nature of patron’s rights, if any, within it, with particular emphasis on
the right of custody in vacancies, entitlement to hospitality, and spiritual
services.
It is clear that the information provided was useful to the Crown. In
particular, additional information was sometimes sought out. It became
usual for the chancery to issue a further writ as well as the diem clausit
extremum writ which set in train the main ipm. This further writ,
certiorari de feodis militum at advocationibus ecclesiarum, asked
explicitly for information about the true value of the knights’ fees and
advowsons of churches belonging to the deceased tenant in chief. It was
used above all in respect of the estates of larger tenants, in which the fees
and advowsons were more plentiful. From the late thirteenth century on,
it was this writ, rather than the initial diem clausit extremum, which
yielded information about advowsons, so much so that an ipm from the
later thirteenth century which did not include returns made to certiorari
writs would be of limited use to the historian of patronage rights. The
4
arrangement of the information was rather different; instead of dealing
with an advowson as an adjunct of the lordship of a particular manor, all
the advowsons of churches and religious houses in a county would be
grouped together in a list. In addition to listing patronage rights held by
the landowner concerned, and their value, ipms in response to such writs
would often state that there were no advowsons in a particular county.
The potential of all this information is obvious for the historian of
ecclesiastical patronage. For this purpose, based on my own studies of
magnate patronage in the later thirteenth century, it seems that the
statement of the fact of a tenant’s patronage is generally reliable. I would
not, however, go so far as to say that ipms necessarily give a complete
picture of a tenant in chief’s ecclesiastical interests. A common problem
is that the ipm is incomplete – there are returns for some, but not all
counties in which the tenant had lands, for example. Another issue is that
the records are in some cases very damaged indeed although the
exchequer copy may help to supply some missing material. But, does the
potential end there? There are literally thousands of church valuations in
ipms; can we use them? If (and it is a big ‘if’) they bear a real relationship
to the actual income of the church concerned, can we use the information
as a guide to the distribution of wealth and the changing fortunes of
regions and localities over time?
Much doubt has been cast on the reliability of the valuations of land in
ipms, particularly of the fifteenth century, on the grounds that interested
parties (such as the heir and his family or those who were hopeful of a
grant of the wardship) exerted undue influence in the process; that
escheators had an interest in giving low valuations because it took the
pressure off themselves to raise revenue; that they relied on the evidence
of previous inquisitions; that the jurors’ own knowledge was uncertain;
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and that the Crown itself was not particularly interested anyway. Recent
scholarship, while recognising the limitations, has nevertheless taken a
more positive view. 4 In fact it may be argued that the valuations of
churches and religious houses were not subject to such considerations.
The heir and his family had no reason to undervalue churches in their gift
(as they may have wished to do in respect of the proceeds from their own
lands). Far from wanting to undervalue the importance of their patronage
rights, heirs will actively have encouraged the king to take them seriously
and to exercise them, since by doing so he confirmed them. The most
common action in relation to an advowson was the assize of darrein
presentment which established possession on the basis of the identity of
the person presenting at the previous vacancy. If it could be demonstrated
that the king had done so by reason of wardship of the patron’s estates
then the patron’s possession was upheld. Indeed the family would even
remind the king of the need to present – although this will also have been
because they hoped that a protégé of the family might benefit.
Far from being backsliding and doing the minimum amount of work,
some escheators went out of their way to provide useful information. The
ipm on the lands of Patrick de Chaworth in 1257 included his holdings in
Standen and Hook Hill in Wiltshire, including the advowson of the chapel
in the manor, whose endowments (including tithes and lands) were
4
Crump, C.G., ‘A note on the criticism of records’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 8 (1924),
140-44, Ross, C.D., and T.B, Pugh, ‘Materials for the study of baronial incomes in fifteenth-century
England’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, vol. 6 (1953-4), 186-9, Kosminsky, E.A., Studies in the
Agrarian History of England in the Thirteenth Century (Oxford, 1956), pp. 46-67, Hilton, R.H., ‘The
content and sources of English agrarian history before 1500, Agricultural History Review, 3 (1955), 319, Hunnisett, R.F., ‘The reliability of inquisitions as historical evidence’ in Bullough, D.A., and R.L.
Storey, eds, The study of medieval records: essays in honour of Kathleen Major (Oxford, 1971), pp.
206-236, Campbell, B.M.S., and K. Bartley, England on the Eve of the Black Death: An Atlas of Lay
Lordship, Land and Wealth, 1300-49 (Manchester, 2006), Carpenter, C., ‘Introduction’, in Calendar of
Inquisitions Post Mortem, XXII, ed. K. Parkin (Woodbridge, 2003), Dyer, C., ‘The value of fifteenthcentury inquisitions post mortem for economic and social history’ and Holford, M., ‘ “Notoriously
unreliable”: the valuations and extents’, both in The Fifteenth-Century Inquisitions Post Mortem: A
Companion, pp. 97-115 and 117-144.
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spelled out. It was also explained that the lord owed 2s per year to the
prior of Ogbourne for the chantry of the chapel.5 In the ipm on the estates
of Elias de Rabayne and his wife, in 1288, there was said to be a chapel
on the manor of Little Piddle in Dorset to which belonged a messuage
and a virgate of land and the tithes of the lord’s demesne; celebration in
the chapel, it declared (with relish, one feels), had nothing to do with the
bishop or archdeacon and the lord had the right to give the land and tithes
to whomever he wanted.6
This amount of detail was unusual, but it was by no means out of the way
for the escheator to show that he understood the purpose of including
information about advowsons. He might indicate, for example, that a
benefice was not vacant, or, that the advowson was litigious, or that a
church was in the gift of more than one patron and whose turn it was next
to present. We can observe different officers at work producing varying
amounts of information in composite ipms. In the Kent and Sussex
sections of the ipm on the lands of William de Say held in early 1272,
two manorial extents reported who the patrons of the church were when
they were not in William’s own patronage; and the identity of the rector
was provided for three churches of which William was patron.7 The
extents for other counties did not go into such detail.
Church valuations were made with some care, as required by the royal
writs initiating them and as shown by the references sometimes given to
the source of the information. There were even hints of fluctuating values
over time. Churches were sometimes said to be worth a given amount ‘in
normal years’. More specifically, the church of Llanharry
(Monmouthshire) on the Clare estates was said in 1296 to have been
5
C.Inq. P.M., I. (HMSO, 1904), p. 114.
C.Inq. PM., II. (HMSO, 1906), p. 421.
7
C.Inq.P.M., I., pp. 281-2
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worth 60s. ‘before the war’.8 Sometimes escheators showed that they
understood the difference between the value of the church and the value
of the advowson; the church of Boreford in Shropshire was said to be
worth 20 marks a year in 1369, but the advowson of two thirds of it,
which belonged to the knight Geoffrey of Cornwall, was said to be worth
nothing.9
Nor were church valuations habitually lifted from existing information. It
is true that such information existed, and an interesting question is the
extent to which that information percolated down to the level of local
officers. In the thirteenth century a number of papal assessments of
ecclesiastical property were made, including the so-called ‘Valuation of
Norwich’ of 1254, but most importantly the rigorous assessment of
ecclesiastical property in England and Wales, the ‘Taxatio’, made in
1291-2 on the orders of Pope Nicholas IV.10 This assessment became the
definitive basis for both papal and royal taxation of the clergy for the
remainder of the medieval period. It is true that a few valuations of
churches in East Anglia of the later thirteenth century claimed to be based
on the valuation of Norwich . However, there is very little to suggest that,
later on, escheators relied on the information in the Taxatio but that they
used other sources for the purpose of their inquiries. For example
comparison of a substantial sample consisting of 87 valuations from
inquisitions of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with those in the
papal assessment of 1291-2 shows that information was not simply lifted
from that source.
8
TNA C 133/77/3, m. 3/17
C. Inq. P.M., 12 (HMSO, 1938), pp. 316-17.
10
Lunt, W.E., The Valuation of Norwich (Oxford, 1926), Taxatio Ecclesiastica Angliae et Walliae
Auctoritate P. Nicholai IV. c. 1291 ed. T. Astle, S. Ayscough and J. Caley (Record Commission, 1802),
The Taxatio Database: www.hrionline.ac.uk/taxatio/index.html and Graham, R., ‘The Taxation of
Pope Nicholas IV’, English Historical Review, 23 (1908), 434-54, reprinted in English Ecclesiastical
Studies (London, 1929), pp. 271-301.
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8
I do not find this at all surprising. The arrangement of information in the
Taxatio was by deanery and diocese not by patron. It would have taken an
enormous amount of effort to trace each church, even if the escheator had
had a text of the papal assessment ready to hand. A much more obvious
place to look would be the valuations made in previous ipms on the same
estates, if these were kept by the escheator’s own office. We are
sometimes able to compare the values of churches when these are
covered in successive inquisitions. It is encouraging to observe that, at
least in the thirteenth century, the values do not seem to have been
habitually lifted from earlier ones, but were generated afresh each time.
For example, comparison between the values of churches as reported in
the inquisition taken into the estates of the earldom of Norfolk in 1270
and those in the inquisitions of 1307 on those estates shows that churches
occurring in both were rarely valued at the same amount. Twenty
churches were valued in both inquisitions and the values of only two
coincide.11 On the Clare estates, six churches valued in 1262 were also
valued in 1314; only one was valued at the same amount.12 On the other
hand, the values of six churches on the Tattershall estates were valued in
1306 and 1308 at the same amounts as they had been in 1304, but this is
perhaps reassuring because the time between the inquisitions was so
short. Again, the valuations may have been intended to show the position
in ‘normal’ years so that year to year fluctuations were less relevant. 13
Evidence that valuations were made afresh each time continues in ipms of
the fourteenth century. Comparison of the values of 55 different churches
in the ipms of a number of magnate estates of the later fourteenth century
with those in later thirteenth century or earlier fourteenth-century ipms
similarly show little correlation.
11
TNA C 132/38/17 and TNA C 133/127.
TNA C 132/27/5, mm. 18, 22, and 26 and C135/44, mm. 65 and 67.
13
TNA C 133/109, mm. 16 and 18 and C 133/123(12), mm. 13 and 17.
12
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I would, therefore, argue that there is at least some evidence, particularly
in the thirteenth century, to suggest that these inquiries were made with
care; and that the valuations of churches give at least a rough guide to the
value of the church concerned. If so, then we can start to think about the
potential of the evidence. In the first place, we can provide a more
detailed quantification of the amount of patronage in the hands of the
laity in the later medieval period. Moreover the comments that were made
to amplify the raw numerical information given in the returns shed light
on officials’ and jurors’ understanding of the nature and significance of
ecclesiastical patronage rights and the value of church property. It is
anticipated, on the basis of the preliminary studies that have been made,
that there may be regional differences in the way in which escheators
interpreted royal instructions and in the way in which valuations were
made. It should also be possible to gain a better understanding of the aims
of central royal government in seeking information and spending
considerable resources on doing so.
If we can use the valuations as a guide, it should also be possible to map
ecclesiastical wealth, to indicate regions and localities in which there
were concentrations of wealthier or poorer churches. For example, ipms
on the estates of the Bigod earls of Norfolk suggest a number of smaller
churches in Suffolk and Norfolk; and those on the estates of the Clare
earls of Gloucester include a number of poorer churches in
Monmouthshire. Conversely, the estates of the later thirteenth-century
earldom of Richmond included a number of very wealthy Yorkshire
churches. There is much more work to be done, and of course the
interplay between the value of individual churches and the number of
churches in a given area needs to be explored. Subject to this, it should be
possible to make inter-regional comparisons, and to chart changing values
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of churches in a given area over time, to see if some parts of the country
increased in prosperity while others declined.
The fact that ipms deal primarily (although not exclusively) with the
estates of tenants in chief does not skew the evidence unduly; comparison
of the values of churches in the gift of tenants in chief with the values of
those of their subtenants – which are, on occasion, also included in ipms
– suggests that the social status of lay patrons was not in itself a
determinant of the value of the benefices in their gift. Magnates had the
patronage of poor churches as well as rich ones. It was, rather, the
number of churches in a given patron’s gift that was related to his or her
status. A magnate’s churches could vary enormously in value – and that,
of course, was the reason why the investigations about value needed to be
made.
Elizabeth Gemmill.
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