In the early summer of 2004, to mark the 800th anniversary of King John’s loss of Normandy, a series of conferences was held, in Caen and Rouen, at Poitiers and Fontevraud, and at the Public Record Office in Kew.¹ The Kew conference, in part financed by a grant from the Pipe Roll Society, itself then commemorating its 120th anniversary, was organized on an altogether less lavish scale than the great jamborees held in France. This was wholly appropriate, given that the French have a great deal more to celebrate than the English from the outcome of the events of 1204....

It has become almost axiomatic among historians that the start of King John’s reign in 1199 saw the introduction of the English chancery rolls.¹ In other words, the rolls began at the point from which they actually survive in The National Archives at Kew. When Nicholas Vincent entitled a recent paper ‘Why 1199? Bureaucracy and Enrolment under John and his Contemporaries’, his question was not, as it might have been, ‘why all this misplaced fuss about 1199?’, but, as he put it, ‘why should it have been in 1199 that the record keeping of the royal chancery took the quantum...

Itinerant justices appointed by the crown to hold pleas in the English shires were, by the 1170s, and probably much earlier, regularly handing in to the Exchequer lists of the penalties they imposed during their sessions, so that these sums of money could be included in the summonses sent to the sheriffs for collection, along with other dues. Such lists are twice mentioned in the Dialogue of the Exchequer, a treatise about the workings of the Exchequer written by the treasurer, Richard fitz Nigel, between 1177 and 1179.¹ Firstly, in the section describing how the summonses were drawn up, they...

Between 1177 and 1179 (although it was subsequently revised and interpolated), Richard fitz Nigel, Henry II’s treasurer, composed his De necessariis observantiis scaccarii dialogus, known in English as the Dialogue of the Exchequer. Posing as a master instructing his pupil, Richard fitz Nigel gives a lengthy account of the activities at the Exchequer at Michaelmas, when the sheriffs were summoned from their counties to answer for their farms and the other multifarious debts that they owed to the king. Richard’s treatise not only describes the assaying of coin and the duties of the various officials who sat at the Exchequer,...

Waleran de Beaumont (1104–66), the elder of the twin sons of Robert I, count of Meulan and Leicester (died 1118), was an exceptional character even among aristocrats. His sixty-two years of life spanned the reigns in England of Henry I, Stephen and Henry II, and in France those of Louis VI and Louis VII. At the peak of his career, in the late 1130s, his estates included an English earldom focused on Worcester, much of the land between the Rivers Risle and Seine in central Normandy, control of the county of Evreux, and, across the frontier, the county of...

When, in 1190, Hugh bishop of Lincoln visited the nunnery of Godstow, just outside Oxford, he was appalled by what he found there. In the church, in front of the High Altar, stood a magnificent sepulchre, hung about with rich tapestries and lamps, towards which the nuns clearly displayed considerable reverence. Inquiring which great personage was buried there, he was told that this was the tomb of Rosamund Clifford, the mistress of Henry II, for love of whom the heartbroken king had erected this monument following her death. Indeed, said the nuns, this royal generosity had caused their house, previously...

The court of King Henry II has long been a favoured hunting ground for Anglo-Norman prosopography. As has become apparent in recent years, it was a court that, while it recruited few Angevin and virtually no Poitevin adherents, consisted to a large extent of Anglo-Normans and in particular of the scions of Norman families whose chief possessions lay in England rather than Normandy.¹ It is just such a courtier whose career forms the subject of this essay. His name was Hugh de Gundeville, and when ranked among the more regular witnesses to the charters of King Henry II, he occurs...

Every medieval ruler faced one overriding problem: who was to carry out his commands? If he entrusted them to a local magnate, there was always a risk that the ruler would be enhancing noble power rather than his own. If, on the other hand, he appointed a man of lesser rank, the official’s dependence upon the ruler’s authority would usually ensure his loyalty to his master, but he might well not wield sufficient power to execute his master’s wishes. Promoting an official of modest rank to a great command also risked antagonising the local aristocracy whose resentment against an upstart...