The Development of the Fine Rolls

The fine rolls provide a wealth of material of great value to historians of Henry III's reign being, in essence, the principal record of offers of money to the king for an enormous variety of concessions and favours to individuals and corporate bodies, both municipal and religious. They reveal what the king was expected and could be persuaded to grant and the benefits his subjects expected or hoped to be able to win from him. They are therefore crucial in understanding networks of patronage and debt and credit, and the increasingly rapid changes to the law, the position of women and the seigneurial landscape and economy in the thirteenth century. Each fine roll was compiled in Latin by a handful of scribes, and a total of sixty-four rolls containing around eight hundred membranes, one for almost all of the fifty-six years of Henry III's reign from 1216 to 1272, survive in The National Archives at Kew in the series C 60. The earliest example is from 1199, the first year of John's reign, making it co-terminus with the first charter roll, a running record of the king's grants by charter, and slightly antedating the close and patent rolls, records of outgoing letters from the royal Chancery, all of which helped rationalise and regularise royal bureaucratic authority in England. Running to twenty-three membranes, however, this ‘first’ extant fine roll was a well-developed instrument of government.