Pipe rolls
medieval and post-medieval English financial documents
The pipe rolls, sometimes called the Great Rolls or the Great Rolls of the Pipe, are a collection of financial records maintained by the English Exchequer, or Treasury, and its successors, as well as the Exchequer of Ireland. They record not only payments made to the government, but debts owed to the crown and disbursements made by royal officials. The earliest date from the 12th century, and the series extends, mostly complete, from then until 1833. They form the oldest continuous series of records concerning English governance kept by the English, British, Irish, and United Kingdom governments, and cover a span of some 700 years.
They were the records of the yearly audits performed by the Exchequer of the accounts and payments presented to the Treasury by the sheriffs and other royal officials. They owed their name to the shape they took, as the various sheets were affixed to each other and then rolled into a tight roll, resembling a pipe, for storage. Although they recorded much of the royal income, they did not record all types of income, nor did they record all expenditures, so they are not strictly speaking a budget.
The early medieval pipe rolls are especially useful for historical study, as they are some of the earliest financial records available from the Middle Ages. A similar set of records was developed for Normandy, which was ruled by the English kings from 1066 to 1205, but the Norman pipe rolls have not survived in a continuous series like the English.
The Pipe Roll Society, formed in 1883, has published the pipe rolls for the period up to 1224.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pipe rolls” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.