3 - The documents

Summary

The documents printed below vary greatly in nature and purpose, covering as they do a span of almost 250 years. The distinction between types of survey, particularly between a ‘rental’ and an ‘extent’, was not rigidly observed, and no doubt varied over the ages. Discussion on the subject has tended to concentrate on the thirteenth century, earlier than the earliest document printed here (1343). Lennard established that an ‘extent’ originally must include valuations, a definition endorsed by Lomas and Harvey; yet, of the documents printed here, only some of the sixteenth-century ones contain true valuations, and they do not call themselves ‘extents’. Lomas also suggested that, in its true sense, ‘the extent had become superfluous by the fifteenth century’ and was largely replaced by the rental; the list of documents which he considered from around the country ends in 1409. Harvey has confirmed that, by the fifteenth century, the rental had become very similar to, and indeed had largely replaced, the extent; ‘the distinctions between the different sorts of medieval survey are not always clear-cut in practice.’ This suggests that even those of our documents which do actually call themselves ‘extents’ may have had more the purpose of a rental, and perhaps the term ‘extent’ was used out of habit. We have tried to observe the usage of the documents themselves, but have not attempted precision nor, necessarily, consistency; ’survey’ is used as a general term covering all such documents. Even a ‘rental’ may vary between a formal list of rents due (such as that of 1480, below) and an informal list of rents collected or to be collected; the documents covering the chantry-endowment manors (below, pp. 143-55) are closer to the latter category.

The three fifteenth-century surveys of the whole manor are spaced almost exactly at twenty-year intervals, being dated 1451-64 (mainly 1459-60), 1480 (by deduction: see below) and 1499. Whether this was due to policy or to chance is not clear; but the turnover of conventionary tenants at this period (see below) was such that a rental would have been very dated after twenty years. It is possible that the 1451-64 extent was the first such covering the estate as a whole (as opposed to ones covering individual manors, such as the fourteenth-century documents printed here), and so was perhaps regarded as having a particular authority, especially in relation to free tenements and their descents.