Medieval Accounting Memoranda from Norwich Cathedral Priory

Summary

At the Fourth Lateran Council, Innocent III ordered that the previously independent houses of Benedictine monks throughout Christendom be grouped and organized into provinces with triennial chapters, a measure which was successfully applied in England. When the first general chapter of the new Benedictine province of Canterbury met at Oxford in 1218–19, one of its clauses stipulated that obedientiaries – monks holding administrative offices within the monastery – should render accounts to the head of the house and this obligation was repeated at every general chapter. Monasteries at the time were often in debt and such accounts served, amongst other things, to establish the ‘state of the monastery’ (status monasterii or status domus), a notion that had a financial significance as well as a moral and disciplinary one. As a feature of the monastic reform of the thirteenth century, which touched not only the Benedictine monks but also nuns, regular canons and canonesses, the development of obedientiaries' accounts aimed to fight debt as well as proprietas, the unauthorized possession of goods by monks. Even before Lateran IV, the importance of imposing account-rendering as part of the papal reform of religious houses appeared clearly in some legatine visitations, such as the visitation of St Mary's, York, by John of Ferentino in 1206. Aside from the theoretically triennial frame of the Benedictine chapters and the irregular legatine visitations, archbishops and bishops also played a role in the enforcement of the rendition of obedientiaries' accounts.