ABSTRACT
Churchwardens' accounts are the primary source material for any description of the financial and communal life of late medieval parishes, but the selection of case studies poses considerable problems. England's copious local archives make it quite impossible to embark on a quantitative analysis of all available sets, and some sort of informed selection procedure is inevitable. In addition to the catalogues of County Record Offices and the publications of local history journals and record societies, a number of reference works supply extensive, if sometimes conflicting, guidance on the survival of parish accounts. 1 By far the most exhaustive survey, however, can now be found in Ronald Hutton's The Rise and Fall of Merry England. County by county and in chronological order, it lists all the detailed (and accessible) sets of accounts up to 1690, and provides information about their location, the existence of editions or printed extracts, and the state of the manuscript for the periods covered.2 This authoritative collection is the result of a monumental research effort by the author, and it would make little sense to duplicate it here. Inevitably though, definitions about starting-dates and inclusion or exclusion of imperfect cases vary, and the definite collection must remain evasive, for new sets are being discovered, and existing records lost or damaged all the time. 3 The compilation used for this study,
Beds. 1 Dors. 2 Leics. : 4 Som. :19 Berks. 5 Essex 7 Lines. :10 Staffs. : 3 Bristol 6 Glos. 1 London :26 Suff. :14 Bucks. 2 Hants. 6 Mid d. : 2 Surrey : 8 Cambs. 5 Heref. 1 Norf. :10 Sussex :13 Ches. 2 Herts. 2 Northants. : 2 Warw. 4 Corn. 7 Hunts. 2 Notts. : 1 Westm. 1 Cum b. 1 Kent :15 Oxon. :10 Wilts. 7 Derb. 1 Lanes. : 1 Salop. : 3 Worcs. 4 Devon :18 Yorks. 8
printed in Appendix 1, emerged in a pragmatic, rather than systematic way, and benefited from the generous help of many other historians working in the field. 4 It would be tedious to elaborate on each and every discrepancy, but, in essence, this list casts its net a little bit wider, includes examples which are now only known through antiquarian transcripts, and incorporates a small number of modifications suggested by further local research. 5 It thus contains 234 rather than 200 pre-1548 sets, but reveals a very similar geographical (see Table 3.1) and chronological (see Figure 3.1) pattern.6
