Manorial Account Rolls and Rentals of Walsham Le Willows 1327 to 1559 (Suffolk Records Society, 68)

This fourth volume, featuring a good series of manorial accounts and rentals, complements the court roll material by painting a more textured picture of life in late-medieval Walsham.


The Suffolk Records Society has already published three volumes on Walsham Le Willows: 17, the Field Book of 1577 edited by Kenneth Dodd, and 41 and 45, the Court Rolls of 1303-1399, edited by Ray Lock. This fourth volume, featuring a good series of manorial accounts and rentals, complements the court roll material by painting a more textured picture of life in late-medieval Walsham through furnishing further details of its society and economy. These include documents from the small lay manor of High Hall, which was highly typical of medieval English lordships but hardly any sources have survived from such places. The accounts and rentals provide insights into Walsham's agricultural practices, including woodland management for the production of fuel, the balance of crops and livestock, the disposal of produce, the remuneration of workers, the consumption habits of harvest workers and local lords, and the role of women in the management of the manorial estate. There are insights into local tensions following the national political turmoil in the summer of 1450.
Yet even these four volumes hardly scratch the surface of the surviving archive. In addition to the published fourteenth-century court rolls there is a long run of rolls from 1399 through to the early twentieth century and there are many more surveys and rentals from the early modern period. Indeed Walsham may reasonably claim to be one of the best documented places in England between 1300 and 1900.

MARK BAILEY was recently High Master of St Paul's School, London, and a visiting fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He was previously a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and is now the Professor of Later Medieval History at the University of East Anglia. His numerous publications include Medieval Suffolk. An economic and social history 1200-1500 (2007) and After the Black Death. Economy, society and the law in fourteenth-century England (2021).

AUDREY MCLAUGHLIN (1931-2010) provided local historians around Walsham with inspiration, leadership and technical knowledge for three decades. Her dissertation for the University of Cambridge's Board of Extra Mural Studies was 'The Three Surveys of Walsham, Their Uses and Limitations' (1985). She co-authored (with Stanley West) A landscape history of Walsham Le Willows (1998).