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        • The Making of an IPM
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IPMs and the Historian

Broadly, early users of the IPMs turned to them for genealogical information and to trace the inheritance of estates. It was in such information, as we have seen, that Sir John Fastolf’s researchers were interested in the fifteenth century; and the documents were used in similar ways in the majority of ‘antiquarian’ county histories written between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in the earlier volumes of the Victoria County History. Indeed, IPMs remain a central source for this kind of work, which continues to be key to the history of medieval provincial society. The ‘gentry studies’ which flourished in the 1980s and 1990s all relied to some extent on IPMs in tracing the descents, alliances and estates of the families they studied.[1] The reliability of their genealogical information has rarely been doubted, except for occasional instances when the ‘wrong’ heir may deliberately be named. Equally valuable are IPMs’ frequent detailed descriptions of property settlements and of grants of annuities and offices. Thus IPMs were one source used by J. M. W. Bean to trace the development of the enfeoffment to use;[2] and were used by Simon Payling to quantify the proportion of family property settlements made to heirs male, female or general.[3] IPMs can thus make a major contribution to legal history and the history of the family. They also cast light on political relations and conflict in local society: on a different occasion, they provided Simon Payling with a crucial piece of evidence relating to a dispute among the Nottinghamshire aristocracy.[4]Christian Liddy’s recent study of the gentry of county Durham, an area for which gentry estate records are largely lacking, relied almost entirely on IPMs in the Durham palatinate archive to establish the structure of local landed society.[5]

The use of IPMs to answer broader questions of social and agrarian history can be traced to the beginning of the last century. H. L. Gray used them to chart the commutation of villein labour services and the nature of field systems,[6] but their broader analysis was pioneered by the Russian historian Evgenii Kosminsky in his analysis of thirteenth-century English rural society, published in 1935 and in English translation in 1956.[7] It was also Kosminsky who offered the first detailed assessment of the reliability of the extents and surveys in the IPMs, an analysis which is still of considerable value.

Kosminsky was sceptical of the IPMs, noting that ‘the escheators had good reasons for returning as low a valuation as possible, since they had to render accounts to the Exchequer, which would be checked against the figures given in the inquisitions’ (p. 46). This scepticism was, at least in part, confirmed by a detailed comparison between the IPMs for Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk, and a set of contemporary accounts relating to the same estates. The values in the IPMs were generally lower than those in the accounts, often much lower: thus mills, for example, were worth on average according to the inquisitions only 2/3 of their value in the accounts; while court revenues were undervalued by an even greater margin. As Kosminsky noted, however, these contrasts are perhaps not as great as they appear, since the values in IPMs are usually ‘beyond reprises’ or ‘clear’ values. Thus the valuations of mills in IPMs may be low because they include allowances for payments for maintenance; valuations of court revenue may be low because they allow for the fees of bailiffs and stewards (pp. 60-1). Comparison between IPMs and accounts is thus fraught with difficulty. Nevertheless Kosminsky was driven to conclude that the IPMs were an ‘extremely unreliable source’ and that it would be very dangerous to build conclusions on them alone (p. 63). All the same, they did have the important benefit of providing evidence ‘relating to practically all the counties of England’ (p. 47) and thus of allowing analysis of figures over wide areas.

Much discussion in the following decades followed the outline drawn by Kosminsky. Rodney Hilton, surveying the sources for agricultural history, argued that – because of the incentive for the escheator to underestimate incomes – IPMs were less reliable than private surveys. At the same time, however, he recognized that they were a key source for the estates of lesser landholders, which are little documented elsewhere, and for counties which lacked other kinds of documentation.[8] Hilton himself used IPMs when trying to assess the ratio of arable, meadow and pasture in early fourteenth century Leicestershire. He found that the tendency of IPMs to underestimate and undervalue was again demonstrated by comparison with manorial accounts; but the inquisitions could still be used to assess the relative proportions of arable and meadow.[9]

A still more sceptical interpretation was put forward by C. Ross and T. B. Pugh. IPMs, they pointed out, did not always give an accurate picture of the deceased’s estates, since the escheator might omit estates held jointly with others and, in particular, estates which had been granted to feoffees. Nor were the documents a reliable guide to the value of individual estates, since jurors were unlikely to be well-informed on such questions, and there was no explicit evidence that families supplied accurate financial information. Furthermore, comparison of the 1439 IPMs for Richard, earl of Warwick, with a valor of approximately the same date, suggested consistent undervaluation in the IPMs.[10] Yet this was only one example, and the comparison was not quite fair, since the valor was a summary of a particular year’s income, while the IPMs probably offered a notional value for an ‘average’ year. And more positive assessments of IPMs have been made. J. A. Raftis, analysing extents from midland county IPMs in the period before 1350, was sceptical that royal government would have accepted completely inaccurate returns. Raftis undertook a detailed analysis of the acreage values which are a virtually unique feature of the IPMs; again, he argued, the IPMs offered unique opportunities for broad chronological comparisons, and the geographical and chronological variations they disclosed tended to corroborate those known from other sources.[11]

This was the first large-scale attempt to exploit the possibilities of the IPMs as a statistical source, an approach continued in two more recent studies by Bruce Campbell and associates. The first was an extensive study of IPMs from the London region between 1270 and 1339 which explored the impact of the metropolis on its rural hinterland. This suggested that the IPMs – although their ‘accuracy at a detailed level should not be pressed too far’ – were an essentially reliable source, particularly suited to analysis in large numbers, and providing the best widespread evidence on land-use.[12] The second was a broader study of land-use at a countrywide level for a somewhat shorter period, 1300-49. This was very largely based on the extents in IPMs, although their information was supplemented from manorial accounts and tax returns. The resulting atlas emphasized, again, the sheer quantity of coverage provided by IPMs. Private extents and accounts may provide ‘richer and more precise’ information but are ‘smaller in number and more selective in both their institutional and geographical coverage’. IPMs, for all their difficulties, are ‘the single best source for reconstructing both the institutional and economic geography of the country’.[13] So too with the land-values given in the IPMs: ‘what they lack in precision is more than compensated for by their quantity’ so that, again, ‘IPMs are the single greatest available compendium of information on the unit value of land’.[14]

The Atlas continues to sound notes of caution. The authors acknowledge that IPMs probably tend to undervalue several sources of income. For revenue from courts, markets, fairs, and mills, IPMs are probably better guides to relative than absolute values.[15] Difficulties in the statistical analysis of documents covering a wide geographical area are also acknowledged. One fundamental issue concerns the size of the acres referred to in the documents, since not only could the customary acre vary in size, but there was also variation between use of the customary acre and the statute acre. Varying values of land per acre may thus reflect not variations in the productivity of the land, but ‘simply differences in the size of the acres being valued’.[16] Another difficulty concerns the nature of the valuations given in the IPMs. In most cases these were apparently notional net values for an average year.[17] Some valuations of arable land, however, which stand out as unusually high, were apparently made according to a different system, perhaps based on the actual market value of the particular crops grown that year.[18] To these difficulties must, of course, be added the possibility explored above that some extents were simply copied from earlier documents and thus represented fossilized rather than actual values. All these difficulties, however, probably do not fundamentally compromise the use of IPM data for broad chronological and geographical comparisons; although it must be emphasized that more work is needed on the post-1349 extents before we can be confident that they are as reliable as their earlier counterparts.

In sum, IPMs are indispensable at two quite different levels of historical inquiry. They remain a crucial source for almost all studies of local society in medieval England; sometimes their information on economic and tenurial structure can be supplemented by the evidence of other accounts or surveys, but often this is not the case. The agricultural history of Rotherfield Greys in Oxfordshire, for example, is largely dependent on IPMs for the period before 1550.[19] On the other hand, IPMs are in many cases the only source available for drawing a national picture; and this in particular has been emphasized in the recent historiography. IPMs thus formed the basis for John Langdon’s account of nationwide variations in the value of mills and thus of milling exploitation. Comparison of IPMs with accounts suggests that the former undervalue mills, even allowing for the inclusion of maintenance costs; but relative variations in value can still be illuminatingly illustrated. IPMs are also the only source after Domesday book which allow the countrywide distribution of mills to be plotted.[20]

Future work on IPMs is likely to extend these lines of inquiry. It is hoped that by digitizing and enhancing the calendared texts and by making them fully searchable, the current project will allow these vital sources of information to be fully exploited at both national and local levels. In particular, the detailed analysis of IPMs from 1349-1447 can be expected to add a new level of detail and breadth to our understanding of post-plague agrarian history. It is also hoped that more recent developments in calendaring will also open up new avenues of research. Most notably these will include research into the jurors whose names have been made available for the first time in the volumes from 1422-47. These volumes, in fact, are the only sources in print which provide the identities of local jurors over a significant chronological and geographical range. Kosminsky’s study of the jurors of the 1279 hundred rolls has had few successors, and much work remains to be done on the lower levels of political society represented by the inquisition jurors.[21]