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The Historical Importance of IPMs

What are Inquisitions Post-Mortem?

Much is known about inquisitions post mortem, especially for the first half of the fourteenth century when their contents have been extensively mined. Much, though, remains to be discovered, and particularly for the mid-fifteenth century and after. This introduction does not deal in detail with the development of IPMs from their inception in the thirteenth century to their standardization, by the mid fourteenth century, under escheators associated with single or dual counties. Good accounts of these developments are already available. What follows concentrates only on the evidence of the most recently calendared documents, those from 1422-47. In deals in particular with the question of how IPMs were produced and subsequently used, and what implications these processes have for the reliability and historical value of the documents. It attempts both to summarize the existing scholarly literature and to contribute new material, deriving especially from the IPMs for 1432-47 and related documents.

What is the Historical Importance of IPMs

Inquisitions post mortem (IPMs) can be briefly defined as inquiries into the lands held at their deaths by tenants-in-chief of the crown (for more detail see section 2 below). The documents are extant in a largely unbroken series in the National Archives of the United Kingdom, beginning in 1236 and ending around the abolition of feudal tenures in 1660. (Series I, containing classes C 132 to C 141, extends from Henry III to Richard III; Series II, in the class C 142, extends from Henry VII to Charles I). IPMs have long been recognized as one of the most important sources for the social and economic history of medieval England. At the most basic level, they provide information about people’s landed estates for a period when landed wealth was the fundamental basis of social and political power. They identify the heir of the deceased tenant, often naming other relatives in addition, and are thus a vital source for tracing family descents and genealogies. By the mid-fourteenth century they regularly detail the deceased’s date of death, alongside the age of their heir, making them an important source for demographic history. They regularly describe the ways in which lands were settled among family members, and have been used, among other things, to study the development of enfeoffments to use or trusts. Perhaps most fundamentally, IPMs provide information about the social and tenurial structure of almost every parish in medieval England. They are one of the fundamental sources of local history and regularly provide the backbone of the parish histories in the Victoria History of the Counties of England.

Finally, the central importance of IPMs for economic and agricultural history is also becoming increasingly clear. A large number of inquisitions contain extents – that is, detailed surveys – of the estates they describe. These typically included acreages and values of different land-types, such as pasture and arable; details of various rents paid by free and villein tenants; and the nature and value of manorial courts and also of fairs and markets. These extents are particularly significant for agrarian history because they cover a virtually national area and because they largely concern lay estates, often those of smaller landholders for whom other estate records are rarely available. Not only do IPMs provide information for areas and persons little documented elsewhere, but their wide geographical and chronological coverage provides virtually unique opportunities for investigating broad contrasts and changes in estate management. Admittedly, the extent to which the data in the extents is amenable to statistical analysis is still a matter of debate; but the possibilities offered by such analysis have recently been compellingly demonstrated by Bruce Campbell, most notably in his recent Atlas. Our project hopes to build on his achievement by making the full content of all the IPMs from 1236 to 1447 and from 1485-1509 fully searchable and by linking them to a GIS system that will enable their contents to be mapped.

The Existing Calendared Texts of IPMs

Given the historical importance of IPMs it is not surprising that there have been many attempts to make their contents more accessible to researchers. From the nineteenth century onwards, in particular, lists and indexes were published by the Record Commissioners and other bodies, and county history societies published IPMs dealing with their own areas of interest.

The systematic calendaring all the surviving medieval IPMs began under the auspices of the Public Record Office (as it was then known) with the Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem (CIPM). In 1898 the first volume of IPMs for the reign of Henry VII (1485-1509) was published; the calendars for that reign, which form a distinct series, were completed with the publication of the third volume in 1955. The first calendar for the pre-1485 IPMs was published in 1904 and the most recent will appear in 2009-10. Within that span there have been several periods of publication. The first twelve volumes had appeared by 1938; volumes 13-15, completing the reign of Edward III (to 1377) appeared between 1952 and 1955. The reign of Richard II (1377-99) was covered in three volumes between 1970 and 1988. Calendars for the period 1399-1422 were published between 1987 and 2002. Finally, calendars for the period 1422-1447 were funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (later Council). Two volumes covering 1422-1432 were published in 2003-4; three volumes for the period 1432-1447 are forthcoming in 2009-10.

This extensive period of publication naturally witnessed important changes in editorial policies which reflected, sometimes too slowly, changes in historical interests. Essentially, the bulk of the early calendars omitted a very great deal of material. They largely reflected an interest in the descent of landed estates: thus, while they included details of all the properties mentioned in IPMs, they omitted the valuations given to lands; nor did they include extents, simply noting ‘extent given’. They also omitted much ‘procedural’ material, such as details of the officials who took the IPMs, the names of the jurors on whose testimony they were supposedly based, and the notes and endorsements found on the IPMs themselves and the writs associated with them. The relatively meagre information provided in these early volumes can be seen by contrasting them with some of those published by county record societies, which were usually significantly fuller: ‘full extent given with names of tenants’ in the former may well represent several pages of printed text in the latter. Peculiarly, however, the volumes from 1236 onwards were quite different, in this respect, from the volumes for Henry VII, which included extents and valuations, and which therefore remain considerably more valuable to modern historians.

These editorial policies continued for a surprisingly long time and, with the growing importance of social and economic history in medieval studies, began to attract criticism from the historians who used the calendars. R. H. Hilton, writing in 1973, bemoaned the inclusion of ‘ancient and obsolete renders’ when ‘more important information, such as valuations’, was omitted. Significant change came only with the volumes for Henry IV, published from 1987 onwards. These included the extents and valuations, although they continued to omit ‘procedural’ information: names of escheators and jurors, and full details of the writs and their endorsements. Only with the commencement of the calendars of Henry VI’s reign was all this information included.

In summary, English translations/summaries of extant IPMs are in print for the periods 1236-1447 and 1485-1509. The documents from 1447-85 (together with the post-medieval IPMs from 1509 onwards), remain uncalendared. Furthermore the calendars for 1236-1399 omit so much information that many researchers will continue to find it necessary to consult the original documents.