The lady of the manor was the auditor

Twenty-eight rules for a widow

Shortly after 1240 Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln and one of the most learned men in England, wrote a set of rules in French for Margaret, Countess of Lincoln. She had just been widowed and now had to run her estates herself. There are twenty-eight rules.¹

The first is not about food or servants. It is about knowing what you own. Buy a writ from the king, the bishop tells her, and have twelve free men in each manor swear to every piece of land, every rent and every custom due to you.² Then enroll each manor in a written roll.³ You cannot manage what you have not listed.

Rule seven is about the accounts. At the end of the year, when the accounts are heard, compare them carefully with the rolls of the accounts already rendered.⁴ Rule twenty-eight tells her when to buy: wine, wax and cloth at two seasons in the year, at the fairs, where the prices are best.⁵

The bailiff who wrote the book

About forty years later a former bailiff, Walter of Henley, wrote a treatise on estate management, also in French.⁶ He had done the job, and his advice is about the people who do it.

Buy and sell "through the inspection of a true man or two who can witness the business", he writes, "for often it happens that those who render account increase the purchases and diminish the sales."⁷ Have someone you trust inspect the accounts once a year, and hold a final account at the year's end.⁸ He explains why: servants and reeves "make merchandise with their lord's money to their own profit".⁸

He even warns about the measuring bushel. Grain was measured heaped or level, and "in the comble is fraud": the heap is where the cheating happens.⁹ The unit of measurement was itself a place to be robbed.

The oldest household account in England

The records these writers describe do survive, occasionally. The earliest private household account in England outside the royal household is a roll kept for Eleanor de Montfort, sister of the king and wife of Simon de Montfort, at Dover Castle in 1265. It records, day by day, the food bought, the guests fed and the servants paid.¹⁰ It was kept during a civil war, in the months before her husband was killed. Even then, someone wrote down what the household spent.

By that reign, written accounts on landed estates had become general.¹¹ The habit of the annual reckoning, with the owner present, was not a rich man's eccentricity. It was how property was kept.

A Paris householder's rule

A century later, about 1393, an elderly Parisian wrote a book of instruction for his young wife. He divides the servants into three classes: those hired by the day or season, those paid by the piece, and those kept by the year.¹² His steward is to hire workmen and "always bargain with them before they set hand to the work, that there may be no dispute afterwards".¹³ The ones who say "you will pay me well", he adds, are the ones who turn out worst. Agree the price before the work. Twelve years later Christine de Pizan wrote a manual for women of every rank, including the wives of barons, who were expected to run the estates while their husbands were away.¹⁴

Why it was the lady

In each of these books the person doing the checking is the owner, and often the owner is a woman: a widow, a countess in wartime, a young wife. The bailiffs and stewards kept the books. The owner heard the account. That separation, between the person who records and the person who audits, is the oldest control in accounting, and it was practiced in a castle in 1265.

Today most households have handed both jobs to the same party. The bank keeps the record, and the bank presents the account. The medieval rule was that those must be different people, and that one of them must be you.