The evidence of their use over periods of several decades is there in the rolls themselves. The rolls had to be retained, because they were needed for consultation as part of the everyday working procedures of the exchequer. Galbraith pointed out: ‘Nearly all decisive action was preceded by an injunction to search the rolls, and this required not merely that the records should be safely kept, but that the whole mass should be readily available for reference.’ 8 7 But in between, when the rolls were not current and not yet ancient, was there a time when they were just rubbish, cluttering up some exchequer store-room? The difficulty of storing and organizing so much parchment was already producing an ‘archive crisis’ by the end of the thirteenth century, as V. When they were hundreds of years old, they were clearly important records of the past, whose value as historical evidence was already recognized by the seventeenth-century antiquaries who consulted them in the pipe office. When the rolls were new, they were the necessary records of the routine annual audit process. 6 There is a question which seems almost too obvious to ask: why were all these rolls preserved? It was not for the convenience of historians, 750 years later. They can be consulted at The National Archives recently, photographs of every roll from 1225 to 1598 have been made accessible online, thanks to the ever-expanding Anglo-American Legal Tradition website.
A significant point, which it is easy to take for granted, is the availability today of pipe rolls, often in duplicate, for nearly every year from 1156 to 1832 (as well as a single survivor from the reign of Henry I). In this context, perhaps it is necessary to look in more detail at the function of the pipe rolls, and the way in which they were used by the exchequer. 4 On the other hand, David Carpenter has defended the value of pipe rolls as records of outstanding debts and their repayment. 3 Nick Barratt has written about the ossification of procedure after 1225 and the gradual decline of the pipe rolls as an indicator of royal finance. 2 Mark Hagger studied the compilation of twelfth-century pipe rolls, and pointed out the difficulties in their use. Nicholas Vincent suggested that ‘the pipe rolls were more or less useless as a means of calculating overall income and expenditure’. 1 Some more recent historians have been less positive. Thomas Madox, the great eighteenth-century authority on the exchequer, thought that its pipe rolls were, next to Domesday Book, ‘recorda, omnium quae in archivis Regiis usquam vidisse me memini, splendidissima’.
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