The Bishop of Winchester’s Household Bills
The only Surviving Account Roll for his Household Expenses
Talk by Dr Brian Collins
Record Extra is collection of important research articles about Winchester Cathedral and published on its website. Dr Collins has contributed a very comprehensive article on his research on the 1393 Account Roll.
Dr Collins’s talk was based on the Bishop of Winchester’s household account roll for half of one particular year, 1393, during the reign of Richard II.
The Bishop in question was William of Wykeham (present-day Wickham), famous for founding Winchester College and New College, Oxford. He lived until the age of eighty at a time when average life expectancy was thirty-five years. His home would have been Wolvesey Palace, now in ruins.
The account roll, which is written in Latin, is made out of 21 separate parchment membranes sewn together with invisible seams. It measures 15 metres in length and 35 centimetres across.
It mentions 103 different places and the names of 437 different people. The latter were people employed by the Bishop and the guests who ate at the Bishop’s table in the course of those six months from April to September and the former were places from which the food they ate came. The handwriting is the same throughout, and would have been that of the Bishop’s chief steward.
The food came from the Bishop’s many estates: there were eighty manors and each manor consisted of several bailiwicks. The Manors were not just in present-day Hampshire, e.g. Bishop’s Waltham, Highclere, Twyford, Bishop’s Sutton, and Bentley, but also in Witney, Farnham, Wargrave and Downton.
The produce included meat from many sources: rabbits, duck, geese, swans, pheasant, sheep and deer; and fish, including herring and salmon. There were big fishponds at Farnham, which still exist today.
They ate lunch and dinner every day, except on Friday, when there was no dinner, and of course, no meat. They would have brewed their own ale, but wine was bought from wine merchants who would have imported it from the continent.
Everything that came into and went out of the kitchen was meticulously recorded on the account roll, as well as the names of those who came to eat at the Bishop’s table.
During the six months covered by this particular roll the Bishop entertained 788 guests, some of them on more than one occasion. Guests included judges, fellows of New College, architects working on changes to the fabric of the cathedral, the richest merchant in Winchester, newly ordained clergy as well as King Richard II and his queen.
The Bishop spent the modern equivalent of £28,000 on two banquets for the king.
