Description
Book SynopsisWestminster Abbey was one of the wealthiest and most influential monastic houses in medieval England: c.1300 it held some 38,000 acres, largely in the Home Counties and West Midlands, and its revenues at the Dissolution exceeded 2,800 p.a. These assets supported a complement of 50 to 60 monks in the fourteenth century. This volume publishes 75 documents providing overviews (''states'') of the Westminster estate and its revenues, as administered by the abbot and convent separately between c.1300 and 1422. The states provided crucial information at a period of great social and economic change either side of the Black Death, assisting in decisions about farming estates directly or leasing them - and to historians today they provide rich evidence of the agricultural economy of medieval England, the systems of provisioning monasteries, and the men who shaped them. The states are of two types. The first gives estimates of corn, stock and cash on the manors, made partway through the financial
Trade Review"Even to skim through these two volumes is enough to give a sense of the richness and importance of the 'states' as mentioned on the first page ... those with an interest in the economic and social history of Westminster Abbey, or of late medieval Europe more generally, will find much here to sink their teeth into. * Richard Allen, Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies *
