322 THE DATING OF THE EARLY PIPE ROLLS July was made up in Michaelmas, and the regnal year is the year in which that Michaelmas fell. The accounts it contains are the accounts of the twelve months preceding that Michaelmas. . . . Thus Richard's reign is dated from his coronation on 3 September 1189 : the roll was made up four weeks later, and hence almost the whole of this roll of the first year of Richard I deals with the accounts of the thirty-fifth year of Henry II. No roll for that thirty-fifth year ever existed, because it began on 19 December and therefore included no Michaelmas. 1 This then is the rule : the roll of a given year is the roll of the Michaelmas which fell within that year. 2 Several years earlier, indeed, Mr. Poole had already insisted on the importance of the point ; commenting in the pages of this Review on the charge I made against the official editor of the Red Book of the Exchequer, he explained that through ignorance of the fact that, according to the exchequer practice, the roll of a given regnal year is the roll terminating at Michaelmas in that regnal year, he has dated all the scutages of Richard I and John a year too late. Thus, while Richard's first regnal year began on 3 September 1189, the roll of his first year terminated on the 29th of the same month, not a year later, as Mr. Hall supposes. 3 Mr. Poole tersely added : ' I cannot agree with Mr. Hall that a blunder of this sort is immaterial ' ; it has led, he has sub- sequently observed, ' to the misdating of a series of entries in the edition of the Red Book of the Exchequer, pp. 9-12, 70-184 4 In further support of Mr. Poole's assertion, I will now show, by a single illustration, the confusion which may arise from the misdating of a Pipe Roll, as in these * Red Book ' entries, even by one year. In the noble volume of Facsimiles of Royal and other Charters in the British Museum, issued by the trustees in 1903, a charter (no. 70) of Richard I to Reginald, bishop of Bath, confirming to the see certain hunting rights, is dated 26 November 1189. The official commentator on this charter has pointed out that ' In spite of it, in the Pipe Roll for Mich. 1190 (p. 151) the bishop is fined 100Z. " pro propresturis minariarum et pro canibus habitis contra assisam " '. The point of this comment 1 What Mr. Poole here means is that '.it began on 19 December ' (1188) and ended, at Henry's death, 6 July 1189. 2 Op. cit. pp. 152-3. Mr. Poole here cites Hunter's preface to the roll of 31 Hen. I (1130), p. xv, and my own Studies on the Red Book of the Exchequer (privately printed), p. 21. 3 Ante, xiv. 150. I should like to add that, so far back as 1873, Stubbs had given the facts with his usual exactitude : he spoke of the ' Pipe Roll of the 1st of Richard I, i. e. the year ending at Michaelmas 1189; a month after Richard's corona- tion ' (Const. Hist. i. 491, n. 2). 4 Op. cit. p. 153 n. Ten years earlier (1902), Miss Norgate, in her John Lackland, similarly pointed out, in an elaborate foot-note (p. 123), of 'the Rolls edition of the Bed Book of the Exchequer ', that ' the marginal dates added in that edition are wrong throughout John's reign ', so that she had to substitute ' the true dates ' throughout it. For the scutages of that reign make the point important (pp. 122-5). at
