Frederik Bearman: Parchment Booklets, the Royal Wardrobe and the Italian connection: How the parchment booklet was adopted as an administrative tool in reign of Edward I and Edward II.

• The use of the parchment booklet by the royal wardrobe of Kings Edward 1 and Edward II
• 2 The royal officials copied the use of books from the Riccardi of Lucca merchant-bankers
• 3 The booklets used by the royal wardrobe are unique in the whole history of medieval central government in English

This paper will shed light on a little-known group of medieval parchment booklets dating from 1277-1326, which forms part of the archive of the royal wardrobe (the financial secretariat of the king’s household) during the reign of Edward I (1272-1307) and Edward II (1307-1327). The discovery of medieval parchment booklet has hitherto focused on those containing religious or secular works, ranging in date from the eight- to the fifteenth century, but the booklets used by central government in the late thirteenth- and early fourteenth century have been overlooked in this study, in particularly those used by the royal wardrobe. However, each group of booklets have several common features – they comprise either a single bifolium of parchment or a number of bifolia arranged into gatherings and held together by thread or parchment tackets. They could be made with or without a parchment cover, though if a cover was supplied it was secured to the gatherings by tacketing. The fundamental difference between the non-government booklets and those employed by the officials of Edward I and Edward II concerns the way in which their function as an administrative tool in the royal wardrobe marked an unprecedented shift away from using the long-established parchment rolls as a means of recording official business. The latter was a system that had been active since the mid-twelfth century. The great ‘pipe’ rolls of the Exchequer (the financial department of state) and the Chancery rolls (the chief secretariat of state) exemplify this practice.

The wardrobe’s unparalleled departure from the choice of parchment rolls to that of the booklet as a record system was first evident during Edward I’s Welsh war of 1276-77. The earliest surviving wardrobe booklet dates from this time (1277) and records accounts during the campaign. The clue as to why the wardrobe broke with the tradition of recording accounts on rolls can be found in Edward’s need for ready cash to achieve his desired victory over Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the then Prince of Wales. When war was declared the Exchequer was unable to supply the large sums of money needed for a successful outcome. He and his wardrobe officials – who had responsibility for economically governing the kings war machine – turned to the Riccardi of Lucca, the Italian merchant-bankers who at that time were functioning as Edward’s main source of revenue and chief financiers. Edward borrowed large sums of money from the Italians to finance his war with the Welsh, and as such a new system of recording these financial activities was desperately needed.

The Italian merchant-bankers at that time – such as the Riccardi of Lucca – had developed the most advanced commercial practices of the period – based on investment and credit banking. Thus they were active in the profitable business of making loans to nobility and the church across Europe; their record keeping was inscribed in books, made with blank paper pages and not in the English fashion of using parchment rolls. With the close relationship that mushroom between Edward’s wardrobe officials and the Riccardi, the Italians offered the wardrobe more than just a lucrative treasury with which to fight the Welsh: they showed the wardrobe new methods of accounting and, crucially, the use of books to record their financial records.

The advantage of a book format for the wardrobe is that it offered ease of access by the mere turning of a page and, like the Italian account books of the time, groups of pages in a given booklet could be arranged in sections and given subject headings. None of these reference aids were available to the officials in the former roll-type arrangement. Hence the wardrobe adopted the use of the book format for the first time. Yet instead of copying the type of ready-made bound blank paper books that the Italians preferred, from the outset, the wardrobe looked for a convenient local exemplar upon which to base their own books – the simple booklet – which could be made from the techniques at hand and the everyday materials found in their office or employed by local binders – notably, parchment and thread.

Although, the Riccardi were arrested in 1294 on suspicion of fraud and their books and letters seized by the crown, the royal wardrobe continued to employ booklets to record their accounts during the reign of Edward II. Understood alongside those dating from his father’s time, these booklets exemplify a unique archive among the records generated by all central government departments during the period of the two kings, and represent a little known continuation in the long tradition of booklet production in England during the middle ages.