Exchequer: Pipe Office: Exannual Rolls

This series contains Exannual Rolls from the Exchequer, Pipe Office listing desperate debts owed to the crown.

The rolls list all desperate debts, except arrears of farms, periodically removed from the Pipe Rolls. Three items are special exannual rolls for particular categories of debts: taxes owed by men of the liberties of the Cinque Ports in Kent and Sussex, the moneyers of Canterbury and the men of the Devon stannaries in the reign of Edward III; taxes owed by religious houses in the fifteenth century; and debts of Catholic recusants between 1580 and 1635.

Chancellor's rolls are in E 352

For a roll of debts of two marks or less extracted from various Pipe Roll accounts under a general pardon of such debts in 4 Henry V see

E 370/4/3

Topics

Government finances

Religious discrimination and persecution

Religions

Debt

Farming

In 1284 the statute of Rhuddlan prescribed that a separate record should be kept of desperate debts owing to the crown, and that they should no longer be recorded in the Pipe Rolls. A single roll, known as the 'roll of the bodies of the counties', was produced, covering both desperate debts and the farm of the counties. It is now kept with the Pipe Rolls as E 372/129

The 1323 Cowick ordinance decreed that there should be a new record, the exannual roll, into which all desperate debts except for the arrears of farms were to be transferred. This was to be read to the sheriffs yearly on passing their accounts to see if any debts could be collected. When money could be raised, the debts were written back to the Pipe Roll to be cleared.

The main series of exannual rolls was begun by taking debts from the last audited Pipe roll account for each county. The oldest was Westmorland, in the roll for 13 Edward II, but all the rest were from the rolls for 15 or 16 Edward II. A general examination of the rolls suggests that during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries removals of debts back to the Pipe Rolls to be cleared were at their most numerous, and that relatively few such removals took place from the early sixteenth century onwards.