The Significance of King Henry I’s Pipe Roll

Abstract This chapter contends that the earliest surviving pipe roll—the pipe roll of Henry I, for the fiscal year 1129–30—is important for understanding Domesday. The chapter presents a new analysis of the pipe roll, which shows that Henry’s revenues flowed from four main sources: the royal demesne, the land tax then known as the danegeld, the profits of justice and government, and the profits of royal lordship. The last included revenues from reliefs, wardships, marriages of widows and heiresses, and the regalian right to claim revenues from religious houses during episcopal and abbatial vacancies. The pipe roll is vital for contextualizing Domesday, since the revenues of William I and William II demonstrably flowed from similar sources. The suggestion made in this chapter, and developed in Chapters 14–17, is that the Domesday survey was intended to collect structured information designed to facilitate the administration of each of those revenue streams.