Agricultural History Review, Volume 62 Part 1 (2014), p. 173

£50. Covering the period 1235–1660, the inquisitions post mortem constitute a series of returns (numbering in their thousands) made by royal escheators based on the investigations carried out by local juries at the instigation of the English Crown on the death of one of its feudal tenants. These provide details of who held the land and what it comprised, together with an assessment of its value. Often ignored or taken for granted and much maligned by generations of historians as inaccurate, incomplete or erroneous, the IPMs represent a fascinating and detailed archive of property holding and offer an almost unparalleled resource for examining the landed society of medieval England.

This book, sub-titled ‘A companion’, is more than a friendly introduction to these documents: it is intended both to complement study of the IPM Calendars and spark off fresh avenues of research. The guide, Michael Hicks, adopts a reassuring tone as he glides through the legal technicalities and administrative process that underlay the Inquisitions. He also contributes an erudite examination of property transmission across generations, concluding that dower, jointure and courtesy are far more complex than historians have hitherto acknowledged and that there is much more research needed into provision for widows and widowers. Other contributors make similar claims for exploring the potential of the sources. Indeed, Lawrence Poos, James Oeppen and Richard Smith, examining the use of the IPMs for measuring life expectancy and seasonal mortality, make an urgent plea for the remaining years of the fifteenth century to be completed. Christine Carpenter, who extols the virtue of the new calendars of IPMs for assessing lesser landowners’ estates and enabling comparisons to be drawn between gentry and nobility, outlines the opportunities for longitudinal studies of individual families and the structure and exploitation of estates in particular locations as well as the strategies and legal procedures favoured for land settlements.

Analysis of landholding patterns and estate values on a broad scale using statistical methods also emerges as a distinct possibility with the new digitized resource. Although the reliability of the data across the centuries still has to be borne in mind, Margaret Yates, on the strength of her Berkshire case study, is confident about the validity of employing quantitative techniques to land use and developments in agriculture. Similarly, Matthew Holford in his reassessment of the reliability of valuations and extents adopts a positive tone since the results so far have been shown to be ‘credible and illuminating’. And, as Holford demonstrates in a second chapter in the volume, it is not just the landholders themselves who can be studied. Since the IPMs contain the names of local jurors, their status, method of selection and deliberations can now be evaluated, revealing the importance of locality in the choice of jurors and the fact that while they were respectable members of their communities, the burden of informing the Crown generally fell upon relatively humble, minor local officeholders. Kate Parkin’s chapter, ‘Tales of idiots’, is equally revealing in its examination of the priorities and strategies for the protection of families and individuals involved in the concealment of idiocy, contrasting the theoretical rigidity of procedure with the flexibility of process that is observable from the ‘lived historical experience’.

For those interested in what goes on behind the scenes, a series of papers highlight the problems entailed in calendaring the IPMs. Sean Cunningham assesses the ‘Great Historical Enterprise’ that the calendaring process represents, examining the different approaches adopted, from the largely antiquarian concerns followed from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century, through differences of opinion on indexing during the post-war period, to the scholarly, more research-informed AHRC calendaring projects of the early twenty-first century. This is matched by Claire Noble’s lucid explanation of the development of the various writs used by the Crown which were encountered in the editing/calendaring process and their idiosyncracies; and Oliver Padel’s consideration of the pros and cons of the late Roy Hunnisett’s longstanding guidelines on calendaring and indexing place-names, at the conclusion of which he offers recommendations of his own to overcome difficulties in the identification of places and uncertainties in manorial affiliations fit for both printed versions and the new age of electronic calendars. The value of the IPMs for economic and social history is rightly brought out by Christopher Dyer’s informative essay, though it would have perhaps been more effective to have this at the close of the book, providing a sense that it was more than just a collection of interesting essays. The volume has a useful glossary and a good index, though predominantly of persons and places. If publishing costs had permitted, it could have done with a few plates of the original manuscripts, illustrating the sheer size of some of the returns and the damaged and dilapidated state of some of them, if only to show the immense dedication and enthusiasm of those who have compiled the calendars which this volume celebrates.