Publication of The Fine Rolls
Despite their compelling interest, the fine rolls of King Henry III have never been properly published. Whereas those of King John appeared in full Latin text, edited by Thomas Duffus Hardy, under the auspices of the Record Commission, in 1835, those of King Henry were only afforded a series of excerpts, selected exclusively on the basis of genealogical interest, which ran to some 10–15% of the content of the rolls. These were edited by Charles Roberts and published in two volumes by the Record Commission in 1835–36, under the title Excerpta e Rotulis Finium in Turri Londinensi asservatis Henrico Tertio Rege A.D. 1216–1272. There was no subject index and the indexes for people and places were completely inadequate. Consequently, the use made of the fine rolls by such historians of the reign of Henry III as E. F. Jacob, R. F. Treharne and Sir Maurice Powicke, writing between the 1920s and 1950s, was limited to the printed Excerpta. The briefing paper that circulated at the first meeting of the Public Record Office Consultative Committee on Publications, which met on 27 November 1947, observed that "Among Chancery Records a full text of the Fine Rolls, Henry III is still needed to supersede the Record Commission’s Excerpta". This was considered amongst "the most outstanding needs."
After an abortive attempt in the mid-1970s, by Dr. David Crook at the then Public Record Office, to make a calendar of the rolls, it was Dr. Louise Wilkinson who conceived the project which has at last led to their publication. A committee was formed consisting of Wilkinson, David Carpenter of King’s College London’s History Department, Harold Short, Director of King’s College’s Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH), and David Crook and Aidan Lawes of The National Archives. This group put together a bid to the Arts and Humanities Research Board (now Council) seeking funding for a three-year project which would publish the rolls down to 1248, a second (ultimately successful) bid being envisaged for another round of funding which would carry publication down to the end of the reign in 1272. The bid was successful and work began in April 2005.
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