Pipe Rolls - Creation

Creation

They were created by taking the shire, or other governmental districts, accounts and writing them on two strips of parchment, usually about 14 inches (36 cm) wide. The two pieces were then attached end to end to form one long sheet. Then, the various sheets from all the shires were piled together and affixed together at the top, and the resulting document would be rolled into a tight roll resembling a pipe. They were not formed into one long continuous roll, as the Patent rolls were, however. The sheets for each county have a heading at the top giving the name of the county the account is for, in Latin. If more than one sheet was required for a county, the county name would be amended on secondary sheets to indicate the order the sheets were in.

Sometimes they are referred to, in Latin, as magnus rotulus pipae. Several sources for the actual idea of making the rolls as rolls have been suggested, including Jews, Adelard of Bath, who was a royal clerk and was familiar with Arabic practices of using rolls, or the royal clerk Thurkil, who studied under a mathematician who may have been from Sicily.

The rolls were written in Latin until 1733, except for a short time around 1650. During the reign of Henry II, a duplicate copy of the year's Pipe roll was made for the Chancellor, and was called the Chancellor's roll. This was created at the same time as the regular Pipe roll, and was written by a clerk of the Chancellor. The Chancellor rolls survive from 1163 to 1832, but are basically duplicates of the corresponding Pipe rolls, except for the occasional addition of a private charter or other material.