“Because It Does Not Appear in the Quittance”: Auxiliary Documents and Accountability in 14th-Century Normandy

In the high and late Middle Ages, great lords increasingly expected to use written accounts to oversee the agents who ran their estates. Where these documents survive, they can provide insight into the practicalities of estate administration, and the relationships between agents and higher authorities. But these written accounts comprise only one piece of a larger documentary portfolio (full of orders, receipts, “quittances,” and lists) which was necessary to support the system of written accountability developing at this time. By looking at the references to these other documents in a series of late fourteenth-century Norman receiver’s accounts, this paper sketches out the documentary world of seigneurial agents, and the challenges they faced as they learned to keep their papers in order. At the same time, it considers how these ephemeral documents constrained the delegated authority agents exercised, shaped their relationships with their lord and his auditors, and increasingly distinguished the physical spaces in which they worked.