Jerome Gasson

Employee fraud is a significant problem in modern economies, resulting in estimated losses worth over £200m in the UK in 2022. But was employee fraud also a serious issue on medieval estates? 

Stereotypes of corruption

The figure of the corrupt estate official was a common stereotype in medieval texts, most famously Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. This paints a vivid picture of a local farm manager, the ‘reeve’, quietly profiting from embezzling his lord’s goods: 

The Reeve in the Ellesmere manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

“He well knew how to keep a granary and a storage bin; there was no auditor who could earn anything by catching him… he was secretly very richly provided / He well knew how to please his lord subtly / By giving and lending him some of his lord’s own possessions”.

Another text, Robert Carpenter’s ’Embezzlement Instructions’, actually gives advice on how to defraud one’s lord. Its suggestions include concealing the births of lambs by claiming that the ewes were barren or aborted; treating skins of dead sheep to make their deaths appear natural (as opposed to from carelessness); and an elaborate scheme to steal cheese from the dairy. 

The audit

However, despite the stereotype there is little to suggest that fraud was anything more than sporadic and opportunistic, at least in the early part of the 14th century. Undetected fraud is, of course, impossible to measure, but we can have a degree of confidence that estates did not miss anything major, because they appointed auditors to closely check the accounts. The auditing process was no mere rubber-stamping exercise. Every year, auditors essentially imposed about 10-15 fines on each farm manager for over-spending. This strict attitude would have made it difficult for officials to make a profit by falsifying the accounts.  

Besides investing in an auditing process, 14th century estates also made sure that key agricultural activities were closely supervised. Image courtesy British Library, Royal 2 B. VII, f.78v.

Exploiting loopholes

Still, fraud could not be eliminated entirely. It seems probable that the opportunities for dishonesty were greatest on the outlying properties of large, scattered estates – that is, on properties that were further away from central management and oversight. 

One interesting example relates to the Dorset manors of Elizabeth de Clare in the 1350s. An estate official had been employed to help count out the harvest on three of these properties, but instead had colluded with other manorial officials to steal grain worth just over £8 (nearly four times his annual wage). 

Investigation of this issue reveals other problems in the same region. At Wyke Regis, the farm manager and his wife were accused of illicitly receiving grain from the workers hired to thresh the crops, as well as other unspecified damages. It is probably significant that these properties were relatively remote from Elizabeth’s main residences were in Suffolk, Essex, and London.

Change over time

An interesting development occurs on some estate accounts from the later 14th century, whereby the auditors’ system of imposing fines for poor performance was essentially used to ensure a minimum return, with the implicit assumption that the farm manager could take a cut of the rest. Although this meant lower profits in good years, it also reduced the need for intensive monitoring and made it easier to collect arrears.   

Harry the Hayward (a manorial official) and Talbat, his dog. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Rawl. D. 939.

So, could farm managers be trusted?

From the perspective of an estate auditor, the answer is a clear ‘no’. There was a genuine risk of fraud, as the above examples illustrate. Moreover, farm managers must have often made the wrong decisions to incur so many fines at the audit. 

However, we should be cautious about accepting the auditors’ judgements at face value. To be sure, they did not benefit directly from imposing fines, and they were willing to change their minds when presented with sufficient evidence. However, by stereotyping farm managers as ineffective and untrustworthy, the auditors demonstrated their own loyalty to the lord, and justified their own wages in turn.  

Further Reading 

• Chaucer, G., The Canterbury Tales. Modern English translation published by Harvard University https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/general-prologue-0 
• Drew, J. S., ‘Manorial Accounts of St Swithun’s Priory, Winchester’, English Historical Review 62:242 (1947), 20-41. 
• Stone, D., ‘The Reeve’, in A. Minnis and S. Rigby (eds.) Historians on Chaucer. The “General Prologue” to the Canterbury Tales (Oxford: OUP, 2014), pp. 399-420. 

Tags: accounting, fraud, medieval, medieval estates, medieval history

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