The extensive accounts of Lady Margaret Beaufort are the kind of source known in the abstract to historians of medieval and early modern social, religious and political history, but sorely underused in practice. Held in the archive of St John’s College, Cambridge, they require a special trip and many days of reading and transcription. To have an edition of the household accounts, therefore, is enormously valuable, not only for the far wider circulation of these incredible documents, but to lessen the strain on the documents themselves, the archivists, and the small space for researchers at St John’s.
Lady Margaret’s accounts are many and varied, and, as Powell points out, the collection is really only rivalled by her son Henry VII’s own surviving accounts. It would be impossible for a single volume to contain all of Lady Margaret’s surviving material, but what we are given here is the biggest, most wide-ranging, and arguably most interesting selection. ‘Household accounts’ is an umbrella term; edited here is a treasurer’s roll for the year 1506-7, largely in Latin; five books of ‘chamber accounts’ of daily expenses, kept by successive cofferers, running from 1498-9 and then from 1502-09; two short chamberlain’s accounts from 1501 and 1502; and Lady Margaret’s own book of receipts and payments, running from 1499-1509. The result is a fascinating insight into the workings of an elite woman’s household in the late fifteenth-century.
As the mother of the first Tudor King, Henry VII, Lady Margaret Beaufort was one of the most eminent women in the country during this period, a fact of which she herself was well aware. Her signature, found on most pages of her accounts, is a bold ‘Margaret R’, which could be taken for ‘Margaret Richmond’—Countess of Richmond, her official title—but might equally stand for ‘Margaret Regina’—Queen. By the beginning of these accounts in 1498, she had been married three times, given birth once at the age of thirteen, and was married to her final husband, Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby. At his death in 1504 she took a vow of chastity and lived to all intents and purposes as a single woman, femme sole, with the right to administer her own property. Though this was not itself unusual—all widowed noblewomen held this status and ran their own estates, keeping similar accounts—few such accounts survive, and thus Lady Margaret’s are an unparalleled source for those seeking insight into noblewomen’s living situations during this period.
The most complex element to this edition is the referencing of the documents. This is not strictly the fault of the editor, for St John’s College archive has undertaken a process of re-cataloguing and re-naming during the time in which this edition was prepared. The result is that the original referencing system, used by previous biographers of Lady Margaret, was also used by this editor. Though there is a necessary ‘table of equivalences’ at the end of the volume, and the situation fully explained in a short note at the beginning, the documents are called by their former references throughout the edition. Powell states that she has done this in order for readers to be able to use it alongside other existing Margaret Beaufort texts, but this reviewer remains unsure about this; any new publications using these accounts are going to want to use the new referencing system as the archive intends, and thus this feels a little like remaining with an older scholarly audience rather than seeking to bring in a new one, affecting the long-term usefulness of this edition.
This aside, the task that Powell has undertaken here is extremely impressive, the more so since Powell herself is working across disciplinary boundaries as a scholar primarily of texts and literary culture rather than history. This, though, informs her edition. The Introduction accompanying the edited texts is lengthy and detailed, and focused primarily on the documents themselves rather than Lady Margaret and her own historical context. The five sections of the introduction take the reader through a brief relation of Lady Margaret’s life and situation before homing in on the specifics of the accounts. Section two uses the documents to interrogate household numbers and personnel and set these in a wider context, building on conclusions reached by previous biographers and commenting on Lady Margaret’s broad horizontal networks of kin, and the relationships between her household officers. Interesting here was the reference to Lady Margaret’s paying guests, ‘sojourners’, often distressed gentlewomen; as Powell notes, ‘Lady Margaret seems to have been especially thoughtful of such women.’ (p. 27). Powell also follows some of Lady Margaret’s almsfolk, and particularly chapel children, through the remainder of their careers, relating this to her funeral sermon delivered by Bishop John Fisher and arguing that ‘only a study of the accounts edited here may allow the individual to assess, in a very different and secular context, how far Lady Margaret may have deserved Fisher’s praise.’ (p. 31). Section three moves onto the compilation of the accounts, and here there is much for those interested in the economics of the household and in pre-modern accounting systems. Lady Margaret’s accounts were made up in bursts through the year by the chief officers themselves, copied fair from other bills and signed off regularly by Lady Margaret, who clearly ran a tight ship. The arithmetic, however, apparently leaves something to be desired, and has been checked diligently by the editor. Section four takes us through each individual document edited in detail, focusing particularly on the materiality. This is extremely thorough and very useful to anybody unable to see the originals, particularly since this volume includes colour plates from each of the edited accounts, allowing the reader to match Powell’s detailed descriptions to the visual image. Powell is clear on what each account contains and can tell us, which will help guide an unfamiliar reader to the parts of the accounts most relevant to their purpose. There is discussion here of the language of the documents; while the majority of the accounts are in English, the first, the Treasurer’s roll, is mostly Latin but with words in French and in English so that it can be difficult to work out which language is in use. Powell explains that the clerks responsible likely ‘thought in English but wrote with stylised Latin formulae and standard French terms’ (p. 50) and that English became more common as the roll proceeds; it would have been nice to see this contextualised a little more. The final section of the introduction, Section five, comprises a detailed, meticulous discussion of the various hands found within the accounts. In all, the Introduction provides the necessary historical, textual, and especially material context for these accounts in a way that chimes with current scholarship in these areas.
The accounts themselves follow. At the beginning of each edited account, the reader is told where to find relevant commentary in the Introduction and which plates to look at, which links the commentary and text beautifully. Then follows a material description of the document, cataloguing measurements, material, archival annotations and classmarks, any damage, the way that the document has been physically put together, the size of the margins, and which hands occur. A summary of the content is offered, though this is rather dense to wade through. The accounts themselves use a clear layout that is easy to follow, and footnotes throughout add to the material appreciation of the text, informing us of parts lost to damage, or where a particular annotation is physically placed in relation to the rest of the text. Where the account includes Latin, this is not translated. While this is a shame for students or scholars who don’t have the easy familiarity with Latin that many medievalists do, it’s also true to say that the volume would need to be far larger if it were to include translation as well.
Throughout, the editorial conventions are clearly explained and followed to the letter. The indexes—General, Places, and People—are well-prepared, and the index of People is particularly useful in the way that it offers alternative spelling, identity, and relationship to Lady Margaret. The page references in the index are a little confusing at first, since they are to the folios of the given document, not to the page number of the edition itself; it is the kind of index where one needs to read the introductory note fully in order to understand how to use it. The inclusion of a glossary is a nice touch and will make this very accessible to students. Powell’s edition of Lady Margaret Beaufort’s household accounts is an extremely welcome addition to the corpus of edited material from this period.
