Book of Fees

The Book of Fees is the colloquial title of a modern edition, transcript, rearrangement and enhancement of the mediaeval Liber Feodorum (Latin: "Book of Fees"), being a listing of feudal landholdings or "fees/fiefs", compiled in about 1302, but from earlier records, for the use of the English Exchequer. Originally in two volumes of parchment, the Liber Feodorum is a collection of about 500 written brief notes made between 1198 and 1292 concerning fiefs held in capite or in-chief, that is to say directly from the Crown. From an early date, the book comprising these volumes has been known informally as the Testa de Nevill (meaning "Head of Nevill"), supposedly after an image on the cover of the volume of one of its two major source collections. The modern standard edition, known colloquially as "The Book of Fees" whose three volumes were published between 1920 and 1931, improves on two earlier 19th-century efforts at publishing a comprehensive and reliable modern edition of all these mediaeval records of fees. The nomenclature Book of Fees is that generally used in academic citations by modern scholars to refer to this 20th-century modern published edition of the ancient collected documents.

Sir Henry Maxwell-Lyte in his preface to the latest edition, suggests that the documents transcribed into the "Book of Fees" stem from two major collections of records:

Towards the end of the reign of King Edward I (1272–1307), documents from these various collections were brought together into a massive book compiled for the use of the Exchequer. The Liber Feodorum, as it was officially entitled, is first referred to in the Issue Roll for 1302 which reports that John of Drokensford (Droxford), keeper of the royal wardrobe, paid the sum of £4 13s to William of Coshall for the service of transcribing the liber de feodis ("book concerning fees") into two volumes. The book was bound the same year and book measures 12½ by 9 inches and would have been larger had not the binder cut down the margins, removing some textual notes in the process. It is held in the National Archives under catalogue number E164/5-6. The surviving documents from which it was compiled are also held by the National Archives, catalogued under E198 as follows, in date order:

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