THE MANORIAL ACCOUNTS 187
'eighties of last century, the largest tenant-farmer in Hertford-
shire had an entirely illiterate bailiff, who came back every
market evening and dictated to his master, for hours at a time,
the most complicated details of the day's offers and acceptances,
in as orderly a fashion as if he were reading from a book; and the
late Mr William Hudson was good enough to tell me of a
Sussex landowner whose bailiff " could not write, and yet never
made a mistake in accounting for the number of faggots he sold
in a year. He notched them all on a door-post".1 So it must have
been with the reeves; for, although the Gloucester injunctions
order the reeves to keep careful tallies, and to enter the details
from time to time on rolls provided for the purpose,2 such
methods were seldom adopted, but rough and ready means
better suited to semi- or wholly illiterate men who were in
charge.
A last survivor of such men is seen in "Ragged Ass Jack" as
described by Mr Ford Madox Ford in his Return to Yesterday.
Jack, he tells us, "could do anything (except write, and late in
life he taught himself to read)—patiently and to perfection:
thatcher, wagoner, shepherd, bricklayer, etc. He could keep
tallies and the most complicated accounts on notched sticks,
cutting with a bill-hook I, n, in, iv, etc., as fast as you could
write them with a pen, and adding up quite as fast."3
Even if a few of them could have kept rough jottings, such as
are sometimes found sewn to the full account,4 the actual accounts
would have been utterly beyond them, and we find that these
are the work of trained scribes who made a round of the manors
after Michaelmas for this purpose. One of the commonest
entries on the compoti records the scribe's fee for his work, and
often the cost of the parchment.5 It may well be, of course, that
where a lord had but two or three manors, the account was made
by the parish priest or his clerk.6 Bishop Pecock, in the early
fifteenth century, advises parish priests to avoid "worldli offices
1 Cf. Hist. MSS. Com. v, 444, where the amount of corn in a bam (1480)
was said to be scored on the door-post.
2 Glouc. Cart, in, 213 ff. 3 Op. cit. 153.
4 Econ. Hist. Rev. i, 68.
8 Min. Ace. 987/24-8, 1052/6; Rogers, Prices, I, 95; ix, 620-1; Obed.
Rolls S. Svoithin (Hants Rec. Soc.), 238, etc.
* Sussex Rec. Soc. xxxi, 51.