The development of financial management and control in monastic houses and estates in England c. 1200-1540

Alisdair Dobie

Accounting, Business and Financial History, 2008, vol. 18, issue 2, pages 141-159

Abstract: This paper traces developments in the financial management and control of monastic houses and their estates in England in the later Middle Ages, and seeks to identify the factors which lay behind these developments. It draws upon ecclesiastical, economic and accounting history literature. It finds first that this period of monastic history is not as uneventful as sometimes depicted; and second that previous accounting history studies have focused largely on the agency relationship between the lord and the steward responsible for the management of agricultural properties, whereas the network of accountability and information flows in monastic establishments was more complex. Furthermore, the impetus for accounting change was more diverse than is often portrayed. A large variety of possible factors existed: these were not mutually exclusive and may have acted to reinforce each other. This paper concludes that there is a need for more detailed research at the micro-level on individual monastic houses to reconstruct and explain the evolution of their accounting and management techniques and processes.

Keywords: history of accounting; medieval monastic estates (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article& ... 40C6AD35DC6213A474B5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:acbsfi:v:18:y:2008:i:2:p:141-159

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/subscription.html

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting, Business and Financial History is edited by J R Edwards and Trevor Boyns

More articles in Accounting, Business and Financial History from Taylor and Francis Journals
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().