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THE TREASURY The Winchester Pipe Rolls, the annual accounts of the bishop's extensive estates, and the bishop's money were once stored at the palace gatehouse. The bishops derived their wealth from vast landholdings, one of the richest estates of medieval England. The yearly income and expenditure on the estates was recorded in great detail in the Pipe Rolls, an astonishing surviving series of documents covering the years from 1208-9 until 1710-11.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss King Alfred and the defeat of the Vikings at Battle of Edington. At the end of the 9th century the Vikings controlled almost all of what we now call England. Mercia had fallen and its king had fled, Northumbria had fallen and so had Essex. The only independent kingdom left standing against the rampaging Danes was Wessex, and Alfred the Great; then he was overrun, his treasury, palaces and castles taken whilst he and his most loyal followers were left to wander the moors. Yet he came back.

"An entry in the Inventory of the Bayeux cathedral treasury records that in 1476 the church owned the following: Item une tente tres longue et estroicte de telle a broderie d'ymages et escripteaulx, faisans representation du Conquest d'Angleterre,"

1. Between Magna Carta and the Parliamentary State: The fine rolls of King Henry III 1216-1272 and the project A fine in the reign of King Henry III (1216-1272) was an agreement to pay the king a sum of money for a specified concession. The rolls on which the fines were recorded provide the earliest systematic evidence of what people and institutions across society wanted from the king and he was prepared to give. They open a large window onto the politics, government, economy and society of England in the hinge period between the establishment of Magna Carta at the start of Henry's reign and the parliamentary state which was emerging at its end. This Project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, makes the rolls freely available to a wide audience while at the same time, in the Fine of the Month feature, providing regular comment on their historical interest. Users of the website are also invited to follow and contribute to the Fine Rolls blog.