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"In this essay, I shall be examining what I feel are the main issues surrounding the problem of why historians do not agree whether Henry V was a good king. The main reasons all stem from individual choices of the historian, and include their choice of frameworks, of sources, how these sources are interpreted and finally the historian's own motives for writing. Through this, I hope to conclusively show how a historian's opinion on a historical figure is often a subjective opinion, just as if they were judging how successful a person alive today had become."

The many thousands of surviving medieval manorial accounts (sometimes known as compotus rolls and in their enrolled form as Pipe Rolls) contain all the information necessary for the precise calculation of the yields of specified crops, on named demesne farms, in dated years. Each account enumerates the cash and stock received and expended on a single demesne farm managed by or on behalf of a manorial lord over the course of an agricultural year, usually from Michaelmas (29 September) to Michaelmas. Typically, each account records the amount of grain (both threshed and as yet un-threshed) received from the previous year's harvest and the quantity of seed sown in preparation for the next harvest (see 'Woodhay 1254-5 grange account'). The information is hand-written on parchment in abbreviated Latin using Roman numerals and the form of the entries is usually formulaic so that with a little practice they are not difficult to interpret. The following extract recording the amounts of barley (Ordeum) received and expended in 1378-9 on the Battle Abbey manor of Alciston in East Sussex (East Sussex Record Office, SAS/G44/34) is an example of one of the more enigmatic types of entry that can be encountered.

The Battle of Hastings: sources and interpretations By Stephen Morillo