Agency and theExcessusBalance in Manorial Accounts

Abstract

This paper examines some accounting and legal aspects of the excessus balance in mediaeval manorial accounts. Earlier findings that such a balance may represent unpaid creditors are supported here with evidence from the Crowland Abbey estates, but it is also suggested that such a balance may possibly be explained as the outcome of an incentive arrangement in an agency relationship between the lord and the reeve. An attempt is made to apply the agency concepts of incentives, bonding and monitoring to this relationship. There is a discussion of whether manorial accounts and audit can be explained in terms of agency theory or whether the existence of the action of account implies a pre-existing legal obligation to account and submit to audit. The paper concludes with a consideration of the excessus balance in relation to the action of account.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.