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 332 THE DATING OF THE EARLY PIPE ROLLS July If I have arrived at any conclusion not wholly in accordance with his own, it is only on matters of detail ; and even on these he is far more likely to be in the right than I am. Never- theless, it is not easy to harmonize what he has written with Hunter's explicit statements on the Pipe Roll of 1130 (31 Henry I). As I ventured to observe when dealing above with the roll of 1189 (1 Richard I), the confusion of the regnal with tjhe fiscal or ' exchequer ' year is (or appears to be) at the root of all the trouble. Hunter himself, it seems to me, was guiltless of confusing them ; but he has been misunderstood. In its terminal points the regnal year varied, of course, with the accession of every fresh sovereign : the fiscal year always ran from Michaelmas to Michaelmas. Mr. Poole, in the passage I have quoted above, rightly insists that ' it is essential to understand exactly ' what is meant by ' a given year of the king's reign ' (p. 152), and I agree wholly with his explanation there given. But in the next para- graph (pp. 153-4) he seems to me to have confused the two years. For we find him writing of the roll of 1130 thus : The earliest pipe roll preserved is that of the thirty-first year of Henry /, which was edited by Joseph Hunter in 1833. . . . Hunter in the preface to his edition, which is a model of historical criticism, demonstrated that the year with which it dealt was the thirty-first year, ending at Michaelmas 1130. Of the two phrases that I have here italicized the first refers, it will be seen, to the regnal year of the king ; but the second cannot do so. For it was not the regnal, but the fiscal, year that ended at Michaelmas 1130. Moreover, 'the year with which it dealt ' was Michaelmas 1129-Michaelmas 1130. My point is that — although the writer had doubtless grasped the facts — he uses here in two senses the phrase ' the thirty-first year ' and thus, however unconsciously, misleads his readers. Hunter, to whom Mr. Poole refers us, is here so lucid in his statement that his meaning cannot be mistaken. What he says is this : The accompts in the Exchequer are made up to the 29th day of Septem- ber each year. My position is, that these are the accompts of the year ending in 1130, September 29th (p. xv). These then are the grounds on which the opinion rests that we have here the accompts from September 1129 to the same month in 1130 (p. xviii). The difference between this statement and that which I have just quoted from Mr. Poole's book consists, it will be found, in one word only. That word is ' thirty-first ', which Mr. Poole has inserted, in his own statement (p. 154), before its closing phrase, ' year, ending at Michaelmas 1130 '. Mr. Hunter employs the same phrase, without that word before it. If it had been