Steward's Accounts

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• barward n bearward; barod(?), bererd, berewood, berherd, berode, berrerd

Record title: Steward's Accounts
Repository: Southampton City Archives
Shelfmark: SC5/1/48
Repository location: Southampton

The stewards' accounts run from Michaelmas to Michaelmas and cover all areas of civic receipt and expenditure, from land rents to annual payments to civic officials, costs of construction and repair of town structures, and rewards to visiting performers. See the introduction to Thick (ed), Southampton Steward's Book, pp iii–xlvi. Thick's edition of the 1492–3 accounts includes full transcriptions of those documents, including records relating to drama and minstrelsy.

The only indication of the year date for this set of accounts is on the cover – a paper one probably of nineteenth-century provenance, which gives the date '1579.' None of the entertainers mentioned in this set of steward's accounts appear in the mayor's accounts for 1578–9, while the mayor's accounts for 1579–80 contain no rewards to itinerant entertainers, suggesting that it was the steward who did the rewarding in that year. The responsibility for recording rewards to visiting performers seems to shift back and forth between the mayor and steward in the late sixteenth century, as such payments are found in the accounts of both but almost never in the same year. Where rewards to entertainers do appear in both the mayor's and steward's accounts, as they do in the 1534–5 accounts, the amounts paid to particular groups match up across the two sets of accounts. These entries have thus been dated to 1579–80 here, following Burch (Minstrels and Players, p 44).

1579–80; English; paper; 21 leaves; 295mm x 200mm; unnumbered; 19th-c. paper cover.