I went to a lecture today about the fine rolls of Henry III (1216-1272). The 'fine rolls' were generally a written list of promised payments to the King for various favours / permissions required from the King, such as the permission to set up a market or to prosecute a case, pleas from peasants to buy their freedom or for women to seek permission to marry the person they wanted to.

The rolls were written in Latin and a number of years ago a small team of people translated it and put the translation up on line here. They've now finished so the project has come to an end.

If you go to the website, click on the 'fine rolls' link and the translations and pick a link at random to look at. The entries are (well I thought) fascinating to read.

The guy giving the lecture said the rolls revealed the first recorded practical joke by an English King:

On the roll for 1207–08 there is the extraordinary offer of 200 chickens made by the wife of Hugh de Neville to be allowed ‘to lie one night with her lord, Hugh de Neville’. 100 Was she John’s mistress and were the two of them joking about what a night back with Hugh would be worth, the answer a ridiculous 200 chickens? On the roll of 1242–43 we have an example of Henry III’s rather more benign sense of humour. In the ship sailing home from Gascony, ‘having a joke’ (ludendo) at the expense of his clerk, Peter the Poitevin, he invented and recorded on the fine roll a whole series of risible debts which Peter supposedly owed: ‘five dozen capons for a trespass in the ship; 28 casks of wine from the arrears of the wine which he bought for the use of the king at Mussak where he dreamed he saw the emperor Otto’ and so on. Henry was careful, however, not to let the joke go too far. Doubtless after Peter had been baffled and perhaps alarmed by the sight of his obligations, Henry ordered them ‘Peter not looking’ to be crossed out with the result that they never reached the originalia roll and the Exchequer. 101