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Introduction 1. The original manuscript of Eudes’s Register is held in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ms. lat. 1245. During the seventeenth century, the manuscript belonged to Roger de Gaignières, erudite French collector and governor of the principality of Joinville. In 1701, he bequeathed the manuscript (along with an enormous collection of other documents) to the king’s library. The exact dimensions of the manuscript are 221 by 149 mm. There are generally two folio numbers given in the manuscript (a roman numeral in a thirteenth-century hand and an arabic numeral in red in a modern hand), and these do not always correspond with the folio numbering given by Bonnin in his edition of the Register. For the purposes of this introduction, all folio numbers given refer to the arabic numerals in the manuscript itself. The organization of the manuscript is a complex subject that deserves further study. Because the manuscript is not entirely chronological (one finds documents from the 1260s inserted into earlier sections that deal with the 1250s), it was probably organized in its present form sometime after 1269. 2. See C. R. Cheney, “Early Norman Monastic Visitations: A Neglected Record,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 33, 3 (1982): 412–23. On how revealing the terminology used in episcopal records can be, see Michael Burger, “Sending, Joining, Writing, and Speaking in the Diocesan Administration of Thirteenth-Century Lincoln,” Mediaeval Studies 55 (1993): 151–82. 3. There were also parallels between Eudes’s Register and thirteenth-century household rolls of magnates, such as Eleanor of Montfort, sister of the English king Henry III and wife of Simon de Montfort. Her household rolls listed her household’s daily expenditures on the right side and the location where the day was spent on the left side. See M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 71–72. Martha Ballard, the New England midwife studied by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, used her journal to keep track of the fees owed to her for her services, noting when an account had been settled (often months or even years later). See Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Knopf, 1990). 4. On January 18, 1249, the archbishop’s secretary received a letter from the priest of Haudricourt dealing with Eudes’s visitation of the deanery of Aumale. The secretary indicated receipt of the letter on folio (fol.) 11r of the register, but he then copied the letter on fol. 10v, squeezing it into the upper right-hand corner so that it would be next to the record of the archbishop’s visitation of Aumale. Notes 5. A large space was left on fol. 2 between VII kalends of August and VI kalends of August. There is another large gap on the same folio between I kalends of August and IV nones of August. Fol. 62v is almost completely blank, with only three one-line entries and giant spaces between each. The secretary clearly expected to have more to write. 6. See, for instance, fol. 41, where four consecutive entries are crossed out. Eudes ended up staying at Aliermont for several days longer than he had anticipated. On fol. 18r, it is clear that Eudes had intended to visit the priory of Parnes on June 30, 1249, but he did not arrive until July 2. “Visitamus prioratum de Panes” is twice crossed out. 7. The archbishop’s secretary numbered two consecutive folios XXXIV but then caught the mistake and changed the second folio to XXXV. Only two pages later, however, he numbered two consecutive folios XXXVIII, a mistake that was never corrected. 8. See, for example, a summary of a bull from Pope Alexander IV: BnF ms. lat. 1245, f. 147. 9. I draw here on Robert F. Berkhofer III, Day of Reckoning: Power and Accountability in Medieval France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). See also Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 3. 10. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 130–45. 11. Raymonde Foreville, “Les statuts synodaux et le renouveau pastoral du XIIIe siècle dans le Midi de la France,” in Le crédo, la morale et l’inquisition (Toulouse, 1971), 120. 12. The personal interest that bishops and archbishops in the thirteenth century took in the management of their dioceses did not continue, at least in the case of Rouen, into the late Middle Ages. During the fourteenth and...