They were the records of the yearly audits performed by the Exchequer of the accounts and payments presented to the Treasury by the sheriffs and other royal officials; and owed their name to the shape they took, as the various sheets were affixed to each other and then rolled into a tight roll, resembling a pipe, for storage.

[4] The Pipe rolls are the records of the audits of the sheriffs' accounts, usually conducted at Michaelmas by the Exchequer, or English treasury.

[8] Besides the sheriffs, others who submitted accounts for the audit included some bailiffs of various honours, town officials, and the custodians of ecclesiastical and feudal estates.

[4] Combined with the Domesday Book of 1086, the Pipe rolls contributed to the centralisation of financial records by the Norman kings (reigned 1066–1154) of England that was ahead of contemporary Western European monarchies; the French, for instance, did not have an equivalent system of accounting until the 1190s.

[19] The Dialogue also states that the Pipe rolls, along with Domesday Book and other records, were kept in the treasury, because they were required for daily use by the Exchequer clerks.

[25][b] By 1166, the fines and other monetary income of the Assizes, or royal courts, began to be recorded in the Pipe rolls.

[26][27] Scutage payments, made by knights in lieu of military service, were also recorded in the Pipe rolls from the reign of Henry II on.

[32] Another source of income recorded in the rolls was from feudal reliefs, the payment made by an heir when inheriting an estate.

[36] However, royal income from taxation that was not annually assessed was not usually recorded in the Pipe rolls, nor were his receipts from lands outside England.

Some payments went directly to the king's household, and because they did not pass through the Exchequer, they were not recorded in the Pipe rolls.

[45] Certain areas did not report their income to the Exchequer, so they do not usually appear in the Pipe rolls, unless the lands were in the king's custody through a vacancy.

[37] This figure is dwarfed by the amount recorded on the Pipe roll that was actually owed to the king, which totals £68,850.

By the end of Henry II's reign, royal income recorded in the Pipe rolls had risen to £20,000.

[61] In 1284 the Statutes of Rhuddlan were issued, which further reformed the accounting systems, and further reduced the detail contained on the Pipe rolls.

The attempt in 1270 had marked old debts with a "d" and stipulated that they were not to be re-entered into future Pipe rolls unless they were paid off.

[67] New offices in the Exchequer were also created, in an attempt to speed up the auditing process and lessen the time it took to prepare the Pipe rolls and other financial records.

[67] In 1462, the Exchequer was told to no longer summon for audit any farms or feefarms worth over 40 shillings per year, as these would be supervised by a newly appointed board of receivers or approvers.

[70] They were created by taking the shire, or other governmental districts, accounts and writing them on two strips of parchment, usually about 14 inches (36 cm) wide.

The earliest surviving non-royal Pipe rolls are those of the Bishop of Winchester, which are extant from 1208,[77] and form a continuous series from that date.

[82] Recent work by Nick Barratt on the reigns of Richard and John have updated the earlier research.

[83][84] Historian David Carpenter has carried out further studies on the early years of King Henry III's reign.

Recent investigations include Judith Green's search for evidence of Henry's financial system.

Another historian, Stephanie Mooers Christelow, has studied the roll along with those from the reign of Henry II, looking for the exemptions and grants made by both kings to various royal favourites.

[80] The historian C. Warren Hollister used the 1130 Pipe roll to study the rewards of royal service during Henry's reign.

[81] The Pipe rolls from the 13th century onwards are less important for historical study because there are other surviving financial records.

[89] However, the post 13th-century Pipe rolls are occasionally the sole source for historical facts such as William Shakespeare's residence in the parish of St Helen's Bishopsgate and in Southwark.

[91] In 1883 the Pipe Roll Society (a text publication society) was founded by the Public Record Office, on the initiative of Walford Dakin Selby and his colleague James Greenstreet, to establish a systematic publishing programme for the Pipe rolls.

The Society's earliest volumes (to 1900) were printed in "record type", designed to produce a near-facsimile of the original manuscript, including its scribal abbreviations.