Allegations of mismanagement have played a major part in the sometimes acrimonious debate between historians on the state of monasticism in later medieval England. Contemporaries were aware of such problems and Benedictine Chapters (assemblies of the heads of monastic houses with the power to make statutes binding on all houses) issued a large amount of regulation to address these issues. This paper analyses the statutes issued by the Chapters to identify those concerned with the financial management of monasteries. The analysis reveals a concern with transparency in financial transactions, evident in efforts to extend knowledge of the financial transactions of a house beyond the immediate participants to the wider monastic community, even requiring its consent for transactions to be considered valid. Additionally, it finds an increasing level of definition both in terms of the preparation and audit of accounts and in the wider control environment. The process of visitation, by which the temporal and spiritual health of monastic houses was monitored, and their adherence to Chapter statutes confirmed, may be regarded as an early attempt at quality control aimed at the maintenance of high standards in religious life. The Chapters can be seen to be an important instrument for the dissemination of improved accounting practices, and the emphasis upon the management of temporalities within Chapter statutes allows further insights into the alleged sacred-secular dichotomy. Accounting and accountability are found to be an essential component in the life of a healthy Benedictine monastery.
This paper is based upon an examination of a selection of the bursars' accounts from Durham Cathedral Priory covering the period from the first extant account (1278–9) to the end of the 14th century. The accounts selected have been transcribed from the original documents and translated from Latin into English. A traditional focus of accounting historians in the medieval period has been on manorial accounting and the system of charge and discharge. This paper examines a series of non-manorial accounts and a variety of supporting accounting materials, analyzing them for evidence of the development and refinement of controls. After an introduction which reviews the background of the accounts and the extent to which they have been utilized for historical research, this paper describes the various sources of receipts and types of expenditure which are revealed. The format of the accounts is traced, and a review of total receipts and expenditure is conducted to gain an understanding of the overall financial position of the bursar's office. Next, the accounts are considered within the context of other accounting records to explore the financial controls in place. Finally, areas for further investigation and analysis are identified. The accounts selected reveal that actual receipts and actual expenditure were kept closely in tandem, and that an extensive network of other accounting material and documents allowing a system of cross-checks enabled auditors to ascertain the veracity and accuracy of the accounts.
Given the continuing interest concerning both the use of case studies and learning styles in accounting education, the recent papers by Adler, R., Whiting, R.H. and Wynn-Williams, K. (2004), and Wynn-Williams, K., Whiting, R.H. and Adler, A. (2008) in this journal are to be welcomed. They both present evidence of their use of business case studies (BCS) in an intermediate-level accounting course in a New Zealand university, measuring students' learning styles before and after the BCS intervention. Both studies fail to report any statistically significant changes in learning styles on two of those years, and reports that learning styles have a bearing upon performance. The papers present an interesting and topical account of the use of BCS in an accounting course over an extended period. However, in our view their applied use of learning styles and the Learning Styles Inventory II (LSI-1985) in this context is methodologically questionable. This comment indicates how future research might build on their exploratory work. Issues of concern include the literature base, the psychometric properties of scores produced by the LSI-1985, and analysis and disclosure of results
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