Cely shipping accounts: Accountability and the transition from oral to written records, The

Accounting Historians Journal, The, Dec 1995 by Hooper, Keith

ORAL AND WRITTEN ACCOUNTING PRACTICES OF THE PERIOD

Typical of the size of English businesses of the period, the Celys' family business was quite small. Writing of the accounting procedures before 1800, Edwards

1989, p. 43

noted:

An elaborate system of accounting is not justified unless it enables significantly better decisions to be made. The accounting systems employed in feudal times, seem to have been adequate to meet contemporary needs.... Charge and discharge accounting is not concerned with profit measurement. The general lack of interest in formal performance assessment resulted from the fact that income was fairly fixed and the bulk of the expenditure unavoidable.

Edward's comments do not entirely apply to the Cely accounts because income was not fairly fixed and expenditures in shipping were often dependent on the vagaries of the weather.

The use of Roman numerals in the fifteenth century made calculation and understanding more difficult. Records were in narrative form and, as Noke

1981, p. 141

found, there was no attempt to have a money or quantity column extended from the narrative. Roman numerals were typical of English accounts of that period. Accounting historians have

Glautier, 1973, p. 69, de Ste. Croix, 1956, and Chatfield, 1974, p. 16

considered that the Roman legacy to the Middle Ages was tenacious and a preference for Roman numerals continued among bookkeepers until the sixteenth century, hundreds of years after the introduction of Arabic numbers.

Edwards

1989, p. 45

explained that because Roman numerals have neither zero nor place values, they do not lend themselves to addition or subtraction, a feature which inhibited the development of double entry bookkeeping. Moreover, Roman numerals cannot be adapted for division or multiplication. Noke

1981, p. 141

observed: "Roman numerals were used in all the accounts and since such a system has no place values, an exact tabulation of the figures would not help the addition." The use of Roman numerals may explain why the Cely accounts were restricted to listing payments and revenues. Macve

1985

disagreed with the notion that a particular form of numeric accounting was necessary to make sophisticated comgutations

p. 241

. Edwards

1989, p. 47

, however, observed that the use of Arabic numerals was resisted on the grounds that they could be more easily changed for fraudulent purposes by adding, or removing or altering a single figure. This may account for an established custom of the period but such an explanation was less likely to specifically apply to family businesses like the Celys, who used their accounts for internal purposes only.

For merchants in the fifteenth century, there were few precedents for record-keeping in English. Latin was still the essential written language of intellectual intercourse, and clerks and estate officials wrote in Latin

Lander, 1980, p.156

. However, there must have existed a strong purpose for written records given the effort, energy and care required from what was generally a semi-literate society. According to Clancy