Accounting practices in Tudor England have relevance and application today for issues such as disaster management and relief in Australia and internationally, according to a Charles Sturt University (CSU) accountancy researcher.

 

Research just published by Associate Professor Jayne Bisman, lecturer and researcher at the School of Accounting and Finance at CSU in Bathurst, examined a unique record from the middle of the reign (1509-1547) of King Henry VIII (born 1491).

 

Professor Bisman says her study of the ‘Hinckford Hundred corn certificate’, a seemingly minor accounting document from East Anglia in 1527, a time of crop failures and resulting localised famine, can be contextualised in terms of Australia's current efforts, and sometimes weaknesses, in providing famine, medical and other relief, both at home (e.g. during times of natural disaster, such as the 2011 Queensland floods) as well as the nation's role in international relief operations.

 

“Australia and other affluent nations continue to struggle with the issue of economic cost versus welfare, with accounting playing a part in both, particularly the latter where 'newer' and emerging accounting practices and priorities, such as social and environmental accounting, offer alternative approaches to handling old and ongoing issues such as famine,” she said.

 

“There is a particular lack of research about management accounting prior to the Industrial Revolution, and the Hinckford Hundred corn certificate is a rare, distinctive and significant document as only a few of the first corn surveys survive. (The term ‘corn’ was used to describe a range of grains and cereals, and the corn certificates related to commodities necessary for basic sustenance at the time.)

 

“The corn commissions (surveys) and certificates were initiated by Cardinal Wolsey, who was Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII from 1515-1529, and the East Anglia famine of 1527-28 coincided with the start of a period of great religious, political and social upheaval in England. Food shortages (dearth) posed, and continue to pose, a great threat to social order, so the corn certificates represented a public policy intervention with the objective of assisting the needy, and can be seen as the beginning of the shift of both responsibility and power from the church to the state.

 

“But the corn commissions also had the effect of serving and upholding the prevailing social order by endowing government with political power to enable the quantification of resources and the control of populations through policy and oversight. They demonstrated how census processes and ‘calculative mechanisms’ could be used in the service of the state in new ways, often with negative consequences, such as the later Poor Laws, and resulted in social repression and exclusion.

 

“The aims and processes used in preparing corn certificates became the basis for the development of more than four centuries of public policy designed to assist the state to provide relief to the poor in times of dearth. As a budgetary document, it represents a form of accounting that persists to this day.”