Collecting and payments to build a cathedral

Segovia 1524-1699

Abstract

The accounting investigation which took place in the archives of the Cathedral of Segovia was presented in the last issue of this journal. A formal analysis of the contents of different accounting documents found in those archives was described in the article as an example of ecclesiastical accountancy from XVI and XVII centuries. The use of the “collecting and data method” was showed in some of those documents, the so called “Factory Books” or “Principal Books”. They presented a list of collecting and payments carried out by the administrators of the Factory, which ended up with the calculation of the “alcance” guess or balance of the treasurer with respect to the institution.
The current article is a continuation of the former accounting history investigation. It goes on with the study of the same accounting registers. First, trying to extract and analyze the greatest amount of data and then trying to make hypothesis about the economical factors that motivated them. As the investigated time interval is so wide, a previous examination of the inflation produced during the years under study was very convenient to
deal with significant figures.
The final aims of the current research are to know in detail the Charge and Discharge method used in the Factory of the cathedral of Segovia; to show the great quality of the information included in these accounting registers, in spite of using a less advanced accounting method than that of the double-entry bookkeeping, a method that was already used at the time. And then to know how the building of the new cathedral was financed, a subject with interest from a local point of view.