treatise (Dialogus de Scaccario) written about A.D. 1179 by
Richard, bishop of London and treasurer of England. His
father, Nigel, bishop of Ely, had been treasurer of Henry I., and
nephew to that king’s great financial minister Roger, bishop of
Salisbury. Nigel is said to have reconstituted the exchequer after
the troubles of Stephen’s reign upon the model which he inherited
from his uncle. The Angevin, or rather the Norman, exchequer
cannot be regarded in strictness as a permanent department.
It consisted of two parts: the lower exchequer, which was
closely connected with the permanent treasury and was an
office for the receipt and payment of money; and the upper
exchequer, which was a court sitting twice a year to settle
accounts and thus nearly related to the Curia Regis (q.v.). We
dare hardly say that either exchequer existed in vacation;
indeed the word (like the word “diet”) seems to have been
limited at first to the actual sitting of the king’s court for financial
purposes. The Michaelmas and Easter exchequers were the
sessions of this court “at the exchequer” or chess-board as it
had previously sat “at the tallies.” The constitution of the
court was that of the normal Frankish curia. The king was the
nominal president, and the court consisted of his great officers
of state and his barons, or tenants-in-chief, and it is doubtless
due to the fact that the exchequer was originally the curia itself
sitting for a special purpose that its unofficial judges retained
the name of “barons” until recent times. Of the great officers
we may probably find the steward in the person of the justiciar,
the normal president of the court. He sat at the head of the
exchequer table. The butler was not represented. The chancellor
sat on the justiciar’s left; he was custodian ex officio of
the seal of the court, and thus responsible for the issue of all writs
and summonses, and moreover for the keeping of a duplicate roll
of accounts embodying the judgments of the court. On the left
of the chancellor, and thus clear of the table, since their services
might be required elsewhere at any moment, sat the constable,
the two chamberlains and the marshal. The constable was the
chief of the outdoor service of the court, and was responsible
for everything connected with the army, or with hunting and
hawking. The two chamberlains were the lay colleagues of the
treasurer, and shared with him the duty of receiving and paying
money, and keeping safe the seal of the court, and all the records
and other contents of the treasury. The marshal, who was
subordinate to the constable, shared his duties, and was specially
responsible for the custody of prisoners and of the vouchers
produced by accountants. At the head of the table on the
justiciar’s right sat, in Henry II.’s time, an extraordinary member
of the court, the bishop of Winchester. The treasurer, like the
chancellor a clerk, sat at the head of the right-hand side of the
table. He charged the accountants with their fixed debts, and
dictated the contents of the great roll of accounts (or pipe roll)
which embodied the decisions of the court as to the indebtedness
of the sheriffs and other accountants. These persons with certain
subordinates constituted the court of accounts, or upper exchequer,
whereas the lower exchequer, or exchequer of receipt,
consisted almost exclusively of the subordinates of the
treasurer and chamberlains. In the upper exchequer the
justiciar appointed the calculator, who exhibited the state of
each account by means of counters on the exchequer table, so
that the proceedings of the court might be clear to the presumably
illiterate sheriff. The calculator sat in the centre of the side of
the table on the president’s left. The chancellor’s staff consisted
of the Magister Scriptorii (probably the ancestor of the modern
master of the rolls), whose duties are not stated; a clerk (the
modern chancellor of the exchequer) who settled the form of all
writs and summonses, charged the sheriff with all fines and
amercements, and acted as a check on the treasurer in the composition
of the great roll; and a scribe (afterwards the comptroller
of the pipe), who wrote out the writs and summonses and
kept a duplicate of the great roll, known as the chancellor’s roll.
The constable’s subordinates were the marshal and a clerk, who,
besides the duty of paying outdoor servants of the crown, had the
special task of producing duplicates of all writs issued by the
Curia Regis. The treasurer and chamberlains, being colleagues,
had a joint staff, the clerical or literate members of which were
servants of the treasurer, while the lay or illiterate members
depended on the chamberlains. Hence while the treasurer and
his clerks kept their accounts by means of rolls, the chamberlains
and their serjeants duplicated them so far as possible by means
of tallies. Thus the great roll was written by the treasurer’s
scribe (the engrosser, afterwards the clerk of the pipe), while the
payments on account and other allowances to be credited to the
sheriff were registered by the tally cutter of the chamberlains.
In the exchequer of receipt the staff was similarly divided between the treasurer and chamberlains; the treasurer having a clerk who kept the issue and receipt rolls (the later clerk of the pells) and four tellers, while each of the chamberlains was represented by a knight (afterwards the deputy chamberlains), who controlled the clerk’s account by means of tallies, and held their lands by this serjeanty; these three had joint control of the treasury, and could not act independently. The other serjeants were the knight or “pesour” who weighed the money, the melter who assayed it, and the ushers of the two exchequers. It should be noted that all the lay offices of the treasury in both exchequers were hereditary. Henry II. had also a personal clerk who supervised the proceedings personally in the upper, and by deputy in the lower, exchequer.
The business of the ancient exchequer was primarily financial, although we know that some judicial business was done there and that the court of common pleas was derived from it rather than from the curia proper. The principal accountants were the sheriffs, who were bound, as the king’s principal financial agents in each county, to give an account of their stewardship twice a year, at the exchequers of Easter and Michaelmas. Half the annual revenue was payable at Easter, and at Michaelmas the balance was exacted, and the accounts made up for the year, and formally enrolled on the pipe roll. The fixed revenue consisted of the farms of the king’s demesne lands within the counties, of the county mints, and of certain boroughs (see Borough) which paid annual sums as the price of their liberties. Danegeld was also regarded as fixed revenue, though after the accession of Henry II. it was not frequently levied. There were also rents of assarts and purprestures and mining and other royalties. The casual revenue consisted of the profits of the feudal incidents (escheat, wardship and marriage), of the profits of justice (amercements, and goods of felons and outlaws), and of fines, or payments made by the king’s subjects to secure grants of land, wardships or marriages, and of immunities, as well as for the hastening and sometimes the delaying of justice. Besides this, there were the revenues arising from aids and scutages of the king’s military tenants, tallages of the crown lands, customs of ports, and special “gifts,” or general assessments made on particular occasions. For the collection of all these the sheriff was primarily responsible, though in some cases the accountants dealt directly with the exchequer, and were bound to make their appearance in person on the day when the sheriff accounted.
We gather both from tradition and from the example of the Scottish exchequer that the farms of demesne lands were originally paid in kind, by way of purveyance for the royal household, and although such farms are expressed even in Domesday Book in terms of money, the tradition that there was a system of customary valuation is a sufficient explanation, and not of itself incredible. At some date, possibly under the administration of Roger of Salisbury, the inconvenience of this arrangement led to the substitution of money payments at the exchequer. The rapid deterioration of a small silver coinage led to successive efforts to maintain the value of these payments, first by a “scale” deduction of 6d. in the £ for wear, then by the substitution of payment by weight for payment by tale, and finally by the reduction of most of such payments to their pure silver value by means of an assay, a process originally confined to payments from particular manors. Only the farms of counties, however, were so treated, and not all of those. The amount to be deducted in these cases was settled by the weighing and assaying of a specimen pound of silver in the presence of the sheriff by the pesour and the melter in the lower exchequer. The casual
