1921 REVIEWS OF ROOKS 111 The history of the wardrobe under Henry III is specially connected with the names of Peter de Rivaux and Peter de Chaceporc. Rivaux was in charge of the department in the years 1219-24, 1231-4, and 1257-8. Chaceporc held the same office continuously from 1241 to 1254. Rivaux seems to have been responsible for a policy of encroachment on the province of the exchequer. In his first term of office we find a new practice of obtaining block grants from the exchequer for the wardrobe expenses, and these grants increase in magnitude from year to year. In his second term he combined his wardrobe office with that of treasurer of the exchequer ; and he appears to have carried to extremes a practice, which we find in an incipient stage in the wardrobe account of 1224-7, of causing taxes to be paid into the chamber instead of the exchequer {Chapters, i. 221). He was thrice turned out of office by the ' constitutional ' party, but he was not, after 1234, regarded as a dangerous man ; for the barons did not insist upon his banishment in 1258. Chaceporc was thoroughly insignificant, except for the accident of being in office during the wasteful and futile Gascon expeditions of 1242-3 and 1253-4. In times of war, or when the king was on foreign soil, the wardrobe at once became the great spending department ; and so Chaceporc handled larger sums, and incurred a greater burden of debts for his master, than any keeper of the wardrobe before Droxford, whose privilege it was to finance the wars of Edward I from 1295 to 1307. If the development of the wardrobe between 1216 and 1254 was due to any deep-laid policy, we may suspect that the policy was not hatched by Rivaux or by Chaceporc, but rather by Peter des Roches, the uncle (or perhaps the father) of Rivaux, who was pro- moted to the control of the wardrobe as soon as Peter des Roches was firmly established in power by the death of William Marshal. The Barons' War led to a temporary diminution in the consequence of the wardrobe. There is a clause in the Provisions of Oxford which prescribes that all the issues of the land shall be paid into the exchequer. This shows that the barons had some inkling of the wardrobe's past encroach- ments ; and, though the wardrobe accounts for the next six years do not show any great reform in the scale of royal expenditure or in the relations of wardrobe with exchequer, Simon de Montfort appears to have made drastic changes in the wardrobe during the first seven months of 1265. He appointed one of his own party, Ralph Sandwich, a knight and a lay- man, as keeper of the wardrobe ; and he cut down the receipts of the wardrobe by one half, so that the royal income was only about £2,500 for seven months. But Montfort's policy was soon reversed in this as in other fields. In the years 1274 to 1280 the average receipts of the wardrobe were £24,000 a year ; and the average rose steadily through the reign of Edward I, until it reached £70,000 in the time of John of Droxford. Of this last period Mr. Tout remarks that the exchequer seems to have abdi- cated in favour of the wardrobe, and that the Issue Rolls are little more than a record of payments to the wardrobe (Chapters, ii. 96). This may or may not have been due to a deliberate design on the king's part. It must be remembered that the time was one of continual wars, and that the wardrobe had been for some time past the recognized war treasury. Circumstances, rather than a new policy, may account for the vast
