The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 4

by E. K. Chambers

THE AUDIT OF HOUSEHOLD ACCOUNTS

Most, but not all, of the accounts preserved are records of audit. There is, unfortunately, no systematic history of the Audit Office; but the somewhat scrappy notices in F. S. Thomas, The Ancient Exchequer of England (1848), and H. Hall, Studies in English Official Historical Documents (1908), and A Formula Book of English Official Historical Documents, Part II (1909), may be supplemented for the Tudor period by the valuable study of M. D. George, The Origin of the Declared Account (1916, E. H. R. xxxi. 41). The Record Office series of Lists and Indexes includes lists of Declared Accounts (ii) and Exchequer Accounts (xxxv). Normally the auditing of royal expenditure was a function of the mediaeval Exchequer. The procedure was for the officer charged with incurring expenditure to appear as accountant before the Auditor-Baron and his Clerk, and produce detailed statements, known as ‘particulars’, together with vouchers for sums already spent out of any ‘imprest’ or advance that had been made to him, and the warrants under which his expenditure was authorized. From these the Exchequer officers prepared a ‘compotus’ or balance sheet, signed it, when the balance was settled, as a record that the accountant was ‘quietus’ or quit from debt to the Crown, and passed it through the King’s Remembrancer to the Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer, in whose office it was enrolled by the Clerk of the Pipe on the roll of ‘foreign’ or non-revenue accounts. It was then returned to the King’s Remembrancer, who kept it, with the particulars and vouchers as subsidiary documents. It was a lengthy and cumbrous process. Moreover, the Lord Treasurer, like the Lord Chancellor, was one of the high officers of state whose functions came at an early date under the control of the barons, and the same motives, which led the sovereign (cf. ch. ii) to develop in the Wardrobe and Chamber an executive machinery independent of the Lord Chancellor, also led him to desire that his more private expenditure should be withdrawn from the survey of the Exchequer. Thus we find the Treasurer of the Chamber accountable (cf. ch. ii) at the end of the fifteenth century to the King alone, and in the mid-sixteenth century to the Court of Surveyors or to ad hoc auditors specially appointed by the King or the Privy Council. When the Court of Augmentations absorbed the Court of Surveyors in 1553, its establishment included two Auditors of Prests, and although this court was itself merged in the Exchequer under Mary, the more up-to-date methods of auditing were continued by Elizabeth’s appointment in 1560, as themselves Exchequer officers, of two ‘Auditores de lez Prestes et Compotorum forinsecorum nostrorum’. The main difference between the methods of the Auditors of the Prests and that of the Auditor-Baron appears to have been that the personal appearance of the accountant was no longer necessary, who now himself prepared in duplicate a balance sheet known as his Original Account, or Book of Account, of which one copy was signed after examination and returned to him as evidence of his quittance, while the other was kept by the Auditors, who based upon it a summary known as the Declared or Recorded Account, which took the place of the old Compotus. This also was in duplicate. Apparently the Auditors kept one copy, on paper, and sent another, on parchment, for preservation, as of record, in the Pipe Office. I understand Miss George, however, to think that the accountant was entitled to the paper copy, if he chose to pay a fee for it, which he very often did not. The amount of detail taken into the Declared Account from the Original Account varied for different offices. The Revels Declared Accounts are very summary; those of the Treasurer of the Chamber, at any rate as regards play-payments, practically duplicates of the Original Accounts, except that, unfortunately, the names of plays, which sometimes appeared in the Original Accounts, are usually omitted. The Auditors also kept the subsidiary documents submitted with the Original Account, and became involved in a controversy, recorded in T. Fanshawe, The Practice of the Exchequer Court (1658), with the King’s Remembrancer, who claimed that they should come to him. The King’s Remembrancer did apparently see the Declared Account on its way to the Pipe Office, and enrolled it, or a further summary of it. About 1603 all the Household accounts appear to have gone before the Auditors of the Prests, except those of the Cofferer, which still followed the old course of the Exchequer. The procedures here described explain the provenance of such Household accounts as belong to the official repositories now united in the Record Office; some others, preserved there or elsewhere, come from the private archives of the accountants themselves, being either the audit duplicates supplied to them, or office copies and drafts of their own Original Accounts, or the journals, pay books, and ledgers from which these were prepared.