£12 7s. 4d. “numero,” paid out.
Deducting, as before, a shilling in the pound from the sums reckoned “numero,” we find them amount to £12 7s. 8d. “blanch.” Adding this amount to the £31 13s. 8d. “blanch,” we have £44 1s. 4d. to the accountant’s credit. But the ferm was only £42 “blanch.” He had, therefore, a “superplus” of £2 1s. 4d. “blanch,” and that is precisely what the roll records that he had. We may then, from this comparison, conclude positively that the money paid in “ad pensum” was liable to a further deduction when the assay made it “blanch.”
The case of Bosham certainly suggests that in the time of Henry I. the ferm on the “Rotulus exactorius” might be reckoned in ‘blanch’ money, even where the accountant paid in his cash by weight. But what is obscure is why the cash so paid should be merely entered ‘ad pensum,’ instead of its assayed value being recorded as under Henry II. For this value must have been ascertained in order to balance the account.
It is noteworthy that, although the ‘Dialogus’ speaks of payment “ad scalam,” as entered on the rolls of Henry I., the phrase is not found on the roll of 1130. In the case of Exeter, as we have seen, the £25 “ad scalam” were entered on the roll as £25 12s. 6d. “numero.” Broadly speaking, the impression created by the Roll of 1130 is that the administration was endeavouring to systematize the ‘ferm’ payments, which, we may gather from the evidence of Domesday, had been almost chaotic in diversity. From the earliest rolls of Henry II. we find a uniform “blanch” system (with the trifling exceptions the ‘Dialogus’ mentions), which testifies probably to further reforms between 1130 and 1139 (when bishop Roger fell). There remained, however, the sad confusion caused by the several meanings of “blanch”; the true assay involving a deduction of variable amount; the fixed deduction of a shilling in the pound, to “blanch” the money paid out “numero”; and the fixed addition of sixpence in the pound (“numero”) to sums granted “blanch,” as in the Exeter case.
If, in conclusion, it be asked what was the origin of the Exchequer, the answer is not one that can be briefly given. In the first place, it must not be assumed that “the Exchequer” was bodily imported, as a new and complete institution, from Normandy to England or vice versâ.
In the second place, the ‘Dialogus’ we have seen, is by no means an infallible authority for the events of the Norman period. In the third place, its author was biassed by his eagerness to exalt bishop Roger, his relative and the founder of his family.
Leaving that treatise aside for the moment, the evidence adduced in this paper points to the gradual development of the ‘Exchequer’ out of the ‘Treasury’ under Henry I. And this view is curiously confirmed by the remarkable, perhaps unique, narrative in the Abingdon Cartulary[199] of a plea held in the curia regis “apud Wintoniam in thesauro.” This plea cannot be later than 1114, and it is difficult to resist the impression that “in thesauro” is purposely introduced, and represents the “ad scaccarium” of later days. That is to say, that the hearing of pleas was already connected with the financial administration,[200] probably because its records were, in certain cases, needed.
I have suggested that the gradual change of name may have been a consequence of the introduction of the ‘chequered cloth’ (scaccarium). But this innovation, probably, was only one of those which marked the gradual transition to the final Exchequer system. Even under Henry II., for instance, Master Thomas Brown and his third roll were, says the ‘Dialogus,’ an utter innovation, and the place assigned to Richard of Ilchester seems to have been the same. Thus the system was by no means complete at bishop Roger’s death, nor, on the other hand, were its details, even then, his own work alone. He did but develop what he found.
It is quite possible that further exploration of that most fertile field for discovery, the cartularies of monastic houses, may cast a clearer light on this institutional development. For it was a belated document transcribed in the cartulary of Merton that has enabled me[201] to prove the existence of the Exchequer eo nomine in Normandy under Henry I. But it is not likely that such discovery will materially affect the views which I have enunciated above on the origin of the English Exchequer. For, after all, they are, in the main, the same as those which Dr. Stubbs, with his sound instinct, shadowed forth when the evidence was even less.