EXCHEQUER. The word “exchequer” is the English form of the Fr. échiquier, low Lat. scaccarium, and its primary meaning is a chess-board (see [Chess]). As the name of a government department dealing with accounts it is derived from the exchequer or the “abacus” by means of which such accounts were kept, such a contrivance being almost universally in use before the introduction of the Arabic notation. In England the department or court of accounts was named originally “the tallies” from the notched sticks or tallies which constituted the primitive means of account-keeping (which were only abolished in 1826), and was only subsequently, probably in the reign of Henry I., named the exchequer from the use of the abacus. Both the name and the general features of the institution may reasonably be attributed to Norman influence, since we find both in Normandy and in the Norman kingdom of Sicily, as well as in Scotland and Ireland; the two latter cases being directly due to English example. As a court of law the exchequer owed its existence in England, as elsewhere, to the necessity of deciding legal questions arising from matters of account, and its secondary activities soon overshadowed its original functions.
We cannot say whether the exchequer, as known in England, is older than the beginning of the 12th century. The treasury, which may be regarded as one of its constituents, dates from before the conquest, and the officers of the exchequer who were drawn from the treasury staff can be traced back to Domesday. But our earliest information about the exchequer itself, apart from that afforded by the pipe rolls (see [Record]), rests on a 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 revenue was paid by tale, and for the determination of its amount it was necessary to have copies of all grants made in the chancery on which rents were reserved, or fines payable. These were known first as contrabrevia and later as originalia; the profits of justice were settled by the delivery of “estreats” from the justices, while for certain minor casualties the oath of the sheriff was at first the only security. At a later date many of them were determined by copies of inquisitions sent in from the chancery. All this business might be transacted anywhere in England, and though convenience placed the exchequer first at Winchester (where the treasury was), and afterwards usually at Westminster, it held occasional sessions at other towns even in the 14th century.
The Angevin exchequer, described by Richard the Treasurer, remained the ideal of the institution throughout its history, and the lineaments of the original exemplar were never completely effaced; but the rapid increase both of financial and judicial business led to a multiplication of machinery and a growing complexity of constitution. Even in the time of Henry II. we gather that the great officers of state, except the treasurer and chancellor, commonly attended by deputy. In the reign of Henry III. the chancellor had also ceased to attend, and his clerk acquired the title of chancellor of the exchequer. To the same period belongs the institution of the king’s and lord treasurer’s remembrancers. These at first had common duties and kept duplicate rolls, but by the ordinance of 1323 their functions were differentiated. Henceforward the king’s remembrancer was more particularly concerned with the casual, and the lord treasurer’s remembrancer with the fixed revenue. The former put all debts in charge, while the latter saw to their recovery when they had found their way on to the great roll. Hence the preliminary stages of each account, the receiving and registering of the king’s writs to the treasurer and barons, and the drawing up of all particulars of account, lay with the king’s remembrancer, and he retained the corresponding vouchers. The lord treasurer’s remembrancer exacted the “remanets” of such accounts as had been enrolled, as well as reserved rents and fixed revenue, and so became closely connected with the clerk of the pipe. Before the end of the 14th century these three offices had already crystallized into separate departments.
In the meantime the increasing length and variety of accounts, as well as the growth of judicial business, had led to various efforts at reform. As early as 22 Henry II. it became necessary to remove from the great roll the debts which it seemed hopeless to levy, and further ordinances to the same end were made by statute in 54 Henry III. and in 12 Edward I. By this last a special “exannual roll” was established in which the “desperate debts” were recorded, in order that the sheriff might be reminded of them yearly without their overloading the great roll. But the largest accession of financial business arose from the “foreign accounts,” that is to say, the accounts of national services, which did not naturally form part of the account of any county. These did not in the reign of Henry II. form a part of the exchequer business. Such expenses as appear on the pipe roll were paid by the sheriffs, or by the bailiffs of “honours”; payments out of the treasury itself would only appear on the receipt and issue rolls, and the “spending departments” probably drew their supplies from the camera curie, and not directly from the exchequer. In the course of the 13th century the exchequer gradually acquired partial control of these national accounts. Even in 18 Henry II. there is an account for the forests of England, and soon the mint, the wardrobe and the escheators followed. The undated statute of the exchequer (probably about 1276) provides for escheators, the earldom of Chester, the Channel Islands, the customs and the wardrobe. During the reign of Edward I., the wardrobe account became unmanageable, since it not only financed the household, army, navy and diplomatic service, but raised money on the customs independently of the exchequer. The reform of 1323-1326, due to Walter de Stapledon, in remedying this state of things, greatly increased the number of “foreign accounts” by making the great wardrobe (the storekeeping department), the butler, purveyors, keepers of horses or of the stud, the clerk of the “hamper” of the chancery (who took the fees for the great seal), and the various ambassadors, directly accountable to the exchequer. At the same time the sheriffs’ accounts were expedited by the further simplification of the great roll, and by appointing a special officer, the “foreign apposer,” to take the account of the “green wax,” or estreats, so that two accounts could go on at once. Another baron (the 5th or cursitor baron) was appointed, and the whole business of foreign accounts was transferred to a separate building where one baron and certain auditors spent their whole time in settling the balances due on the accounts already mentioned, as well as those of castles, &c. , not let to farm, Wales, Gascony, Ireland, aids (clerical and lay), temporalities of vacant bishoprics, abbeys, priories and dignities, mines of silver and tin, ulnage and so forth. These balances were accounted for in the exchequer itself, and entered on the pipe roll, but the preliminary accounts were filed by the king’s remembrancer, and enrolled separately by the treasurer’s remembrancer as a supplement to the pipe roll.
The next important change, about the end of the 15th century, was the gradual substitution of special auditors appointed by the crown, known as the auditors of the prests (the predecessors of the commissioners for auditing public accounts), for the auditors of the exchequer. Accounts when passed by them were presented in duplicate and “declared” before the treasurer, under-treasurer and chancellor. Of the two copies, one, on paper, was retained by the auditors, the other, on parchment, was successively enrolled by the king’s and lord treasurer’s remembrancers, and finally by the clerk of the pipe, to secure the levying of any “remanets” or “supers” by process of the exchequer.
Besides the two great difficulties of the postponement of financial to legal business, and of preventing the sheriffs from exacting the same debt twice, the exchequer was, as has been seen, hampered in its functions by the interference of other departments in financial matters. Its own branches even acquired a certain independence. The exchequer of the Jews, which came to an end in 18 Edward I., was such a branch. In 27 Henry VIII. the court of augmentations was established to deal with forfeited lands of monasteries. This was followed in 32 & 33 Henry VIII. by the courts of first-fruits and tenths and of general surveyors. These were reabsorbed by the exchequer in 1 Mary, but remained as separate departments within it. But the development of the treasury, which succeeded to the functions of the camera curie or the king’s chamber, ultimately reduced the administrative functions of the exchequer to unimportance, and the audit office took over its duties with regard to public accounts. So that when the statute of 3 & 4 William IV. cap. 99, removed the sheriff’s accounts also from its competence, and brought to an end the series of pipe rolls which begins in 1130, the ancient exchequer may be said to have come to an end.