Finance on a Shoestring: The Exchequer in the Thirteenth Century

Summary

In October 1301, Edward I wrote to the exchequer from his campaign headquarters in Scotland. Typically, he was demanding funds for an ambitious attempt to construct a floating bridge across the Firth of Forth, so he could pursue his enemies through the winter.

‘Know that we wonder greatly why you have sent us as little money as you have sent up till now, and in particular, we are surprised you have sent it in such small instalments . . . we would have achieved such a success against our enemies, that our business in these parts would have been brought to a satisfactory and honourable conclusion in a short time.’

As well as typifying his style of kingship, Edward’s letter encapsulates various problems in the structure of state finance in the latter years of his reign, especially after his policies brought the country to the verge of civil war in 1297. The similarities with the crisis facing his grandfather in 1215 are striking. Edward was forced to make sweeping concessions – the Confirmatio Cartarum issued in November 1297, and the Articuli super Cartas in 1300 – that effectively blocked further demands for extraordinary taxation, on which his government had come to rely; and, in consequence, the continued expenditure of the wars in Scotland brought his financial administration to the brink of collapse. Prestwich has argued that at the time of Edward’s death in 1307, the crown was at least £200,000 in debt, of which £60,000 was still outstanding in the late 1320s; and he identifies the inability of the exchequer to exercise effective authority over the wardrobe as a major cause of the debt, as the department was permitted to spend far beyond its means.

The primary aim of this paper is to investigate the evolution of the exchequer during the thirteenth century. The first section will detail how the exchequer’s role in the financial administration rapidly changed between the days of Richard fitz Nigel’s Dialogus de Scaccario and the constitutional crisis facing Henry III in 1258. The second section explores the recovery of the exchequer as an institution from a state of virtual collapse in 1268, under the leadership of three important reformers, the treasurers Joseph de Chauncy, John Kirby and William March.