The English Royal Chancery in the Thirteenth Century

Summary

The English royal chancery was the greatest of all the medieval chanceries and the thirteenth century its greatest age. English royal government was ‘document driven’. The chancery in the thirteenth century wrote, and authenticated with the great seal, the instruments through which the king spent and controlled his revenues, dispensed justice, distributed patronage and expressed in myriad other ways his personal will. No wonder control over the chancery was a major ambition of the reformers in 1258.

For the chancery the thirteenth century stands as a peak between the valleys of the twelfth and fourteenth centuries either side. Compared to the twelfth century, its work had vastly increased. First, it steadily produced more documents. Michael Clanchy has ingeniously revealed one index of that, namely the amount of wax used by the chancery to seal its documents. In the late 1220s, a little over 3lbs of wax each week was needed; in the twelfth century the figure was almost certainly much smaller; but by the late 1260s the requirement had reached over 30lbs a week. Second, from the 1200s onwards, the chancery began to record the charters and letters which it issued on a series of rolls. For the thirteenth century nearly all these rolls are in print. Between 1200 and 1307 they fill some forty-six volumes, containing around 23,000 pages. Even that, however, gives but a partial impression of chancery activity because only twenty-one of the volumes printed the rolls in extenso. In nearly all the rest they were reduced to an English calendar, sometimes with important omissions. Moreover, the rolls themselves only reveal part of the chancery’s labours since large numbers of documents, most notably the routine writs de cursu (‘of course’), which originated legal actions, were never enrolled.

In the thirteenth century the chancery was at the centre of the king’s personal rule. In the fourteenth century it was not. The essential reason for the change was the way the chancery became separated from the king or, as historians sometimes put it, ‘went out of court’. From having been almost permanently together, from the late thirteenth century onwards king and chancery spent increasing time apart. Ultimately, in the fourteenth century, the chancery took up near permanent residence at Westminster.