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scaccarium (chessboard or exchequer cloth) and Christina wimplaria (wimple/s). Whilst it may be the case that this gift ‘transcended normality’ it also shows gender divisions.35 Hugh received a countergift which was of practical use, Christina an item of clothing which was gender-specific, since veils were used to cover the hair of married women. If the scaccarium was an accounting cloth, this countergift also reflects the predominance of his economic interest in the joint interest of husband and wife. Husband and wife here acted together to grant land to a painter
Gloucester patrimony. When Hawise witnessed a chirograph between Hamo de Valognes and Durand, son of Robert of Torigni, she was witnessing a complicated settlement of inheritance in her husband’s court.12 By contrast she also witnessed a charter of her husband to Walter the harper granting some land for a full dish of beans rendered annually at the earl’s exchequer in Bristol.13 The agreements that Hawise witnessed thus concerned both important tenants and household servants. One of the key problems when studying witness lists is how to evaluate their significance as
belief that the Minority government could not overturn King John’s appointments, Walter and his fellow royalist sheriffs continued the wartime practice of spending the fixed dues, proceeds of the county and hundred courts, and issues of the royal demesne manors within their shires as they saw fit, without first accounting for them at the Exchequer.39 This was a crippling practice for the royal government, which thereby was denied a regular revenue from the localities. The situation was such that, by 1220, Pope Honorius III wrote that the great men of England were
moderated poll tax on alien residents. 4 The two taxes were kept strictly separate, and the system for assessing and collecting those subject to the alien subsidy differed significantly from that used for the fifteenth and tenth. Since 1334, the administration of the fifteenths and tenths had been a matter of local initiative, with each tax district charged a fixed lump sum and its inhabitants left to decide how to redistribute the burden across the community; the county-level collectors of the tax were then held personally responsible in the Exchequer for ensuring that
there was a rather greater vigilance on the part of tax assessors in the South during the assessment of the 1483 and 1487 alien subsidies about spotting and reporting Scottish people in their midst. Certainly, it is in the 1480s that we encounter a number of cases where English men were effectively ‘suspected’ as Scots and listed as liable to the alien subsidy. In 1488, the king’s attorney, James Hobart, delivered a sworn statement to the Exchequer on behalf of Robert Radclyff, who had been assessed towards the alien subsidy in Southwark. Radclyff had been named as a
were no arrangements made for him to check up on sheriffs and other officials as he journeyed through the country. It made sense that government should operate from Westminster (or during the Scottish wars from York). The exchequer was based at Westminster, as were the central courts of law. The chancery was becoming established there in this period. An order in 1296 requesting the chancellor, John Langton, to come to the king at Berwick ‘with all our chancery’ shows that by that date it was not usual for the chancery to accompany the king on his travels.8 An
; and secondly, the returns to a special series of taxes on foreigners resident in the realm collected at various points between 1440 and 1487, known as the alien subsidies, preserved among the documentation of the king’s Exchequer. The archivist Montagu Giuseppi and the economic historian William Cunningham first drew scholarly attention to these records in the 1890s. 17 It was not until after World War II, however, that historians began to make systematic use of these and other records in order to test older notions about the alien presence in later medieval
Lacys remained fairly constant during the three-quarters of a century under investigation. In fact, the progressive fragmentation of knightly tenures broadened the family’s tenurial base in England. The family also held the Welsh marcher lordship of Ewyas Lacy (in the south-western corner of modern Herefordshire), which was excused scutage and is generally absent from Exchequer reckoning. Hugh was preceded in his lordship over the Lacys’ English lands by his elder brother Robert, who had succeeded their father Gilbert by 1160,10 but was associated with the
within the period, has led historians to pin its cause to his last firmly datable actions. Although this tendency predated him,112 its longevity is largely down to the Lacys’ modern biographer, W. E. Wightman. Wightman concluded that all of Walter’s lands (not just those in England and Normandy) had been seized in 1197. He explains: 92 divided allegiance: 1189–99 In that year [1198] Richard Silvain accounted for the lands of Walter II de Lacy for the twelve months before they were returned to him. The sum for which he answered to the exchequer at Caen was the enormous
their household accounts, are the most useful; from the time of King John onwards we have an almost complete daily record of each king’s whereabouts. The baggage train, made up of ten to twenty carts and wagons in the time of King John (1199–1216), contained everything from the treasury to the king’s wardrobe, and had to move about with the king; it must have required adequate roads. More than that, the entire court was itinerant and constantly moved with the king, until at least the reign of Edward I (1272–1307) when the exchequer and chancery became established at