Catalogue description TREASURY OF THE EXCHEQUER, CONTENTS AND ADMINISTRATION OF THE.

Records are held in a broadly chronological sequence.

Some individual pieces within this section cover wide spans of dates, or have been found to be incorrectly dated.

The Treasury of the Exchequer was never a single place. The 'Great Treasury' of the medieval Exchequer was the Chapel of the Pyx, situated off the cloisters in Westminster Abbey; but the Exchequer also retained its ancient treasury in the Tower of London, continuing to use it even after the dominant archive stored there had become the records of the Chancery; and utilized also a small room behind the tally court in the Exchequer of Receipt, under the direct oversight of the chamberlains of the Receipt. In this room they kept to hand also the keys to chests in other repositories, and to the Pyx and the treasury in the Tower. The keys were stored, with Domesday Book and a few other documents, in a great chest, the keys to which were held severally by each of the Chamberlains and by the Treasurer; by the eighteenth century responsibility for these keys had passed to the deputy chamberlains and the clerk of the auditor of the Exchequer. The term 'treasury' also encompassed the various chests sited in the several offices of the Exchequer and of the Duchy of Lancaster within the palace of Westminster, and in the porch of St Stephen's chapel, which stood immediately behind the receipt. By the end of the sixteenth century the chapter house of the former monastery of St Peter's, Westminster, had been converted for the storage of records; and the Exchequer maintained in addition a treasury above the 'little gatehouse' in the new buildings in the palace of Westminster. This gatehouse, leading into St Margaret's Lane, had been pulled down by the time of the appointment of Richard Morley as Keeper of the records in 1740. By the early eighteenth century record keeping had become centralised on the Chapter House, Westminster, under a keeper of the records, although until about mid-century the Chamberlains continued to keep records also in the small treasury behind the tally court.

The medieval Treasury was a place of safe custody both for documents, jewels, plate, and other items of value, including the trial pieces and standards used for the assay of the coinage. It continued to be used as a place of safe custody for jewels and plate into the sixteenth century, although increasingly displaced as such by the jewel house in the Tower and elsewhere. The regalia, used in the Coronation ceremony, remained in the Chapel of the Pyx until forcibly removed and largely destroyed under the Commonwealth. Matters related to the assay, and those documents which had been deposited in the Treasury of the Receipt, remained in the various repositories which together constituted the Treasury of the Receipt until their contents were finally dispersed to the Mint and the Public Record Office respectively in the nineteenth century. The documents now in E 101 are one part of a larger archive documenting more than five hundred years of Exchequer custody of important documents of state, legal records, and other archives, and its use as a place of safe storage for jewels, plate and other valuables. Records relating its custody of materials for the assay are mostly in E 101 (Mint), E 36, and E189. Records relating to its archival function, both as a place of deposit and of scholarly resort, are, in addition to those in E 101, in E 36, E 163, E 407, OBS I, IND 1, SP 46 and E 192. The history of the Treasury of the Receipt of the Exchequer as a repository for records in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is further documented through the reports of the various commissions on the public records, printed as parliamentary sessional papers; through the records of the Treasury, which funded archival and remedial tasks, including the preparation of finding aids, undertaken partly as a result of those commissions; and through the work of the Record Commissioners in the nineteenth century, some of the official and private papers of which are in the Public Record office. A few of the original chests and containers used to store records in the Treasury of the Exchequer in the long period of its history still survive in SC 16 and E 27, and in both the library of Westminster Abbey and the Chapel of the Pyx itself. From 1836 records housed in the Chapter House ceased to be an Exchequer responsibility. Following the passing of the Public Record Act in 1838 the Chapter House functioned as a branch record office under the charge of successive Assistant Keepers until the records were finally removed to the Public Record Office building at Chancery Lane in 1859, pursuant to an order of the Master of the rolls.

'Matter relating to the assay' continued to be stored, with restricted access and under some conditions of secrecy, in the Chapel of the Pyx even after most records had been consolidated in the Chapter House. By the early nineteenth century the Trial of the Pyx had become more a matter of form and ceremonial than of substance. In 1830 the trial plates were renewed; and those old plates which still survived, of which the earliest, and long obsolete, dated back to 1477, were handed over to the Mint in June 1837 by Privy Council warrant of 1833. In 1870 the keys to the Tryal chest, and the remaining trial pieces, were handed over to the Board of Trade, which had succeeded to the responsibilities of the chamberlains of the Exchequer. Other matter formerly housed in the Chapel of the Pyx was unceremoniously transferred to the Public Record Office in 1908, by the Office of Works and Public Buildings. The Deputy Keeper's report of 1909 reports the transfer of 'A quantity of Ancient tallies of the Exchequer and other objects formerly preserved in the Chapel of the Pyx'; coin dies were similarly transferred by the Ministry of Works to the British Museum in 1914.