Catalogue description Records of Council and Parliament

As the central secretariat of the Crown, Chancery naturally provided the basic administrative and clerical staff for the developing king's council. In its earliest post-Conquest form the council was a loosely defined body of noblemen and counsellors attendant upon the king, but the increasingly frequent administrative demands of an increasingly centralised bureaucratic state gave the council added significance and added burdens, and from the frequent but irregular meetings under the Anglo-Norman kings there emerged, by the mid-thirteenth century, a recognised, if still somewhat variable, institution of sworn royal counsellors known as the king's council.

This council required administrative services, which were frequently (though not invariably) provided by the clerks of Chancery; from the time of Edward I, such clerks, sometimes in groups and sometimes named individually, were involved ad hoc in council business, although this administrative support was recruited indifferently from Chancery and from the Privy Seal Office. From c1375, however, John Wellingborough of the Privy Seal Office seems to have been a full-time clerk of the council, and thereafter Chancery clerks no longer served.

Chancery also provided the earliest clerks of Parliament; this was a routine use of clerks about the king's person, and more particularly in the service of the council, at the time when the 'great council' was evolving into its later parliamentary guise. As early as 1315, however, the proceedings in Parliament were enrolled by a named Chancery clerk, and thenceforward there is a clear, if not always consistent, link between Chancery and Parliament, as to both staff and record-keeping.

By the later fourteenth century there was a designated 'clerk of Parliament', who was appointed from the highest grade of Chancery clerks, the Chancery masters, and whose records passed into Chancery as a matter of course. In 1497, however, the then clerk of Parliament decided to retain all records except the formal enrolment of proceedings. By 1523 the clerk had severed all administrative links with Chancery, and all functions were discharged in the Parliament Office; the Parliament rolls, however, continued to be enrolled and kept in Chancery.