Catalogue description Records of the Treasury of the Receipt

The Treasury of the Receipt of the Exchequer was not a department of the Exchequer but a place, the four repositories and places of safe custody within the Palace of Westminster and Westminster Abbey which were used by the Exchequer from about the mid-sixteenth century until the early eighteenth century. They were responsible for providing secure storage for items, principally records, of particular value to the Crown.

Although, before the Norman Conquest, the king's treasure often accompanied his peripatetic household, and small quantities of valuables might be deposited with religious houses for temporary safekeeping, a tradition had already arisen whereby Winchester was the residual home of the royal treasury; in 1035, at the death of Cnut, Harold I set a precedent (much followed over the following century by successors to the throne whose claims were not uncontested) by making possession of the treasury at Winchester his first priority. The Norman kings maintained the treasury there (many of their financial officers seem to have been based in Hampshire), while conducting more and more financial business elsewhere, and especially at Westminster. This meant that, with the gradual development of elaborate and regular audit procedures at Easter and Michaelmas, the staff of the incipient Exchequer devoted much attention and cost to the transportation of specie and valuables in chests, bags, and hampers.

By the middle of Henry II's reign, the responsibility for these tasks were clearly vested in the Lower Exchequer or Exchequer of Receipt, where the Treasurer and chamberlains (nominally) and the chamberlains' deputies (in practice) made arrangements for the treasury to be brought from Winchester to Westminster, stored in temporary strongrooms, and returned after the session. By the end of the reign, the bulk of the treasury was normally kept at Westminster, although Winchester retained a role, and other depositories were used as well: the Tower of London, the Temple, and Salisbury, together with continuing ad hoc use of religious houses around the country; later, John used dispersed treasuries in royal castles such as Bristol, Devizes, Nottingham, Marlborough, Corfe, and Exeter.

Nevertheless, the pressures of business in a centralised monarchy confirmed the treasury's metropolitan location; despite migrations with the king or his officials from time to time, by the end of the thirteenth century the treasury was firmly established at Westminster, with the only important satellite repositories being close at hand. Presumably as the apotheosis of the old tradition of using religious houses, the premises of Westminster Abbey, rather than the palace of Westminster, became the primary site; the undercroft of the chapter house was certainly used from an early date, and the pyx or coffer in which the standards for the coinage were kept was housed in a chapel (soon to be known as the Chapel of the Pyx) nearby. A mention in 1345 to 'the treasury within the cloister of Westminster next the chapter house' was referring to arrangements which were then already old-established, although there is evidence that, perhaps because of its better security, the Tower of London was the repository for the main reserves of bullion, coin, and jewellery.

Westminster continued to provide secure storage spaces until the nineteenth century. Following the dissolution of the monastic houses in the 1530s, the Chapter House and the Chapel of the Pyx were devoted solely to record storage; two other repositories, in the Court of Receipt and above the gatehouse of the Palace of Westminster were also in use from about the mid sixteenth century until the early eighteenth century. Four factors brought important changes in the functions of the Treasury of Receipt. First, the growing use of dispersed royal departments, notably the household, decentralised the custody of working royal cash, diminishing the logistical impact of increasing royal revenues. Furthermore, the sophisticated, if cumbersome, Exchequer procedures of book-keeping transactions without transfers of cash - as, for example, the discharge of Crown debts by vouchers payable locally by customs officials - reduced the amount of ready money which the Exchequer required, or indeed possessed, at any one time; indeed, by the eighteenth century the Bank of England had become the repository of the Exchequer's material treasure. Thirdly, the role of the deputy chamberlains became primarily that of custody of royal records.

The Treasury of the Receipt was never formally abolished. Radical changes to the structure of the Exchequer in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries swept away much traditional practice and many offices, although keepers of the records continued to be appointed for the Chapter House until the complete revolution in government record-keeping brought about by the Public Record Office Act in 1838.