Catalogue description Records of the King's Remembrancer

The origins of the Remembrancers of the Exchequer is unclear, although from the earliest perceptible period, in the twelfth century, both the Crown and the Treasurer had senior clerks to assist in the functions of audit and receipt. Essentially, they were officers charged with recording and pursuing debts and other matters outstanding from the process of audit in the Upper Exchequer. This meant initiating proceedings against defaulting accountants, conducting inquiries into unresolved problems, unverified claims, and inadequately documented sums outstanding, and maintaining records of all such procedures in order to report back to the Exchequer at the next session.

The two roles were well established in the course of the thirteenth century, and from the end of Henry III's reign onwards their functions diverged increasingly; when the Exchequer ordinances of 1323 laid down firm distinctions between the work of the King's Remembrancer and the work of the Treasurer's Remembrancer, it reflected and consolidated an existing division of duties. The King's Remembrancer became responsible for collecting and recording Crown revenue from various and occasional sources, rather than the ancient and fixed revenues, such as feudal reliefs, and (despite some inevitable variations due to bureaucratic evolution and the addition of duties by statute) these responsibilities were recognisably the same at the end of the eighteenth century as they were at the beginning of the fourteenth.

The King's Remembrancer was, accordingly, the recipient and custodian of great numbers of writs addressed to the barons of the Exchequer (brevia baronibus) authorising expenditures over the entire range of routine and current Crown business, and for issuing Exchequer writs authorising consequential expenditures or allowances to sheriffs, escheators, and other accountants. He was also the custodian of a wide variety of documents sent into the Exchequer for action or record. Thus deeds, recognisances, and other valid or negotiable instruments rendered in support of debts to the Crown - or, indeed, rendered as part of the documentation of complex financial relationships of which a Crown debt might only be one part - were deposited with, and often enrolled by, him and his clerks.

He was also responsible for the receipt of two main categories of accounts: the particulars of accounts (that is, the expense accounts) rendered by persons incurring expenses on behalf of the Crown and claiming allowance or reimbursement, and the accounts of both the assessment and the collection of lay and clerical taxation. Among sundry duties, the King's Remembrancer was also, specifically under the ordinances of 1323, the Keeper of the Red Book of the Exchequer (a compendium of Exchequer practice, including the Dialogus de Scaccario) and of various other books of record and practice.

The work of audit and recording went hand in hand with the duty to pursue defaulters, and the King's Remembrancer issued writs against Crown debtors, extracted bonds and recognisances and issued process for their realisation or discharge, authorised commissions to establish the resources of non-paying accountants, and initiated inquiries into otherwise untraced or desperate debts; in effect, he was the administrative legal official responsible for the investigation and prosecution of Crown debtors.

By extension from these duties concerning Crown debtors and accountants, the King's Remembrancer acquired a similar legal and administrative jurisdiction in equitable suits in the Exchequer. The Exchequer's equity business (unlike Chancery's, which was widely based on plaints to the Crown as the fount of justice) arose strictly from its financial dealings. Officials of the Exchequer, royal accountants, and debtors to the Crown had, since 1311 by statute and in practice long before, the right to have litigation heard in the Exchequer, on the grounds that the outcome had a bearing on their ability to administer or pay debts to the Crown. Most of this business was common-law litigation heard in the Exchequer of Pleas, but, late in Henry VIII's reign, equity suits by bill began to appear.

At first the practice was sporadic, but by the end of Elizabeth I's reign the King's Remembrancer was dealing with hundreds of cases a year, and, although the Exchequer never challenged the volume of Chancery's business, the numbers of suits continued to grow until the end of the seventeenth century. Until 1649 the flow of cases was regulated by the Exchequer's insistence on the formal requirements of a genuine royal financial interest in each case, but thereafter it was sufficient for a plaintiff to make a generalised claim to be a 'debtor and accountant to the commonwealth [from 1660, 'to his majesty']', a claim which the court refused to investigate or overrule. Thus, from about 1650 onwards, the Exchequer became a general court of equitable jurisdiction, with the King's Remembrancer - most commonly by deputy - acting both as Clerk of the Crown and as a 'master' conducting enquiries and drafting opinions for the advice of the court. This work was transferred, in 1820 (1 George IV, c35) to two masters in the Exchequer, but in 1841 (5 Victoria, c5) the Exchequer's equity jurisdiction (including all cases pending) was transferred to the court of Chancery. The revenue work of the King's Remembrancer was also substantially reorganised in the nineteenth century.

The offices of the Lord Treasurer's Remembrancer and of the Pipe were abolished in 1833, and their duties transferred to the King's Remembrancer, but under the Queen's Remembrancer's Act 1859 c21 the main record-keeping functions of all these Exchequer offices were abolished. Under provisions of the Statute Law Revision 1875 c66, the Queen's Remembrancer was transferred to the Supreme Court of Judicature, and attached to the Central Office of that court in 1879. In 1881, under an order in council, the Exchequer Division of the Supreme Court was abolished and its business passed to the Queen's Bench Division, where the senior master, acting as Queen's Remembrancer, continued to administer Crown revenue cases until reallocations of responsibilities within the Supreme Court in 1950 and 1963.

A few formal duties, mainly of record-keeping and issuing process in traditional ceremonies, remain associated with the post. These include the enrolment of certain deeds on the memoranda rolls; attendance at the Trial of the Pyx, and subsequent enrolment of the trial and verdict; enrolment of Lord Chancellors' oaths of office; issue of writs of assistance to officers of the Board of Customs and Excise granting them search powers; functions relating to sheriffs' accounts, including the acceptance, on behalf of the Crown, of the token rents payable by the Corporation of the City of London at the annual Quit Rents Ceremony; receiving the nomination of sheriffs for England and Wales; swearing in of the Lord Mayor of London before the Lord Chief Justice; keeping safe custody of the seal of the Chancellor of the Exchequer; and the issue of enclosure commissions under the Dean and New Forests Act 1808.