Catalogue description Records of the Enrolment Office

Enrolment, in the Chancery sense, meant the recording on parchment rolls, normally in a standardised, abbreviated form, of the details of formal letters issued under the great seal. The purpose was twofold: firstly, to provide a record of Chancery transactions for the information of the Exchequer if fees or other dues were involved; and secondly, to provide an authentic office copy of all the Crown's most serious business.

The origins of this practice are uncertain; enrolments of formal accounts were known in the Exchequer from the time of Henry I at the latest, and Chancery enrolments (mainly in financial connections) are known from the 1170s onwards. From 1199, however, with the appointment of John and, perhaps more importantly, with the accession of Hubert Walter to the office of chancellor, the practice of enrolment in Chancery for the provision of a permanent and official record of business under the great seal began, and in some series continues to the present day.

The processes whereby the Chancery rolls were compiled are not always apparent. It is likely that the original letters under the great seal were drafted, approved, sealed, and despatched without themselves passing through the hands of the clerks who enrolled them; sometimes, even as late as the fifteenth century, it is clear that enrolment did not take place until long after the original had been issued, and moreover the enrolling clerks were not necessarily based in the same office, or even in the same location, as the clerks responsible for issuing the letters. It is more likely that in earlier centuries the enrolling clerks often worked from drafts or transcripts, a process which may account for the not infrequent variations and lacunae in the enrolled version; later, from the mid-fifteenth century onwards, enrolments were based on the text of the authorising warrant.

Further lacunae were caused by the practice of requiring the recipients of grants and privileges to pay for the enrolment of the documents embodying these grants; while it was a prudent precaution to ensure that an authentic copy of a grant was available in case the original was lost, not all recipients paid and not all letters under the great seal were enrolled. Furthermore, with the proliferation of uses for writs under the great seal, it soon became the practice to limit enrolment to non-routine letters patent and letters close in which the Crown had an interest.

The practice of enrolment generated a subsidiary activity on which Chancery clerks, and grantees, were not slow to capitalise, and the searching of the Chancery rolls, and the issue of certified copies of documents enrolled there, became a lucrative part of Chancery (or at least the clerks') business. Furthermore, the status and security of Chancery enrolments encouraged private individuals and corporations, particularly Chancery officers in their private capacities, but many others as well, to have private deeds entered upon the Chancery rolls so that reference could be made to them in future.

This practice, not unknown in other courts of record also, came to be commonplace; indeed, the Close Rolls, which were the series principally used for the enrolment of private deeds, ceased to have any administrative function within Chancery in 1533, but nevertheless continued in active compilation, purely for these private purposes, until 1903, since when the function has been continued in the Enrolment Books of the Supreme Court. Specifications for patent inventions were enrolled on the Close Rolls until 1854, when the duty passed to the newly-established Patent Office.

Although Chancery enrolment was, it seems, originally the task of the senior clerk who later became the master of the rolls, it soon devolved upon subordinates in a specialised branch of three clerks (increased to six, under pressure of work, in 1389). With the establishment of the master of the rolls in the Domus Conversorum from the early fourteenth century onwards, a division of business developed, between the enrolments themselves, made at Westminster in what became the Enrolments Office, and the custody of non-current rolls at the Rolls Office, both under the master of the rolls.

One of the six clerks, known as the 'riding clerk', discharged the business of enrolment, although by the sixteenth century the function had devolved to deputy clerks, recognised by statute in 1573, who themselves used under-clerks for the practicalities of entering enrolments. There was also a minor clerk known as the portjoy, who was in origin the officer responsible for transporting the Chancery rolls when occasion required; this post seems to have transmuted into that of usher from the sixteenth century, and it lapsed in 1725. These clerkships under the old system were abolished in 1842, and the duties transferred to a single clerk of the enrolments.

Aside from the general run of enrolments, enrolment for certain defined purposes was assigned to specific officers; thus the clerk of the dispensations enrolled his own business, while a clerk of the enrolments in bankruptcy was appointed in 1731.