Catalogue description BUNDLE 13: FOREIGN MERCHANTS

Miscellanea: foreign merchants

The documents in C 47/13 have been brought together from several now obsolete arrangements of the records, including Chancery Diplomatic Documents and Chancery Diplomatic Documents, Portfolio series, the series of Royal Letters, the numbered sequences of Chancery Miscellaneous Rolls, and unsorted miscellanea.

Most, but not all, of the documents in C 47/13 are records of the Exchequer and the Wardrobe, now found in a Chancery context by reason of the use by both departments of the Tower in the thirteenth and fourteenth century as a place of safe storage for records. In some instances the derivation is explicit, revealed by the 'Treasury of Receipt' stamp applied to the documents themselves during the course of sorting in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Other documents are properly records of the Chancery itself, including returns to writs, drafts, and internal memoranda concerning the issue of instruments under the great seal, including a schedule of licences and warrants issued under the great seal, 12 Edward III, for the export of wool to Brabant, with its memorandum that there were other instruments relating to the same but issued under the privy seal, and which were thus unknown to the Chancery.

Many of the documents prior to the fifteenth century concern the relationships of the Crown with its foreign bankers, mostly Italian, and the making of accounts between them. Some documents are thus records of the Exchequer and the Wardrobe. others appear to be subsidiary to the issue of instruments under the great seal concerning those accounts.

A few items concern litigation in Chancery between particular foreign merchants, or the records of such litigation initially heard before the mayor and sheriffs of London, of which the record was then summoned into Chancery for enrolment or further process. C 47/13/11 is a file containing certificates, mostly from towns in the Low Countries, concerning the discharge of goods in those ports, but including a few stray customers' certificates.

Records of the Wardrobe and Household, 1285-1286, ed B F Byerly and C R Byerly (HMSO, London, 1977)