SPEAKER_00 0:00

The English Exchequer and the Tally Stick. The Exchequer was the accounting office of the English crown in the Central Middle Ages. The name comes from the checkered cloth laid on a table, a grid of squares like a board for counting. Counters were placed on the squares to stand for pounds, shillings, pence, and larger sums. Officials sat around that table at the sessions called the Upper Exchequer. Below it, in the lower exchequer or receipt, money actually came in and went out, and wooden tallies were cut to record what had been paid. The institution was not a bank and not a modern treasury building, it was a set of procedures, a twice-yearly summons of sheriffs, and a written memory that grew into roles. By the 12th century the pattern was already firm. Henry I's reign supplies early evidence of an organized receipt. Under Henry II, the annual Great Roll, the Pipe Roll, survives in a series that begins for practical purposes in the 1150s, and then runs on, year after year, with few breaks. Richard Fitznigel, treasurer, described the whole machine in the dialogue of the exchequer, toward the end of the 12th century. His account is the clearest contemporary description: who sat where, what the sheriff brought, how the tallies were used, how the role was written, and why the cloth was marked in columns. The sheriff was the ordinary accountant for a county. He owed a farm, a fixed sum for the old royal revenues of the Shire, and he owed extra items that the role listed as they arose, rents of particular manners, profits of justice, aids, scuttages, debts of individuals that he was ordered to collect. Twice a year at Easter and at Michaelmas, he was expected at Westminster, or wherever the exchequer was sitting. At Easter he made a view, a half-year account. At Michaelmas he made the full account. He brought money or tallies showing that money had already been paid in, and he brought excuses and writs. The barons of the exchequer heard him. The treasurer and the chancellor's clerk watched the record. Calculators moved the counters on the cloth so that everyone could see the same sum at once. The checkered cloth made arithmetic public. A pile of counters on a square for scores of pounds, another for single pounds, another for shillings could be read across the table without a whispered sum. Error was not impossible, but it had to survive several pairs of eyes. When the counters and the sheriff's tale agreed, the sum was ready to be written. When they did not, the argument was about a particular farm, a particular immersement, a particular writ that had or had not discharged a debt. The cloth did not decide the law. It displayed the figures on which the law was being applied. The tally was the receipt's own instrument. It was a stick of hazel, or of another straight-grained wood, notched and split. The size and placing of the notches stood for denominations: a broad cut for a large sum, a smaller cut for a pound, different marks for shillings and pence, according to a convention the Chamberlains knew by sight. The stick was split lengthwise through the notches, so that each half carried the same teeth. One half, the stock, went to the payer, the other half, the foil or counterfoil, stayed with the exchequer. To prove a payment, the two halves were fitted together. A stick that did not match was not a receipt. The method needed no ink at the moment of payment, and left two parties with the same record. Tallies were issued for money paid in, and they were also issued in other ways that later ages found confusing. A tally might be struck in advance as an assignment. The crown ordered that a creditor be paid out of a future receipt, and the tally was the instrument the creditor presented to the sheriff or to the collector. In that use, the stick was a kind of check on a particular source of money. Much of the later medieval crowns' hand-to-mouth finance ran on such assignments. The wood piled up, stocks circulated, foils remained in the tallies' chests. Matching them was part of the receipts' ordinary labor. The great roll of the year was the pipe roll, named from the pipes, the skins of parchment sewn head to tail, and rolled so that the year looked like a pipe or a scroll of pipes. Each roll was the account of one exchequer year. Counties appeared in a traditional order. Within a county, the sheriff's farm came first, and the items of new business, the debts carried from earlier years, the names of men who owed fines or reliefs, or the rents of particular estates. The writing was a highly abbreviated Latin. A clerk who knew the formulas could pack a sentence into a line. A reader who did not know the formulas saw a forest of hanging marks. A typical entry does a small number of jobs. It names the accountant, it states what he owed, it states what he paid, by tail or by tally, it states what is allowed to him by writ, money he had spent on the king's order, or a sum pardoned, or a sum transferred. It ends with the balance, et quietus asked if he is quit, or a remaining debt that will be called for again next year. Debts could live on a roll for a generation. A name appears, the sum is repeated, a little is paid, the rest is carried down. The roll is therefore not only a picture of one year, it is a ledger of unfinished business. Other roles grew up around the pipe. Memoranda rolls noted the decisions and the pieces of process that the great role did not need to carry. Originalia rolls sent information from the chancery down to the exchequer. Fine rolls, close rolls, and patent rolls belonged to the chancery, but constantly fed the accountants. The exchequer of the Jews, while it existed, had its own chest and its own rolls for that body of debt and regulation. The Forest Ire and the itinerant justices produced immersements that the sheriff was told to collect, and that then appeared at the checkered table. The machine was a meeting place of other machines. The personnel had titles that stayed stable, even when the men changed. The treasurer was the head of the account, the chamberlains kept the receipt and the tallies, the chancellor's clerk controlled the role that was the official memory, a check against the treasurer's role. The constable, the marshal, and other household officers had places in the older description. Barons of the exchequer sat as auditors and judges of the account. Deputy sheriffs and attorneys appeared when the sheriff himself did not. A bishop or a great baron who farmed a county did the same arithmetic through a clerk. The table was a social mixture held together by the order of business. Money itself arrived as coin, and coin had to be examined. The later medieval exchequer knew assays and the picks in connection with the mint. The earlier receipt already cared whether a payment was by weight or by tail, and whether the silver was good. A sheriff who paid in bad coin, or short, met a procedure. The details shift with the century. The constant is that the crown did not treat a bag of pennies as a number until someone had accepted it as such. The year at the table had a rhythm. After Michael missed, the full accounts were heard, the pipe roll for that year was written, and then copied as needed. Estreets, extracts of sums to be levied, went out to sheriffs for the next collection. At Easter the view checked progress. In between, the receipt took payments from collectors of particular taxes, from the farmers of manors, from towns that owed a farm of their own, from men who came to pay a fine in person. The great experiments of national taxation, the Saladin tithe and its successors, the later lay subsidies, had to be fitted into this older household of shire farms and feudal incidents. Sometimes they sat in the pipe roll. Sometimes they generated parallel accounts. The exchequer adapted by adding membranes, not by throwing away the sheriff. Fitznigel insisted that the exchequer's strength was knowledge. Who owed, who had paid, what writ had gone out, what allowance was lawful. A king who traveled, and a government that lived on customary dues plus occasional levies, needed a place where the memory did not travel with the court and get lost. The rolls stayed. The tallies stayed in their chests. A new treasurer inherited the unfinished debts and the same squares on the cloth. By the later Middle Ages, the system was creaking in ways the 12th century description does not show. Assignments multiplied, tallies of the receipt became instruments of credit that might not be honored in order. Sheriffs complained of sums they could not collect. New revenues passed through other offices, yet the pipe roll continued, and the receipt continued to cut wood. The tallies survived into the early modern period as an official form, long after the checkered cloth had become a metaphor. A fire at the Houses of Parliament in 1834 is often told in connection with the burning of old tallies. The sticks had become an obsolete archive that was still taking up space. That ending does not change what they had been in the years when the exchequer was the center of the account. A single Michael Macession will gather the pieces. The sheriff of a Midland County is called, his farm is recited. He produces tallies for sums already paid at the receipt in the course of the year. He produces writs that tell the barons to allow him money spent on the cartage of the king's wine, or on the repair of a castle, or on a prisoner sent to London. The calculators set out the farm on the cloth, they take off the tallies and the allowances, a remainder is visible. The sheriff pays some of it in coin, a new tally is cut and split. The clerk writes the county on the roll, with the verbs that mean paid, allowed, and still owed, the sheriff goes out. The next name is called, the cloth is cleared and set again. The tally that leaves in the sheriff's bag is a piece of hazel, with notches and a name. The foil in the chest will match it if both sides keep their halves. The roll will mention the payment in a line of Latin that a later clerk can find by county and year. That is the whole of the invention, a table that makes sums visible, a stick that makes a receipt splitable, and a roll that makes a year permanent. The crown's wealth in this period is not a heap in a vault. It is a list of men who owe, a list of men who have paid, and the wooden and parchment proofs that the two lists have met.