eighth century, at the same time as the barbatoria, though it is not mentioned in the sources; that is the hypothesis which M. Guilhiermoz regards as most probable; or, on the other hand, we might perhaps suppose that the solemn arming had disappeared among the Franks and that it only came into vogue again with them to replace the barbatoria as a practice borrowed from a Germanic people who had preserved it better . . . A passage in the life of St. Wilfrid of York, by Eddi, seems to allude to the custom of arming among the Anglo-Saxons at the end of the seventh century." 1 Thus the Anglo-Saxons, who kept many Germanic institutions which the Franks had dropped, are supposed to have preserved the primitive usage described by Tacitus and to have transmitted it, towards the end of the eighth century, to Charlemagne and his subjects. The hypothesis is an interesting one, and connects itself with a class of considerations which Stubbs perhaps did wrong to neglect. M. Guilhiermoz says, a certain number of facts show the influence exercised in the Frank empire by AngloSaxon usages in the seventh and eighth centuries.” The anointing of the kings in France, Brunner has noticed, was an Anglo-Saxon importation; so also was the custom of entrusting the young people brought up at the palace to the care of the queen.2

Influence of Anglo-Saxon civilization on the continent

As

The part that the scholars of the school of York played in the Carolingian Renaissance is well known. Carolingian painting, whose origins are complex and obscure, is beyond a doubt derived, in large part, from the early Anglo-Saxon art of miniature; and when we

1. Principles quoque saeculares, viri nobiles, filios suos ad erudiendum sibi (to St. Wilfrid) dederunt, ut aut Deo servirent, si eligerent, aut adultos, si maluissent, regi armatos commendaret." M. Guilhiermoz takes this passage from Raine, Historians of the Church of York, i, p. 32.

2. Guilhiermoz, loc. cit. and pp. 92, 93.

compare the strange and striking productions of English painting in the tenth century with those of the Rheims school in the ninth, we may ask ourselves whether, far from having inspired Anglo-Saxon art a century after, the famous psalter of Hautvillers, or “Utrecht psalter,' was not painted in France by Englishmen.

Stubbs has shown forcibly the influence of Carolingian institutions on English institutions. It would be well, perhaps, to insist equally on the expansion of AngloSaxon civilization, which is in certain respects remarkable.

1. An influence which was only however very powerful in the 12th century. Stubbs describes this phenomenon of tardy imitation, with much learning, in his account of the reforms of Henry II (Const. Hist., i, 656-7).

45

VI.

THE ORIGIN OF THE EXCHEQUER.

the question

SEVERAL Scholars, since Stubbs, have examined the perhaps insoluble question of the origin of the Exchequer, notably Mr. Round and quite Recent work on recently Messrs. Hughes, Crump and Johnson. These latter come to the conclusion that the financial organisation described in the celebrated treatise of Richard Fitz-Neal proceeded both from Anglo-Saxon and from Norman institutions. We should have in it therefore a typical example of that process of combination which formed the strength of the Norman monarchy, and which Stubbs has put in so clear a light. But in the searching study which he made of the Exchequer Stubbs refrained from distinguishing the elements of this institution with a precision that the sources did not appear to him to justify. Are there grounds for speaking with more assurance than he did? Let us see what we have learnt for certain which he has not told us.

The Exchequer; it will be remembered, comprised two Chambers, the Inferius Scaccarium, a Treasury, to which the sheriffs came to pay the firma comitatus and other revenues of the king, and the Superius Scaccarium, a Court of Accounts staffed by the great officers of the crown and personages having the confidence of the king, whose business it was to verify the accounts of the sheriffs on the "exchequer," and also to give judgment in certain suits. The thesis of Messrs. Hughes, Crump and Johnson is that the Treasury, the firma comitatus and the system of payment employed in the first years

1. In the introduction which they have prefixed to their critical edition of the Dialogus de Scaccario (1902), pp. 13-42.

1

after the Conquest, were of Anglo-Saxon origin, while the verification on the exchequer and the constitution of the staff of the Court of Accounts were of Norman origin. In short, an upper chamber of foreign origin was superimposed on a lower chamber already established before the Norman invasion.1

The Anglo-Saxon kings could not do without a Treasury. Stubbs admitted the existence of a "central department of finance" before the Conquest,2 and the latest editors of the Dialogus will meet with no contradiction on that head. Let us add that we know even the name of

Anglo-Saxon elements of the Exchequer

the treasurer of Edward the Confessor. An inquest relative to the rights of the king over Winchester, made between 1103 and 1115, speaks of "Henricus, thesaurarius," who, in who, in the time of Edward the Confessor, had a house in that town, at which the Norman kings themselves for a long time kept their treasure.3 Two offices mentioned in the Dialogus, those of weigher (miles argentarius) and melter (fusor), appear to be anterior in origin to the constitution of the Exchequer properly so called, and evidently date, like that of the treasurer, from the Anglo-Saxon period.1 Stubbs himself tells us that the farm paid by the sheriffs was tested by fire and weighed, and that this operation could not have a Norman origin. Thus the offices of treasurer, weigher, and melter, the firma comitatus and the method of verifying the value of the money date from the pre-Norman period. Mr. Round has pointed out 1. Hughes, Crump and Johnson, op cit., pp. 14, 28.

2. Const. Hist., i, p. 408, note 1.

3. Round, The officers of Edward the Confessor, in English Histor. Review, 1904, p. 92. Upon this inquest, see an article by the same author, in the Victoria History of the Counties of England, Hampshire, i, pp. 527 sqq.

4. In the time of Henry II, they were dependent on no other officer, and the author of the Dialogus was not sure whether he ought to connect them with the Lower Exchequer or the Upper Exchequer (Dialogus, i, 3; ed. Hughes, etc., p. 62). [Modern writers following Madox generally call the weigher pesour.]

that, contrary to an erroneous assertion of Stubbs, the "blanch-farm" is mentioned several times in Domesday Book. Stubbs' proof might have been more complete and more exact, but on the whole his conclusion remains inexpugnable. No one is entitled to say, with Gneist and Brunner, that "the court of Exchequer was brought bodily over from Normandy." The pre-Norman origin of a part of the financial organisation of the twelfth century is a settled point.

Shall we now try to distinguish, with Messrs. Hughes, Crump and Johnson, the elements imported from abroad? "The arithmetic of the Exchequer, like the main portion of the staff of the Upper Exchequer, is," they say, "clearly of foreign origin."2 The 'clearness' they give us on that point is not dazzling. Let us see what it amounts to.

Origin of the arithmetical system of the Exchequer

The "exchequer" was a cloth divided into squares by lines, with seven columns, each column including several squares; according to the place it occupied at one or the other extremity a counter might signify one penny or 10,000 pounds.3 This arrangement suggested the idea of a game played between the treasurer and the sheriff, and, according to Mr. Round, was intended to strike the eyes of the ignorant and to make the business easy to such unskilful accounters as were the sheriffs of the time of Henry I. It was out of the question to demand writings on parchment from them.5

The editors of the Dialogus think, on the contrary, that the system required "skilled calculators," and suppose

1. The Origin of the Exchequer, in: The Commune of London and other Studies, p. 66.

2. Op. cit., p. 43.

3. See the description, op. cit., p. 38 sqq.

4. "Inter duos principaliter conflictus est et pugna committitur, thesaurarium scilicet et vicecomitem qui assidet ad compotum, residentibus aliis tanquam judicibus ut videant et judicent." (Dialogus, i, 3; p. 61 of edition quoted.)

5. Commune of London, p. 75.