Revenue Collection and Accounting at the Exchequer

Abstract

This chapter discusses the sheriff’s responsibility for collecting and accounting for royal revenue. Sheriffs collected a miscellaneous range of revenue on the king’s behalf, including rents for custody lands, fines and amercements levied by other courts, and traditional fees payable at the county court and tourn. The chapter discusses the nature of the various debts and rents which the sheriff was bound to collect. Some of this money was pumped immediately back into local communities, while some of it had to be paid into the Exchequer. The chapter reconstructs the system of Exchequer audit in the Tudor period, which consisted of up to seven stages: pre-view, foreign apposal, view, sum, account of seizures, additional views, and final sum. It identifies the problems with this system, most importantly the fact that sheriffs had to account for money which was impossible to collect, and it discusses various attempts to solve these problems, most importantly the acts of Parliament passed to alleviate sheriffs’ financial burden in 1543 and 1548.