Exchequer

In the civil service of the United Kingdom, His Majesty's Exchequer, or just the Exchequer, is the accounting process of central government and the government's current account (i.e., money held from taxation and other government revenues) in the Consolidated Fund. The term is used in various financial documents, including the latest departmental and agency annual accounts.

Historically, it was the name of a British government department responsible for the collection and the management of taxes and revenues, making payments on behalf of the sovereign, and auditing official accounts. It also developed a judicial role along with its accountancy responsibilities and tried legal cases relating to revenue.

Although the Exchequer was the official way of receiving tax revenue for his/her majesty's government, by the late fifteenth century, there was never a way of knowing how much one had at a given time. Any report would take years to come to fruition.

Similar offices were created in Normandy around 1180, in Scotland around 1200 and in Ireland in 1210.

The Exchequer was named after a table used to perform calculations for taxes and goods in the medieval period. According to the Dialogus de Scaccario ('Dialogue concerning the Exchequer'), an early medieval work describing the practice of the Exchequer, the table was large, 10 feet by 5 feet with a raised edge or "lip" on all sides of about the height of four fingers to ensure that nothing fell off it, upon which counters were placed representing various values. The name Exchequer referred to the resemblance of the table to a chess board (French: échiquier) as it was covered by a black cloth bearing green stripes of about the breadth of a human hand in a chequer-pattern. The spaces represented pounds, shillings and pence. This was necessary because many sheriffs, who were responsible for collecting and submitting taxes, were unable to read or write.

The term Exchequer then came to refer to the twice-yearly meetings held at Easter and Michaelmas, at which government financial business was transacted and an audit held of sheriffs' returns.

The operation of an exchequer in Normandy is documented as early as 1180. This exchequer had broader jurisdiction than the English exchequer, dealing in both fiscal and administrative matters. The Dialogue concerning the Exchequer presents it as a general belief that the Norman kings established the Exchequer in England on the loose model of the Norman exchequer, while noting with some doubt an alternative view that the Exchequer existed in Anglo-Saxon times. The specific chronology of the two exchequers' founding's remains unknown.

It is unknown exactly when the Exchequer was established, but the earliest mention appears in a royal writ of 1110 during the reign of King Henry I. The oldest surviving Pipe Roll is that of 1130 (already in mature form, indicating that such records existed for some time beforehand, though they do not survive). In the 1490s around 90 percent of the King revenue was received by the Exchequer. Pipe Rolls form a mostly continuous record of royal revenues and taxation; however, not all revenue went into the Exchequer, and some taxes and levies were never recorded in the Pipe Rolls.