An Unknown Survey in the Memoranda Roll of the English Exchequer, 1340–41

This note draws attention to unpublished, and hitherto neglected, entries in the memoranda roll of the English exchequer for 1340-41.This record provides evidence that the fourteenth-century exchequer could and did compile detailed surveys of expenditure for the king of England at times of particular need, despite the fact its records were not compiled with this purpose in mind and that doing so was not its main function.The following paragraphs provide historical and historiographical context before the relevant section of the memoranda roll is analysed, and its significance established.The king of England presided over an extensive fiscal apparatus which generated vast quantities of records, many of which are extant in The National Archives UK.Bureaucratic record keeping does not, though, imply modern accounting practices.The exchequer's purpose was to record and receive sums owed to the crown and to distribute revenue to the crown's creditors; it was not to calculate the entirety of the king's income and expenditure and compare the two.As T.F.Tout and D.M. Broome noted in 1924 'The notion of affording a balance sheet of the year was entirely absent from the minds of exchequer officials'. 1 One of the great challenges of studying English royal finance in the Middle Ages is, therefore, that the voluminous records of the exchequer were not compiled to provide summaries of expenditure or to estimate accurately the current or projected balance of government finance.This led some modern historians to suggest that the medieval exchequer was a fundamentally ineffective institution: 'it was', wrote the great historian of Tudor administration, G.R. Elton, 'impossible for the late medieval exchequer to render any sort of survey; from the records as they stood, no "state"