ABSTRACT
The financial department of state was the exchequer, developed as a separate institution in the later twelfth century and therefore already 300 years old when Henry VII came to the throne. Its two parts-the exchequer of receipt where the money was received, stored, and disbursed, and the exchequer of audit where accounts were audited and unpaid sums driven in-reflected a thorough desire for safety in bureaucracy. A multiplicity of officials and records, designed to prevent fraud and collusion, dealt with the finances. But while the king could be sure that the work of the exchequer was honest, he orten had to wait a long time for the creaking machinery to do its work; accounts were audited years after they were due, and it took even longer to collect outstanding items. The records were so designed as to make knowledge of what was coming in, going out, or still in hand very hard to come by. These shortcomings had caused earlier kings to rival the exchequer machinery by financial departments developed in the royal
household where the king could exercise personal and direct supervision, keep clear of baronial interference which at titnes afFected offices of state, and handle the cash needed in daily administration without recourse to the cumbersome machinery of the exchequer. Henry III and Ed\vard I had built up an office of finance out of the wardrobe, the accounting department of the household, while Edward II and Edward III had used the king's chamber, the innermost part of the household out of which the exchequer had originally grown. The decline of royal power in the fifteenth century was reflected in the decline of the dynamic household activity in national government which characterised the middle ages; wardrobe and chamber were reduced to purely household departments. Thus when Henry VII attacked the problem of a shrunken revenue, he was confronted with an administration which could be of little use in the expansion and exploitation of his resources.
