ABSTRACT
Henry VII only gradually acquired an appreciation of the nature and purposes of chamber finance and of his need for what the Yorkists had created. Henry VII’s chamber finances, like those of his Yorkist predecessors, were thus his personal hoard, the accumulation and maintenance of which entirely depended on the king’s immense application, vigour and constant vigilance. Henry’s advisers probably had some hand in drafting the new version of an unsuitable Lancastrian act. F. C. Dietz claimed that whereas the exchequer revenues increased by 50 per cent during the reign of Henry VII, the ‘augmented’ revenues increased perhaps ten-fold between 1487 and 1505. In spite of an impression gained from modern writers on Henry VII’s reign that great care was taken to ascertain his yearly income and to live within it, none of the surviving documents can in fact tell us what this yearly income actually was.
