seal of Chancery, came into existence as a means of authenticating the brevia as impressed with royal authority. Thus the camera was able to duplicate the functions of the Chancery as well as those of the Exchequer.[1] About the middle of the thirteenth century the Pipe Rolls take to referring to the exceptional financial transactions as taking place not in the camera but in the garderoba. There are clerici garderobae and a chief officer called indifferently the custos and the thesaurarius garderobae.[2] Presumably the garderoba or 'wardrobe' was at first merely that apartment of the camera in which the financial work was done, and there are still indications of some such early relationship in the position of the Wardrobe when we first get a clear view of the operations at the very end of the century.[3] But by this time its scope had greatly increased, owing to the policy of Henry III and Edward I, who found in it a financial and administrative instrument, both more ready to hand and less subject to baronial control and criticism than either the Exchequer or the Chancery. Much of the revenue had come to pass through its hands, under a system of tallies, which were issued to it in block by the Exchequer on the authority of a royal warrant dormant, exchanged for incomings with accountants, and ultimately presented as vouchers at the Exchequer of Account. As part of the same process, the clerical head of the Wardrobe had acquired an importance almost equal to that of the Chamberlain. Indeed, so far as he was controlled by any lay officer, it was less the Chamberlain than the Steward, under whom he sat at the daily review of household expenditure which formed a feature of the Wardrobe system, and was continued into Tudor times by the Board of Green Cloth. Here also sat a consocius of the Treasurer, the contrarotulator, who kept duplicates of his accounts as a check upon him, and had the charge of the privy seal. The Wardrobe held not only the money and jewels of the King, but also his 'secrets'. Its officers were his secretarii in the earlier unspecialized sense, his confidential agents, both in finance and in diplomacy and other affairs of state. The extant account-*books show that it not merely defrayed the expenses of his household, his alms, and his amusements, but also those
- ↑ Tout, 63.
- ↑ Madox, i. 267; P. R. O. Lists and Indexes, xi. 102; Tout in E. H. R. xxiv. 496. The following summary of the history of the wardrobe and chamber in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries is largely based on Tout, The Place of Edward II in English History (1914). Additional material has since been published in J. C. Davies, The Baronial Opposition to Edward II (1918).
- ↑ Fleta, ii. 6, quoted on p. 37.
