APPENDIX B
COURT PAYMENTS
The body of this appendix contains extracts from the accounts of
the Treasurer of the Chamber and the Office of Revels, in which
expenditure on plays or masks at court is recorded. But in view of
the importance of these documents as sources for the history of court
entertainment, it will be well to add something about their general
nature and state of preservation to what has already been said about
the procedure of the Treasurer of the Chamber in ch. ii and that of
the Revels Office in ch. iii.
THE AUDIT OF HOUSEHOLD ACCOUNTS
Most, but not all, of the accounts preserved are records of audit. There is, unfortunately, no systematic history of the Audit Office; but the somewhat scrappy notices in F. S. Thomas, The Ancient Exchequer of England (1848), and H. Hall, Studies in English Official Historical Documents (1908), and A Formula Book of English Official Historical Documents, Part II (1909), may be supplemented for the Tudor period by the valuable study of M. D. George, The Origin of the Declared Account (1916, E. H. R. xxxi. 41). The Record Office series of Lists and Indexes includes lists of Declared Accounts (ii) and Exchequer Accounts (xxxv). Normally the auditing of royal expenditure was a function of the mediaeval Exchequer. The procedure was for the officer charged with incurring expenditure to appear as accountant before the Auditor-Baron and his Clerk, and produce detailed statements, known as 'particulars', together with vouchers for sums already spent out of any 'imprest' or advance that had been made to him, and the warrants under which his expenditure was authorized. From these the Exchequer officers prepared a 'compotus' or balance sheet, signed it, when the balance was settled, as a record that the accountant was 'quietus' or quit from debt to the Crown, and passed it through the King's Remembrancer to the Lord Treasurer's Remembrancer, in whose office it was enrolled by the Clerk of the Pipe on the roll of 'foreign' or non-revenue accounts. It was then returned to the King's Remembrancer, who kept it, with the particulars and vouchers as subsidiary documents. It was a lengthy and cumbrous process. Moreover, the Lord Treasurer, like the Lord Chancellor, was one of the high officers of state whose functions came at an early date under the control of the barons, and the same motives, which led the sovereign (cf. ch. ii) to develop in the Wardrobe and Chamber an executive machinery independent of the Lord Chancellor, also led him to desire that his more private expenditure should be withdrawn from the survey of the Exchequer. Thus we find the Treasurer of the Chamber accountable (cf. ch. ii) at the end of the fifteenth century to the King alone, and in the mid-sixteenth century to the Court of Surveyors or to ad hoc auditors specially appointed by the King or
