Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (23 page)

Now clearly the Norman chivalric code was more ‘civilized’. Indeed, in time, it would become a central element in a new hybrid Anglo-Norman identity. This saw England as a self-consciously ‘civilized’ nation in contrast to the barbarous peoples of the Celtic fringe, who still embraced the brutal pre-chivalric code and slaughtered each other (and, when they got the chance, the English) without mercy. That is the credit side of chivalry. But there was an equally strong downside which threatened to undo the remarkable political achievement of Anglo-Saxon England.

The issue was royal power. In theory, the king remained as much of a king as he had ever been, consecrated by holy Church and honoured by all. But with the Norman Conquest the reality of his position had undergone a fundamental shift. For the king was now a knight as well as a sovereign: he shared the chivalric ethos and was bound by its code. As were all his greater subjects. And the greatest of them all thought of themselves as his ‘peers’ or equals. They expected to be treated accordingly with consideration and kid gloves, while the king, for his part, had a severely limited range of sanctions which he could apply to bring them into line. Execution, in particular, was unacceptable; instead confiscation, exile and, as a last resort, life imprisonment, were the most extreme measures he could use. The effect was to license a high level of political dissent and disorder, as the case of Normandy shows.

But all this, as William of Malmesbury points out, was foreign to the Anglo-Saxon tradition. This is why post-Conquest England experienced the apparent paradox of rebellions which were led by Norman nobles while the English natives clamoured for the king to hang the rebels in the approved English fashion!

Henry I had benefited from this sentiment when he resolved on a final settlement of accounts with Robert of Bellême. And it helped guarantee him a trouble-free English reign thereafter.

III

In time the chivalric virus would spread to England. But, even before it did, the country needed proper government during the king’s lengthy absences in Normandy. At first, Henry turned to his queen, Edith-Matilda. She gave birth to her daughter Matilda in 1102 and her son William the following year. Then, after a mere three years of marriage and having barely fulfilled her dynastic duty, she separated herself from her husband’s bed and lived apart, in great splendour, at Westminster. Henry did not complain and she appears not to have complained either when he reverted to the habits of his unmarried youth and sought the solace of many other women.

There were also political advantages to the arrangement as it left Matilda free to act as regent of England. She presided over councils and conducted diplomatic business. She also gave government a human face as she was pious, charitable and cultured. She loved music and musicians and was lavish in her patronage of foreign scholars, since, as William of Malmesbury noted slyly, they would trumpet her fame abroad.

But Matilda died in 1118. Thereafter Henry turned to a man of sterner stuff: Roger of Salisbury.

Roger was a priest of humble birth. Like that other priest-minister, Cardinal Wolsey, who was one of the last of the breed just as Roger was one of the first, stories abound of Roger’s swift dispatch of business in his earlier days. Roger is supposed to have first attracted Henry I’s attention by the speed at which he said mass. This may or may not be true. What it certainly shows, however, is that Roger, like Wolsey later, impressed contemporaries as a man who got things done, and, when it was necessary, got them done fast.

There were other resemblances, too. Like Wolsey, Roger flagrantly broke his vow of celibacy and openly lived with his mistress. Roger was also a great builder, particularly at Shaftesbury and Malmesbury.

For there he erected extensive edifices at vast cost and with surpassing beauty; the courses of stone being so correctly laid, that the line of juncture escapes the eye, and leads one to imagine that the whole wall is composed of a single block. He built anew the church of Salisbury and beautified it in such a manner that it yields to none in England.

‘He was’, William of Malmesbury concluded, ‘a prelate of great mind, and spared no expense towards completing his designs.’

And it was, above all, this
magnanimity
or greatness of mind that was the key to his magnificently confident handling of power. Wolsey was supposed to be in the habit of saying
Ego et rex meus
(‘I and my king’). But Roger actually saw fit to add his own authority to the king’s by issuing a writ which contained the phrase: ‘I order you, on the part of the king and myself ’.

Even the great Cardinal might have hesitated before committing such an expression to writing.

Finally, both men’s careers ended in failure when they were humiliated and repudiated by the kings they had served so well. Nothing survived from the wreck of Wolsey’s fortunes. But Roger fared better and established an enduring administrative dynasty that ruled England, in three successive generations, for almost the whole of the twelfth century: from Roger’s own advent in about 1100 to 1196, when Richard fitzNigel, Roger’s great-nephew, died, still in harness after nearly forty years as treasurer. Not even the Cecils would cling to power so long or so tenaciously.

Henry had appointed Roger head of his household while he was still a landless younger son. Then, as soon as he became king, he gave him swift promotion up the official ladder: Roger was made chancellor in 1101, bishop of Salisbury in 1102 and finally, at an unknown date, ‘justiciar’. Or maybe it would be truer to say that it was Roger who made the post of justiciar. There were two distinct aspects to the position: the justiciar was head of the ordinary administration of finance and justice, or, as we might say, chief minister; he was also vice-regent during the king’s absences abroad. Under the earlier Norman kings the two functions seem to have been discharged by different men. Roger, however, combined them in his own person and did so, moreover, for the unprecedentedly long period of two decades or more under two kings.

Most important, perhaps, was Roger’s dominance of the machinery of finance. Here again he appears as an innovator, since he was, almost certainly, not simply England’s first minister of finance but also the creator of the financial ministry itself. This was known then and for the following seven hundred years as the ‘Exchequer’.

The Exchequer’s origins are much disputed. All that can be said for certain is that in 1110 Henry issued a writ addressed to ‘the barons of the Exchequer’. It dealt with the payment of an ‘aid’ (tax) for the marriage of the king’s daughter to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry V, and it was witnessed by Bishop Roger. This writ appears to be the earliest piece of evidence for the Exchequer; it points to Roger’s role as its managing executive (if not its creator) and it suggests that the imposition and collection of the ‘aid’ may well have been the first large-scale undertaking of the new agency. Roger’s formative role also features heavily in the
Dialogus de Scaccario
(‘Treatise on the Exchequer’), written by Roger’s great-nephew, treasurer Richard fitzNigel, in about 1178.

Like many medieval administrative agencies, the Exchequer was named after a thing. What made it unique, however, was the nature of the object. It was not a piece of furniture (like the King’s Bench) or a room (like the Chamber). Instead, it was a calculating device. The Exchequer was a board, 5 feet wide and 10 feet long, set up on trestles like a table. The board was covered with a black cloth, replaced each Easter, and divided by a grid of vertical and horizontal wood laths into squares.

The resulting resemblance to the board for a game of chess, known as
scacci
in Latin and
eschecs
in Old French, gave the Exchequer its name. It also enabled the board to function as a form of abacus or calculator. The seven columns, running from right to left along the length of the board, were denominated according to monetary value: at the extreme right were pennies, then shillings, pounds, scores of pounds, hundreds, thousands, and finally tens of thousands of pounds. Counters representing a debt to the king were placed in an upper row (so many for each penny, shilling, pound and so forth) and counters representing monies paid on account put likewise in a lower row. The amount outstanding could then be determined by subtracting the lower row of counters from the higher.

The device was necessary because the clumsy form of Roman numbers and their lack of a zero made arithmetic on paper more or less impossible. It also represented cutting-edge technology. The abacus had first been described in the West in the tenth century, and treatises on it continued to multiply over the next two centuries. One of the most important was written by the great English scholar Adelard of Bath, while he was a teacher at Laon in the early 1100s. Laon was then the most flourishing and influential school in the West. And, it has been conjectured, it was from Laon (conveniently nearby in Picardy in northern France) that someone, almost certainly Roger of Salisbury himself, borrowed the idea of the abacus and adapted it to the demands of English royal finance.

But the key to the Exchequer’s effectiveness lay not only in its technology but also in its personnel and procedures – in
who
sat round the board,
what
they did, and
when
they did it. Here, once again, we almost certainly see the hand of Bishop Roger, who sat as its first president and modelled it in his own image of brusque, businesslike efficiency.

The board was placed long-side-on at the end of the room furthest from the door, like a high table in a college hall, and was surrounded on all four sides with benches. At the head of the table sat the justiciar, with the chancellor on his left and another senior councillor on his right. On the long bench against the wall were placed the treasurer and beneath him the clerks who wrote out the rolls of the Exchequer in which the written records of its business were kept. On the opposite long bench, with their backs to the room, were those who performed the mechanical tasks on which the smooth operation of the whole system depended: the calculator, who placed and manipulated the counters, and the tally-cutter, who made the notched sticks which served as a tangible record of monies paid and received.

Finally, at the foot of the table, sat the man who was the object of this whole elaborate apparatus: the sheriff. With the assistance of his clerk, he was the accounting officer for the king’s revenues in the county or counties which he administered and he appeared before the Exchequer as a kind of defendant. The prosecuting counsel, on the other hand, was the treasurer, whose job it was to press the revenue’s case for the sheriff to pay over as much money as possible. While the other senior officers, known as the ‘barons’ of the Exchequer, acted as judges between them.

This meant that the metaphor of a chessboard took on another, grimmer significance. For the sheriff was like one player in a game of chess; his opponent was the treasurer, ‘so … it is chiefly between [these] two’, the
Dialogus
notes, ‘that the conflict takes place and the war is waged’: each counter in the upper row meant that the king received more; each in the lower, that the sheriff paid less. It was the difference between ruin and security for the sheriff and riches and pecuniousness (which in turn meant power or weakness) for the king.

By and large, it will come as no surprise to the modern taxpayer, the treasurer won on the king’s behalf, while the sheriff, summoned to appear ‘as you love yourself and all that you have’, paid up.

Not all of this was new, of course. Tallies went back to the reign of Edward the Confessor at least. Similarly, later Anglo-Saxon England had a centralized treasury at Winchester, where were kept not only cash but written records and assessments. The innovations, on the other hand, were just as important: the siting of the Exchequer in Westminster; the use of Latin for the records; and, above all, the fixed rhythm of biannual audit: the first at Michaelmas (29 September), when the sheriff paid monies on account, and the second at Easter, when a final reckoning was agreed and any balance due handed over.

And it was this inexorable regularity, as well as the ‘scientific’ precision of the calculator and his counters, that gave the Exchequer its special edge. What was agreed at Easter and entered in the rolls was final: it could be changed only by the king himself and it would be pursued to the last penny and fraction of a penny, thanks to the attendance of the marshal and his officers on the board, who would imprison the defaulting or recalcitrant until they paid up or were discharged.

What the Exchequer did
not
do, however, was to handle cash. This, instead, was the role of the exchequer of receipt. And it was much less straightforward than merely counting coins. Not that there wasn’t a lot of counting to do, since only one coin was then current in England: the silver penny.

But, beyond counting, there was the question of value. For the value of such coins rested, as would continue to be the case for almost the next millennium, not on their face value but on the actual quantity of precious metal they contained. Thus, for all the bureaucratic elaboration and sophistication of the Exchequer machine, the wealth of the king, like the wealth of England, rested on the quality and stability of the English coinage. This was yet another Anglo-Saxon creation. It had survived the reigns of the first two Norman kings largely unscathed. But, by Henry I’s own time, there was significant deterioration and the face value of the coins was no longer supported by the quantities of silver in them. There are several possible explanations for this. The ‘moneyers’, or coiners, were paid neither a salary nor commission. This made the temptation to reduce the weight of the coins, or their fineness by adding base metals, very great. Above all, there was the scale of the king’s own demands – the ‘manifold impositions’ of which the Anglo-Saxon chronicler repeatedly complains – which subjected the whole monetary system to intolerable strain.