Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Fortitude — all may be well and good, but what is of higher importance is Money.  This is the surprising message of the dedication of The Course of the Exchequer,[1] a manual for the operation of the English Treasury composed by Richard Fitz Nigel in the late 1170s.[2]  To Richard, the Archdeacon of Ely and an illegitimate son who inherited his father’s position as Treasurer in 1158, money was hardly a force for evil in the world; rather, it was “the agency of money” that parts the waters, smoothes over difficulties, and enables the fulfillment of the “sound and wise schemes” that the virtues prescribe (2).  In the hands of the King whom Richard served, money is that which in war fortifies castles, pays soldiers’ wages, and defends the realm, that which in peace builds churches, practices mercy, and “feeds and clothes Christ in the persons of the poor” (2). Those who lack money “are a prey to their enemies, those who have it prey upon them” (1); in short, money is power, and the King had better concern himself with its acquisition.

However, according to Richard’s portrayal, money was not always so central to the exercise of royal power.  Indeed, despite the rather technical nature of many of the Course’s descriptions of the workings of the Exchequer, the work yields a wealth of evidence on the evolution of the role of money as a source of royal influence.  The conversion of the English government to a system of money-based revenues led to a standardization of the currency and of obligations to the Crown, reforms that had effects well beyond the narrow economic sphere in the projection of military power, the growth and specialization of the bureaucracy, and the creation of centralizing legal structures.  Furthermore, the royal administration and its use of money tended to promote both men and ideas supportive of royal power.  In this way money, the love of which the Apostle had called “the root of all evil” (I Tim. 6:10) was able to stand in Richard’s estimation on a level with the four cardinal virtues; the former may “confer distinction” on the King, but only money can give power (1).

The Exchequer that Richard oversaw was, at its core, the Internal Revenue Service of twelfth-century England.  It was a special session of the court, presided over by the highest official under the King, the Justiciar; it oversaw the collection of income from Crown lands and the tabulation of debts on the chessboard-like abacus which provided the origin for its the name (7).  Royal lands in Richard’s day were divided into counties and overseen by Sheriffs, each of whom was responsible for paying a certain amount of revenue from the lands to the Exchequer at its biannual meetings at Easter and Michaelmas (22).  Because the King relied heavily on the income from his lands as a major source of revenue, the Exchequer served a vital role in the administration of royal government.

Indeed, the only information Richard provides on society at large comes through the lens of the Exchequer and its operations.  In his discussion of the ‘assay’ by which currency was tested for its purity and full weight, Richard paints a picture of a transition from a non-monetized economy before the Conquest — or, more specifically, a non-monetized royal government — to a fully monetized government that helped to establish royal power and controlled a universally beneficial standard currency.  “Our fathers have told us,” Richard relates, that under the original arrangement after the Norman Conquest, “no sums of gold or silver were paid to the King from the crown lands, but victuals only, from which the daily needs of the King’s household were supplied” (40). The collection of in-kind revenues from Crown lands called for relatively little bureaucracy; an accounting institution such as the Exchequer would certainly have been superfluous, as “the officers concerned” were trusted to remember “how much came in from each estate” and to know exactly “from which counties wheat, or other various kinds of flesh meat, or forage, or other necessaries were due” (40-1).

This system put certain constraints on royal power.  Monetary revenue was available only through the profits of justice, voluntary payments for privileges, and tax revenue from cities engaged in trade (40).  However, Richard does not represent these sources as constituting a significant portion of the King’s income; for instance, displaying either the relative scarcity of such cities or his own anti-trade preconceptions, Richard refers to revenue-producing trading towns only as “cities and villages whose business was not agriculture” (40).  Relatively little coin was apparently available for those expenses that required it, most notably “the wages and rewards of knights” who were serving for pay rather than out of feudal obligation (40).  Wheat and forage could only be used for certain purposes and lacked the liquidity of cash, and their use for anything other than simple consumption entailed potentially significant transportation and storage costs.[3]  Despite these flaws, however, the system was no mere stopgap implemented to meet William’s needs immediately after the Conquest; instead, Richard writes, it persisted throughout the Conqueror’s reign and into that of Henry I, “so that I myself have seen persons who themselves saw victuals being brought in at fixed times to the Court from the crown lands” (40).

            Yet this description of post-Conquest England, with its royal government living comfortably on a regular supply of grain and meat, is deceptively simple. Despite the process of in-kind taxation, the concept of money was never far afield, as the supplies that arrived at the King’s door were assessed in terms of their cash equivalent.  Enough wheat to bake bread for a hundred men was assessed at twelve pence; the carcass of a grazing ox, twelve; a ram or sheep, four; and forage for twenty horses, four (41).[4] Although it is possible that these commodities were undervalued by Crown officials so as to obtain more produce per unit of account, these prices show that the silver denarii were still far too expensive for daily use by most people.  Indeed, the very fact that payments denoted in coin were conducted in kind, with the inevitable transport costs and loss of liquidity, suggests that currency was scarce enough in post-Conquest England to make the collection of cash inconvenient.

            Under Henry I, the desire for money by both king and public became sufficiently acute to switch from produce to cash.[5]  Richard’s account leaves Henry’s motives unclear, but it portrays two distinct factors:  foreign wars and agricultural depression.  To conquer Normandy, Henry needed soldiers and wages to pay them; “coined money” thus “became of the utmost necessity to him for that purpose” (41) — coin was required for the King to project his power. Henry was not the only one looking for taxes to be paid in coin; Richard tells the story of “a crowd of aggrieved farmers” who repeatedly “beset the Court, or (what was even more annoying) the King himself on his progresses,” presenting their ploughshares “as a token of agricultural depression” and protesting the “countless inconveniences” they suffered in transporting produce “from their own homes to all parts of England” (41).  The annoyance of Richard’s source — for he would not have seen the protests firsthand — testifies to the strength and frequency of the farmers’ demands.  That farmers would ask to pay in cash raises several possibilities — that in the countryside money had become more plentiful, that transportation costs were too high, or that the prices at which their crops were valued (especially in a time of shortage, when real prices would be high) were too low.  In any case, Richard records, the King was moved by the protests and his own interests and ordered a survey of crown lands, in which commissioners “saw for themselves the conditions of the countryside” (41) and affixed a value for the victuals paid in by crown lands in each county.  From then on, the royal revenues arrived at the court in the form of coined money.

This reform rendered more uniform the obligations of counties that before had paid in different types of crops; it also had the additional result, of which Richard heartily approved, of imposing minimum standards on the kingdom’s currency.  Now that the Crown was receiving almost all of its income in cash, the quality and weight of the coins received became crucial.  The initial reforms of Henry I had required Sheriffs to pay their obligations ad scalam, with an extra charge of six pence per pound to account for variations in coinage; it soon became apparent that “the coinage, which was then good, might deteriorate” over time, and an additional reform was made in which the Sheriffs were compelled to pay ad pensum, by weight (41).  As time went on, the work of “forgers, and mutilators or clippers of the coin” (12) caused the currency to deteriorate further, and Richard attributes (although perhaps falsely) to his relative Roger Le Poer, Justiciar under Henry I, the discovery that even a man who paid twenty shillings “actually weighing a pound” might not have paid “a pound of silver” (43).  It was therefore necessary to assay the metal provided to the King and determine its purity as well as its weight.  Richard knows very little about the actual metallurgical techniques involved in assaying silver,[6] but his dedication of eight of the work’s 127 pages to the assay shows his belief in its importance.

Uniformity was also assured by the appointment of a standard currency throughout England.  In the time of Henry I, Sheriffs were required to bring in “only current and lawful coin” in payment for their farms or for “profits of justice” (9).  However, this requirement exaggerates the degree to which current and lawful coin was available in England, as exceptions existed for several counties, notably Northumberland and Cumberland, where money was scarce.  Having “anciently no moneyers,” these counties “got their pence where they could” and were allowed to pay in any type of coin, “provided that they were silver and of good weight” (9) — implying that coins with high proportions of other metals, as well as underweight coins, were common enough to be a danger.  It was not until 1158 that Henry II “appointed one weight and one money throughout all the realm,” requiring all counties to pay specifically in legal tender — a decision that Richard presents as one of the “great deeds” of the “noble King” (9).[7]  Here, Richard implies, there were no confusions of currencies, no deniers tournois and deniers parisis competing for use; instead, all counties paid “in the same coin” and were “bound by the same law” (9).  By standardizing the currency, eliminating adulterated money from circulation and making sure that the King’s revenues were not decreased by the use of false coin, Richard writes, the interests of both “the King and the public” (43) were furthered.[8]

The description of counties using the same coin as “bound by the same law” (9) is telling. Along with monetary standardization came a number of other efforts to centralize the administration of Crown lands.  Richard was well aware of the ability of kings to extract wealth from their subjects through new regulations; he cites his father’s aphorism that it is better to pass down old financial practices to posterity than to lose them and cause new rules to made, since “in matters of finance progress is scarcely ever towards a milder practice” (50).[9]  Why was wealth in the form of money so desirable?  With cash in hand, the monarch’s reach can be extended; the increasing use of money by the royal government allowed for and required an increase in royal power.  Evidence from the Course indicates — though not always explicitly — three distinct advantages arising a uniform currency and administration of royal lands:  the projection of power, the rise of a central bureaucracy, and centralizing tendencies in law.

The first and clearest mechanism for turning money into power is to hire soldiers.  A wealthy king could obtain professional mercenary troops, as opposed to those raised at home through societal obligations.  The change in obligation from military service to the payment of scutage allowed a king “to expose mercenaries to the hazards of war, rather than his own people” (52), to use the funds for other purposes in peacetime, and probably to retain a more professional and experienced fighting force in the bargain.  The widespread use of mercenaries would tend to increase the power of the King relative to local lords, since the revenues of the Crown lands would give the monarch far greater access to money.  The Course testifies to the relative size of royal revenues compared to those of individual lords in its discussion of place value; while the accounts of Sheriffs or other lords might require enumeration in the hundreds or thousands of pounds, the ten-thousand-pound place on the Exchequer table is used only “rarely” (24), when there is an account made “of the whole receipt of the realm” (25).  It is not hard to imagine how an order-of-magnitude advantage on the Exchequer table might become an advantage of similar scale on the field of battle.

The second advantage money granted the King over local lords was that the use of cash requires some degree of centralization, since a bureaucracy that can educate and support talented administrators and accountants must be well-funded.  The Exchequer table itself represented high technology of government operations; it was essentially a large abacus, and the earliest records of its use date from a time when the abacus was still quite new and training for its use unusual, the device having been reintroduced to Europe less than eighty years before.[10]  A trained administration would enable the King to further his reach, since the bureaucracy could then be entrusted with new tasks of governance.  For instance, after the Assize of Northampton, the Treasury was given the task of maintaining the records of the “Justices in Eyre,” who rode circuit through six regions of the kingdom to “restore the rights which had lapsed,” do “full justice” to those wronged, and “save the poor both money and labour” that would otherwise have been required to travel to the royal court (77).  The Justices and the mechanism of the Exchequer could then be used further to identify and combat “purprestures” (93), or encroachments on Crown lands.  Richard notes that, due to war conditions or carelessness on the Sheriff’s part, “those who live next to [C]rown lands” occasionally “occupy some portions of them and treat them as their own” — a problem as old as the Middle Ages.  Yet the charge that the squatters are “growing rich at the public expense” clearly alludes to some kind of public interest that the Exchequer could address, rather than some private dispute between the King and another landholder (94).  In describing the workings of the Exchequer, Richard outlines the process for addressing these encroachments after they are identified by the Justices in Eyre; their assets are valued separately from the rest of the county and the responsibility for paying their share of the royal income is placed on the Sheriff, who then has a strong interest in their recovery.

The third advantage of standardization involves the impact of money on the law: the legal mechanisms invented to deal with the questions posed by a money-based system of revenue helped unify Crown control across the jurisdictions of different Sheriffs.  Sheriffs were expected to collect debts to the Crown on the king’s behalf, and they were held accountable for the sums at the biannual meetings of the Exchequer; as a result, the Course outlines a good deal of bankruptcy law, with provisions for disposing of the assets of insolvent debtors to the Crown.  As currency and commerce became standard across counties, a need arose for inter-jurisdictional protection of creditors, and the Exchequer quickly became involved in fighting what would in modern parlance be called money laundering and fraudulent conveyance. Money laundering in the twelfth century was simple:  knowing when the royal Summons would be issued, some debtors simply transferred their stores and flocks to another party or a hiding-place in another Sheriff’s county.  The latter Sheriff “dared not lay hands upon any of it, having no orders to that effect” (71); the debtor sat “calmly awaiting” the approach of the Sheriff, and the King’s Summons “was flouted for years . . . at the King’s own expense” (71).  Richard calls these attempts “laughable, but costly”; as “new diseases” require new remedies, a rule was implemented after the reign of Henry I that made Sheriffs responsible for notifying their ‘offshore’ peers of the existence of the debt and for its collection at the Exchequer (71).[11]  A similar issue of jurisdiction arose with respect to fraudulent conveyance, where insolvent debtors might sell their assets to close associates at less than face value; because the third party owed no debt to the Crown, the assets could not be seized.  However, Richard outlines rules designed to collect such debts:  if a debtor to the Crown subsequently decides to rent his land or use it as a security for a loan, “or even, absurd as you may think it, has sold it and parted with the ownership,” the debt will be recovered from the current possessor “however good his title” (113).  Richard’s apparent amusement at the technique shows that it is uncommon and may betray its novelty; in both cases, “new” abuses related to jurisdiction required a more active central role in administering royal lands and settling disputes.

            A fourth means of extending royal power, more complex and more indirect than three named above, can be found in the role of a monetized administration as a social solvent and an agent and beneficiary of ideological change.  The Crown raised men of varied birth to high station, muddying social categories as well as creating a group with a fierce personal interest in preserving and strengthening royal power. In its descriptions of society at large and in the evidence it provides of Richard’s own opinions, the Course displays an ideology supportive of royal supremacy and meritocracy relative to the claims of the nobility.  In this view, the King and his public officials were seen as the proper rulers of an undifferentiated “public,” wherein individual status was decided not only by birth but also by talents and the favor of Fortune.  Though a man of the Church, Richard saw himself primarily as an officer of the King; he served God by serving His anointed.  Such ideas, and the men who held them, could work tirelessly for the King’s advantage for years to come.

The royal administration could not have functioned without revenues from Crown lands, and the gathering of these revenues relied on a network of officers committed to royal service instead of personal or familial gain — men who would work as public officials rather than private retainers.  Regarding the administration of Crown lands, the Course shows explicitly where such men could be found; they were the Sheriffs, who were entrusted with great power in their jurisdictions for the enforcement of judgments and the collection of debts and regular revenues.  Yet this power was always subject to royal oversight; Sheriffs were required to attend the Exchequer twice a year to bring royal revenues to the Treasury, and failure to appear was a grave offense — even a four-day delay put the wrongdoer “at the King’s mercy” (80).  Even when acting within their own jurisdictions, Sheriffs were not allowed to oppress the peasants arbitrarily:  a Sheriff who had been given a royal pardon for certain taxes or fines was instructed to “take care not to exact it from his tenants,” lest the King punish him “an hundredfold” (48). Though Sheriffs may not have been entirely outside the network of feudal allegiances — of the very few excuses that Richard lists as acceptable reasons to miss a meeting of the Exchequer, most address the Sheriff’s conflicting responsibilities to his liege lord (83-4) — they were not submerged within it.  Sheriffs were not necessarily knights, as Richard indicates by noting that those who happen to be knights receive easier treatment in debtor’s prison (117).  In fact, Richard describes the position as open to “any knight or other sensible man” (84), even those who hold no land of the King.  The institution of the Sheriff introduced a new element to the feudal equation, for it was the King’s prerogative that “any man in the kingdom, if the King need him,” may be placed in royal service no matter “whose man soever he be, and whomsoever he serves in war or peace” (84).

That the drafting of those of ability into royal service, the raising of non-knights to the position of Sheriff, had the potential to blur class lines was observed at the time, as is clear from Richard’s treatment of the concept of ‘fortune.’ Murray writes powerfully of the ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ a metaphor which gained strength in the eleventh and twelfth centuries as Europeans recognized the power of money to “make a king of a serf and a serf of a king” (82); his sketch of the growth of reason and meritocracy as social forces, supported mainly by court patronage, is quite consistent with the data provided by the Course.  The bureaucracy with which Richard was affiliated was not necessarily a mechanism for widespread social mobility; after all, though illegitimate, Richard himself descended from a family with significant royal connections.  But royal service that depended at least in part on talent rather than birth had the potential to challenge existing social structures; the concept of three distinct Orders, though by the twelfth century already glaring in its inaccuracy, is strained further by the ability of both “clerks and courtiers” to serve equally as bureaucrats for the Chief Justiciar and to be valued, not for their birth, but because they are “the most prudent in the realm” (15).  The learning of the abacus at the same time enabled men to rise and provided a metaphor for their ascent; a single counter could stand for “a penny, a shilling, a pound, a hundred pounds or a thousand pounds” — or, “at the pleasure of the Accountant,” start in high office and “sink step by step to a penny again” (25).  Similarly, “any common man” may “rise to the top” if the Justiciar adds to him “some worldly ‘accidents’“ or be thrust to the bottom “as the wheel of Fortune revolves” (25-6).  Richard sees Fortune as playing a key role in the affairs of men; “the fickleness of fortune” puts affluent persons in want until and God’s grace makes them rich again (109), and even monarchs’ power rises and falls “as their portable wealth flows or ebbs” with the vagaries of time (1).

What did the author of the Course think of this place-value social mobility? Of course, Richard could not be expected to have shed all the prior attitudes of the society and Church of which he was a member.  Although his very occupation was dependent on a monetized economy, Richard seems to share his contemporaries’ dislike for the profits of commerce and the burgher class.  In his discussion of bankruptcy, Richard states that when penurious farmers who “have land and live by husbandry” are fined for trespass, the Sheriff is allowed to merely give the Exchequer the assurance that the debt will be collected.  Yet in the case of townsmen — described as those who “condescend to trade,” who “save and scrape with all their might to augment their wealth” — the Sheriff must instead liquidate their assets and pay the debt immediately.  The rationale given is that instead of cattle and grain, which are difficult to hide away, money “is the tool of the trader,” and might be unscrupulously concealed from the eyes of the law (107-8).   Richard sees no need to reform current concepts of class structure; he matter-of-factly reports that the moveable property of villeins may be seized and sold to pay their lord’s debts, “for these chattels are notoriously the lord’s property” (112); indeed, the nobles are “deservedly . . . lords not only of their [villains’] chattels but of their bodies” (101).[12]

However, the emphasis Richard places on obeying class distinctions also provides evidence that those distinctions were slowly eroding in his own time.  The passage on townsmen cited above mentions that a man may be a “citizen or burgess” either “by birth, or because under pressure of circumstances he has voluntarily submitted himself to the laws of the citizens among whom he dwells”; the language suggests some form of compulsion, perhaps a tendency for poorer knights to sink gradually into the bourgeoisie (107).  When a knight did “condescend to trade” (107), Richard decried him as “derogat[ing] from his rank for filthy lucre’s sake” (109).  Richard minces no words in describing the knight or freeman who “demean[s] himself (which God forbid) so as to acquire money by engaging in trade, or what is worse, practicing usury . . .” (109).  Such knights were to be punished harshly if indebted to the King; like burghers, their rents were confiscated in order to pay the debts, and Richard noted that they deserved for their actions to “share the fate of those who ‘make money . . . which way they can.’“ (109)  This type of outrage is unlikely to appear in a society where trading knights do not play a noticeable social role.

Indeed, a world where knights were losing power was likely a far more comfortable place for Richard than would have been a world where nobles were a law unto themselves.  Although in the Course Richard generally values the separate place of the noble in society, he also includes clear sentiments opposed to lordship as a form of government, arguing that the King is responsible to the general public and that nobles can mount oppressive challenges to the monarch’s rightful authority.  In explaining the terms of the Assize of Clarendon, which had been issued in 1166 and had increased the role of royal officials in the administration of justice,[13] Richard states that the chattels of villains convicted of crimes are delivered, not to their lords, but to the King.  Otherwise, the “feverish thirst of human avarice” might compel the lords “for the sake of a paltry profit” to “contrive the murder,” presumably by framing them, “of their own innocent villeins” (101).  The chattels of convicts must fall to the King so that the villeins will not be “the prey of their natural enemies, the lords” (101)  The King, on the other hand, can be trusted to protect the people, as he has been entrusted by God with “the care of all his subjects alike” (101).

As could perhaps be expected from one whose success was due to royal institutions and royal favor, Richard was an unabashed royalist. His patron Henry II, “whose noble actions are beyond human belief” (27), is a frequent object of his praise, overshadowing all other princes or lords.  In fact, because the Exchequer was designed primarily to take accounts of Crown lands, the earls, dukes, bishops, and other powers of England appear in the Course only as the Crown’s debtors or perhaps as its officials, giving the impression that the royal government is the sole governing power in England.[14]  This impression would not have upset the work’s author; though a man of the cloth, Richard devoted his work to an entirely secular topic and dedicated most of his life to service in a secular government where “the King’s profit” was served in all matters (38).  To Richard, it was not “inconsistent with the clerical character” to work to expand the royal treasury; there is a tension, of course, between Richard’s role as a faithful financial servant of the Crown and his religious and cultural disdain for the amassing of money, but he reconciles the two by arguing that the King was not merely hoarding treasure, but “spending it as it should be spent” (2).

Furthermore, as we have seen, Richard believed that money could perform a number of useful functions; one was therefore justified not only in augmenting the King’s virtues, those “excellencies in which the glory of kingship displays itself,” but also in so lowly a task as increasing the “worldly wealth” that the King accrues.  Richard’s opening dedication outlines his claim that the King is “ordained by God” (1) and subject to none but Him; all others must “be subject and obedient” to the royal authority “with all fear” (1) (Dictatus Papae, one supposes, notwithstanding).  One may then work to record and expand the royal revenues, regardless of whether they are justly deserved or result from the “secret devices” of the King’s heart and the mere abuse of his “arbitrary power” (1).  One may not “question or condemn” the King for such practices, for though he may be above all men, he will pay for his acts at the Last Judgment (1).  Before one assumes that the reference to Judgment Day betrays some hint of Richard’s clerical upbringing, it is important to note that even this most religious of sentiments in the Course contains a clear commercial metaphor, comparing the salvation of princes to a “happy bargain” in which the price is “temporal and the reward everlasting” (2) — a spiritual exchange with credits and debits to be recorded on the great Exchequer table in the sky.

            The placement in high station of men like Richard, as well as the wide circulation of their royalist ideas, can only have augmented the strength of the royal bureaucracy and, by implication, the power of the King.  Their hands would work efficiently to organize the royal finances and serve the King’s profit; their ideas would justify the actions of royal authority and oversee its extension into new fields.  The customs of the Exchequer and the standardized currency system which they oversaw served as powerful centralizing forces in Richard’s England; through the institution of the Exchequer, it was possible to translate royal lands into royal money — and, more importantly, to turn royal money into royal power.

[1] Richard Fitz Nigel.  Dialogus de Scaccario (The Course of the Exchequer).  Trans. by Charles Johnson.  Oxford Medieval Texts.  Oxford:  Clarendon, 1983.

[2] The Prologue of the Course states that it was written in the 23^rd year of the reign of Henry II (5), which dates it between Dec. 19, 1176, and Dec. 18, 1177 (xx).

[3] In fact, Richard alludes to these costs as “countless inconveniences” later in the work (41).

[4] Surprisingly, it seems that men were cheaper to feed than horses, since bread for a hundred men cost 12 pence, yet forage for a hundred horses would be valued at twenty.

[5] The text does not identify which “King Henry” (41) is intended, but the question is settled by a mention of Roger le Poer, uncle of Richard’s father Nigel of Ely, who served under Henry I.

[6] His comments that silver may be destroyed in “the fierceness of the fire” are very unclear, and his description of the assay process is vague in areas where metallurgical knowledge would be required (37).

[7] A different form of the exceptions was preserved, however, in the privilege of some counties (again including Northumberland and Cumberland) to avoid the process of assay and pay by tale — sheer number of coins — alone (9).

[8] Of course, the standardization of Henry II was not permanently effective at ensuring a stable currency.  Richard notes that the current practice of the Exchequer is to confiscate any adulterated currency offered by a Sheriff in payment for some royal obligation, except when the currency is obviously new, in which case the minter is punished and the Sheriff credited with the weight of the pure silver it contains.  However, a later interpolation states that this rule is “practically obsolete and out of general use,” since “offences against the coinage laws are universal” and not all currency may be confiscated; the interpolation looks forward to a time when money shall be “restored to its proper and legal standard” and the old rules can come back into use (39).

[9] For example, for the right price, a King could sell a manor or farm, the wardship of a minor, the right of a royal tenant’s heir to inherit his father’s tenancy, the property of intestate holders of royal lands, the property of those convicted of crimes, or the right to speedy resolution of some trial or controversy — which Richard duly notes is “not, of course,” the same as the right “to ensure justice [will be] done”) (119-120).

[10] Alexander Murray. Reason and Society in the Middle Ages.  Oxford:  Clarendon, 1978:  9.

[11] The specific clause implementing the rule was later removed from the formula for the Summons, but the practice continued (72).

[12] On a similar note, Richard’s attitude towards women did not diverge substantially from the accepted view; in his discussion of female indebtedness, he quotes Paul to the effect that “The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband” (1 Cor. 7:4).  (Of course, Richard leaves off the second half of the verse, which states that “and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife.”)

[13] Assize of Clarendon.  1166.  Tr. by Albert Beebe White and Wallace Notestein.  Source Problems in English History.  New York:  Harper, 1915.  Available online at <http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/aclarendon.html>.

[14] The emphasis can here be illustrated quantitatively; variants on the word ‘noble’ or ‘lord’ appear 73 times in the Course and ‘bishop’ or ‘church’ eight times, while variants on ‘King’ or ‘crown’ see a total of 472 uses.  (Similarly, while variants on ‘land’ are used 54 times, ‘money’ and its relatives receive 87 mentions.)