Other Exchequer (and Treasury) Records

Abstract

Ancillary to the Pipe and Recusant Rolls, whose data they both amplify and modify, are two series of Exchequer Memoranda: those of the Lord Treasurer’s and of the King’s (or Queen’s) Remembrancers. These record multifarious financial matters of concern to the Crown, of which recusancy-penalties were but one category; Catholics mulcted on other grounds also occur in these documents, cross-referenced with various Exchequer records—some of them prior to the 1581 recusancy legislation—and continue to appear in them long after the Recusant Rolls come to an end. However, it is via cross-references from the latter that the bulk of Catholic material in the Memoranda Rolls is to be found—particularly in the L.T.R. series, the Communia sections of which contain important records, or Recorda, giving details of recusancy-convictions, seizures and settlements, total or partial, and the grounds for discharges (e.g. payment, conformity, erroneous assessment, legal flaws) as well as much personal information. The significance of these and related documents in building-up ‘Exchequer Dossiers’ of individuals has been expertly demonstrated in two articles by the late Dom Hugh Bowler and more recently they have been drawn on to illuminate Elizabethan and seventeenth-century Catholicism in the West Midlands. To a certain extent derivative from the Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer’s series are the Memoranda Rolls, just mentioned, of the King’s (or Queen’s) Remembrancer, which shed some light on recusancy cases—particularly ones initiated by Common Informers in the 1580s—though usually to a lesser degree than the former series.