The Books of Receipts: Money in

Only three of the king’s books of receipts have been preserved.  All are for Henry VII.  Their outside dates are 1487-1489, 1489-1495, and 1502-1505.  Written on thick paper of good quality, they retain their original soft-cover bindings of heavy parchment. The first two (and probably others) of these ledgers were almost certainly created in their pristine state as a blank book by John Heron, who was then just a clerk to the treasurer of the Chamber, Sir Thomas Lovell.[26]   Not only is the first of these books crudely constructed, but the binding incorporates Office fragments documenting, in Heron’s handwriting, removal of specie from several money chests.[27] The preamble to this same book rather suggests that the immediately preceding, and now lost, book, contained both receipts and payments.[28]  From the summer of 1487 receipts and issues were recorded in separate ledgers.  The contents of individual books in both series changed over time, and additional sections were added, or ceased.  Just when the revenues arising from lands in the hands of the Crown were drawn together in the books as a discrete group is unknown because of the gap in the sequence.  But by 1503 payments into the Chamber from receivers and farmers of lands that, for whatever reason, had fallen into the king’s hands were grouped together, and those entries written in Latin rather than the English employed for other entries.[29] The lists were not individually signed off by the king.  Major income streams in all three books came from taxation, from customs and butlerage charged on overseas trade, all being forms of revenue nominally under Exchequer control, and from lands in Crown hands, either directly as rents, profits, and annual leases or ‘farms’, or indirectly by the exploitation of potential feudal revenues. The most striking shift over time is the increase in the number of entries referring to payments on obligations.  At its most basic, this simply means that a document had been drawn up by which a person, sometimes associated with other persons as guarantors, acknowledged that a certain sum was due and payable on a named day or days, and was now making payment.  The books name the debtor and the amount – but by no means always the reason lying behind the bond.  This, although it should be borne in mind that the reason was not always punitive or coercive, might be the most interesting part of the story.  In some instances, a name search in the Books of Payments may yield further details.  Other possible sources are numerous, but widely scattered.[30] 

The first two books, and to a diminished extent the third, are calligraphically written, with bold headings to individual entries, and generous spacing.  Famously, Henry VII signed both every entry, and also the balances struck approximately quarterly.[31] However, by the end of 1503, as payments on obligations exploded in number and the entries became cramped, the king was signing only every page. Scribal interventions by the king in these books are few. One addition is significant. The third of the books is fronted by four pages entirely in the king’s handwriting, retrospectively and currently transferring to Heron’s charge a large quantity of foreign coin and allowing him outgoings that included an instalment of the Scots dowry.[32]   The Books of Receipts are as much presentation manuscripts as financial statements, although they supply the formal ‘charge’ element of John Heron’s accounts with the king. The books of payments provided his ‘discharge’.  They were compiled from rough accounts written by the Office clerks, mostly in Latin, of which a very small number still survive, and from Office files that have almost wholly disappeared: the books are a digest of both.  It is known that the King’s Books of his Receipts do not fully represent the extent of Henry VII’s accumulated treasure, or John Heron’s accumulated responsibilities.[33] 

Later books have disappeared. There are, however, numerous fiscal documents, particularly among the Exchequer’s own records and those of the nascent prerogative courts, and even within the Books of Payments, that show the flow of cash to the Chamber 1505-1521.[34] When he drew up his final balance in the Book of Payments for 1509-18 John Heron charged himself with over one and a half million pounds received on Henry VIII’s behalf in the first nine years of that king’s reign.[35] Equally important as a signpost are the various statutes that provided a legal framework for John Heron’s position as the king’s ‘generall Receyuour’ and listed those Crown revenues that were ordinarily to be assigned to the Chamber, and paid there rather than in the Exchequer of Receipt.   Much of that list continued practices already established or evident before 1509.[36]