Between 1177 and 1179 (although it was subsequently revised and interpolated), Richard fitz Nigel, Henry II's treasurer, composed his De necessariis observantiis scaccarii dialogus, known in English as the Dialogue of the Exchequer. Posing as a master instructing his pupil, Richard fitz Nigel gives a lengthy account of the activities at the Exchequer at Michaelmas, when the sheriffs were summoned from their counties to answer for their farms and the other multifarious debts that they owed to the king. Richard's treatise not only describes the assaying of coin and the duties of the various officials who sat at the Exchequer, but also sets down in detail how the Pipe Rolls – the annual record of all these transactions – were organized and by whom they were composed. It is these comments, and a close reading of the rolls themselves, that provide the basis for the following discussion.

Richard fitz Nigel states that the treasurer's (in other words his own) chief tasks were ‘receiving the accounts of the sheriffs and … the writing of the roll’. The chancellor, he had already declared, was ‘equally responsible, with the treasurer, for everything that is written in the roll, except for the amounts recorded as having been received “in the treasury“’. That is not to say that these great men exerted themselves in the actual copying of the roll.