Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Dedication
- Preface
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Ann Williams: a Personal Appreciation
- Life-writing and the Anglo-Saxons
- Meet the Swarts: Tracing a Thegnly Family in Late Anglo-Saxon England
- The Moneyers of Kent in the Long Eleventh Century
- Master Wace: a cross-Channel Prosopographer for the Twelfth Century?
- From Minster to Manor: the Early History of Bredon
- Eadulfingtun, Edmonton, and their Contexts
- The Family of Wulfric Spott: an Anglo-Saxon Mercian Marcher Dynasty?
- The Burial of King Æthelred the Unready at St Paul's
- Eustace II of Boulogne, the Crises of 1051–2 and the English Coinage
- Through the Eye of the Needle: Stigand, the Bayeux Tapestry and the Beginnings of the Historia Anglorum
- Robert of Torigni and the Historia Anglorum
- Invoking Earl Waltheof
- Hidden Lives: English Lords in post-Conquest Lincolnshire and Beyond
- Lordship and Lunching: Interpretations of Eating and Food in the Anglo-Norman World, 1050–1200, with Reference to the Bayeux Tapestry
- The Exchequer Cloth, c. 1176–1832: the Calculator, the Game of Chess, and the Process of Photozincography
- Ann Williams: a Bibliography 1969–2011
- Index
- Tabula Gratuloria
The Exchequer Cloth, c. 1176–1832: the Calculator, the Game of Chess, and the Process of Photozincography
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Dedication
- Preface
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Ann Williams: a Personal Appreciation
- Life-writing and the Anglo-Saxons
- Meet the Swarts: Tracing a Thegnly Family in Late Anglo-Saxon England
- The Moneyers of Kent in the Long Eleventh Century
- Master Wace: a cross-Channel Prosopographer for the Twelfth Century?
- From Minster to Manor: the Early History of Bredon
- Eadulfingtun, Edmonton, and their Contexts
- The Family of Wulfric Spott: an Anglo-Saxon Mercian Marcher Dynasty?
- The Burial of King Æthelred the Unready at St Paul's
- Eustace II of Boulogne, the Crises of 1051–2 and the English Coinage
- Through the Eye of the Needle: Stigand, the Bayeux Tapestry and the Beginnings of the Historia Anglorum
- Robert of Torigni and the Historia Anglorum
- Invoking Earl Waltheof
- Hidden Lives: English Lords in post-Conquest Lincolnshire and Beyond
- Lordship and Lunching: Interpretations of Eating and Food in the Anglo-Norman World, 1050–1200, with Reference to the Bayeux Tapestry
- The Exchequer Cloth, c. 1176–1832: the Calculator, the Game of Chess, and the Process of Photozincography
- Ann Williams: a Bibliography 1969–2011
- Index
- Tabula Gratuloria
Summary
Richard fitzNigel, in his Dialogue of the Exchequer, composed in the dozen or so years between 1177 and 1189, wrote of the Exchequer the following words:
The exchequer is a rectangular board, about ten feet long and five feet wide, which those sitting around it use like a table. It has a raised edge about four finger-widths high, so that nothing placed on it can fall off. Over this aforementioned exchequer is placed a cloth bought during the Easter Term, not an ordinary cloth, but black, marked with lines a foot or a spread hand's width apart.
It was from this cloth that the Exchequer took its name, patterned, fitzNigel tells us, like a chessboard, hence scaccarium, and like the game of chess, the cloth took the role of the battleground on which combat was joined between the sheriff, who was there to defend his accounts, and the treasurer, who was there to interrogate the sheriff on the ways in which he had administered the king's money in his county. The look of the cloth ought to be easy to determine, therefore: it must surely have been chequered with squares of alternate colours. Richard fitzNigel's description of it as being ‘not an ordinary cloth, but black, marked with lines a foot or a spread hand's width apart’ does not make the cloth sound chequered at all, however. Hubert Hall, in the nineteenth century, was unconvinced that a counting board would work with chequered cloth, and the first modern editors of the Dialogus took the same view.
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- Information
- The English and their Legacy, 900–1200Essays in Honour of Ann Williams, pp. 245 - 256Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012