of a Lord High Treasurer.and there are consequently no records of that department of an earlier date.
The Treasury, however, has come into greater and greater prominence since the final disappearance of the Lord High Treasurer in 1714, and the substitution of Commissioners for the execution of his office.
Reforms of the Exchequer.In the reign of William IV, remarkable for reforms of more kinds than one, many of the old Exchequer methods were swept away as useless, and the resulting records ceased to accumulate.
The Exchequer as a separate Court disappears, and its Chancellor is now an Exchequer Officer only in name. Last of all, in virtue of the powers given by the Judicature Acts, the Court of Exchequer has ceased to exist. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, for whom a counter-roll or duplicate of the Great Roll was made out until the reign of William IV, and who sat in the Court of Exchequer for various purposes, has now no judicial functions. He is a Cabinet Minister as being a Senior Lord of the Treasury, and he has become ex officio Master of the Mint, but he is practically an Exchequer Officer only in name, and his roll is a thing of the past.
The Treasury resumes its early prominence.Thus the Exchequer, of which no mention can be found in the time of the Conqueror, had, in the reign of Her late Majesty, Queen Victoria, all but disappeared,[1] and the more ancient Treasury had come again to the front.
- ↑ There is an 'Exchequer' account at the Bank of England, to which the gross revenues are paid directly by certain departments, and from which transfers are made by order of the Comptroller and Auditor General, on the authority of the Treasury. 'Exchequer' seems, however, to be little more than a convenient term, which has survived from a past age, when its meaning was not the same.
