Hilary Term 2023

The History and Antiquities of the Exchequer of the Kings of England by Thomas Madox

Very little is known about the personal life of Thomas Madox. He was probably born around 1666, but there is no known record of his birth or baptism, nor is there any evidence that he attended either Oxford or Cambridge University. He was admitted to the Middle Temple, to study law, but was never called to the bar. He held administrative posts in the government, but took no part in politics or in public life, instead applying himself conscientiously to his work, both as an official and as a scholar and antiquarian.

His first post was as a sworn clerk in the office of the Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer. At this point in history, the primary responsibility of the Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer was to collect and record regular and established revenues (rather than revenues derived from taxation and customs), especially rents and other income from Crown lands, or from the grants of liberties and franchises. Madox was later made joint clerk in the Augmentation Office of the Exchequer, the successor to the Court of Augmentations which had been set up in 1536 to administer the revenues accruing to the Crown follow­ing the dissolution of the monasteries and other church institutions. He there­fore spent his working days surrounded by his­torical records both from the past and in the making, and was con­scious that they should be kept in good order – in February 1716 he and a fellow clerk reported that there was much disorder in the Remembrancer’s office, one of their chief com­plaints being that for many years the senior sworn clerk had not been entering important ac­counts in the parchment rolls (known as pipe rolls, because when rolled up they resembled a length of piping) which were designed as a perma­nent re­cord, but only in paper books.

In 1702 Madox published his first work, the Formulare Anglicanum. This was a large collection of charters (formal legal documents recording transactions such as grants of privileges, contracts, or conveyances of property) from the Norman Conquest to the end of the reign of Henry VIII. This was valuable to scholars not only for the meticulous transcriptions, which were made from the original documents rather than the cartularies into which medieval scribes often copied them, but also for Madox’s lengthy introductory essay, in which he discussed the scribal conventions and palaeography of the documents themselves, and also their use as guides to social and economic developments.

His second work, The History and Antiquities of the Exchequer of the Kings of England, is displayed above. This was published in 1711, and is not simply a study of the records of what had in the Middle Ages been one of the most important departments of state; it is also an account of how it changed and grew over the centuries, and impacted on the general legal and financial history of the kingdom. Madox’s aim was to provide not only a history, but also a methodology: ‘My ambition,’ he states in his preface, ‘was, to form this History in such a manner, that it may be a pattern for the antiquaries to follow … in reference to the method of vouching testimonies.’ He goes on to say that England is so well furnished with records that any history of it should be grounded in them, as they will vouch for what is said; in modern terms, the history should be backed up by evidence from primary sources.

In July 1714 Madox was appointed Historiographer Royal. This office had been more or less invented for himself by its first holder, James Howell, in 1660, who urged that other states, such as France, had such an official ‘to transmit to posterity the actions and counsels of that state as also to vindicate them’; ‘historiographer’, in this context, seems to mean one who writes history in the sense of recording what will become history. The title brought with it an annual stipend of £200, but what duties were required of its holders was very vague. Madox continued with his medieval researches: in 1726 he published Firma Burgi, an essay on the history of England’s medieval boroughs, and intended to follow it with a history of the feudal system, but died in January 1727 before he had finished making revisions to it; what he had completed was published in 1736 as Baronia Anglica. The material he had collected in the course of his researches was bequeathed by his widow to the British Museum, and comprised ninety-three volumes.

This copy of Madox’s History of the Exchequer was given to Somerville by the family of Sir Edward Fry. Sir Edward was a distinguished lawyer and judge; his daughter, (Sara) Margery, entered Somerville in 1894 to read mathematics, but did not take a degree – her parents had told the then Principal, Miss Maitland, that, now that she had qualified for Somerville, they wished her to sit no more examinations. In 1899 she was appointed Librarian at Somerville, and with Miss Maitland was chiefly responsible for the building of the library, opened in 1904. Shortly after this she left to become warden of a hall of residence for women students at the University of Birmingham. After war work with the Friends’ War Victims Relief Committee, followed by active membership of the Howard League for Penal Reform and of the University Grants Committee, she was persuaded to return to Somerville as Principal in 1926. She was popular with the undergraduates – one of whom is reported to have said that they had heard she was an authority on food reform and prison reform, and these were the two things Somerville needed – but was out of sympathy with the university in general, which she found too entrenched in privilege and tradition. She resigned less than five years later, and returned to her work in support of reform, particularly of the penal system, a cause in which she remained active until her death in 1958. The portrait of her which hangs in Somerville’s Dining Hall was painted by her brother, the art historian and critic Roger Fry.