When writing about the Chambre the Comptes of Paris, Olivier Matt”oni observed that such institutions were closely linked to ‘central power’. The fact that the Chambers had royal or princely courts as their main residences ensured that these auditing bodies became intimately linked to the rulers’ personal control over their territories. Through the annual ritual of the audit that was forced upon officials all over the country, the king possessed an ideal tool to imprint a mark of hierarchy on his subordinates. It showed the domination of the sovereign through the hands of his audit masters. Just as the king was the earthly representation of divine justice, the auditors took over this role in his absence when judging the accountable officials.
Even though a fixed location of the annual audit sessions near the princely or royal residence had certain advantages, it took a while before this became a reality on both sides of the North Sea. While in the later years of Count William III of Holland (r. 1304-1337) all but two audits took place in The Hague, his successors once again audited accounts all over the counties of Holland, Zeeland and Hainault. Taeke Jansma concluded that the main rationale for the location of these proceedings must simply have been the court’s (varying) place of residence. He linked this to a lack of decent audits: without a fixed location, Jansma argues, it would have been very difficult to use older accounts and archives in an effective way during the accounting process. Only after the definite arrival of the Burgundian dukes in 1432 did The Hague regain its exclusive prominence as the centre of the Holland auditing practices.
In Scotland, the Exchequer remained itinerant slightly longer. Just like in Holland, the audits at first followed the royal court. Craig Madden described the Scottish Exchequer as ‘rather primitive’ and an ‘extremely amateurish organisation’. It is true that this form of audit centred around the royal council was quite similar to practices that had already been ‘modernized’ for a century or more in the Burgundian territories. One of Madden’s main arguments is the fact that the Exchequer was far from permanent and for a long time continued to use changing venues. This is comparable to Jansma’s criticism on the audits organised by the Counts of Holland before the 1430’s. However, these flexible locations might also have had their advantages.
The principal reason for the Scottish Exchequer’s peripatetic nature was actually that the Scottish state functioned quite different from its neighbours. Alice Taylor stresses the intimacy between ‘central’ and ‘local’ government in high medieval Scotland. The audits were organised in various sheriffdoms spread out over the heartland of the kingdom (see map 1.1 ). The local sheriff, who paid for the costs of the session, functioned as auditor alongside important ecclesiastics and court officials such as the chamberlain and chancellor.
In the medieval period, accountants did not always appear before the Exchequer at set annual intervals. The time between audits varied from less than a year to a maximum of two years. The financial year was equally flexible, beginning at either Martinmas, Whitsun or Michaelmas. Not all accountants were expected to appear at the same time: usually they attended the sessions in their own district, either north or south of the Forth. Officers like the Justiciar conducted their ayres or circuits at irregular intervals, accounting directly after the completion of their work. Taylor suspects that this might have been true for many other royal offices as well.
In this way, the ‘local’ sheriff became a ‘central’ auditor when the court arrived in his locality. The auditors were intimately linked with the person of the king and his court, just like the sheriffs and major court officials, who all formed an interrelated elite that governed Scotland. The audit procedure was institutionalized and formalized, but not geographically centralized until well into the sixteenth century. For a long time, Scottish central government did not really possess a separate institutional form that existed autonomously from the local sheriffdoms. The travelling audit reflects this inherently localized way of ruling that was quite different from the way in which the kings of England or France ruled their realms in this period.
The Exchequer usually commenced just after the Whitsunday term, when most of the king’s rents were collected. This means that it took place during June, July or August. At least forty days before the audit, the sheriffs received a summons to appear before the auditors. They had to spread this news to all ‘officiaris, liegis and subdits that aw compt’ in their district. When local accountable officials such as the chamberlain of Kintyre and the feuar (tenant) of Glencairny arrived too late in 1507, the auditors had to convene an extra session in September, two weeks after the original Exchequer had closed. The ability to receive those officials who had to travel a long way at a later date shows the flexibility of the system rather than its inefficiently established procedures.
While most officials in central Scotland appeared at the audit on a regular basis, those on the periphery were more lax in their attendance. This might partially be explained by the travel costs; many smaller burghs paid Exchequer officials to represent them to avoid having to incur these expenses. The mountainous terrain and other geographical challenges might have made it much more difficult to control far-off Scottish royal officers. Jean-Baptiste Santamaria remarks how in equally rocky Savoy, the maximum distance one could travel per day was twenty kilometres. Therefore, the varying locations of the Exchequer might actually have made it easier to audit all the accounts of the realm on a more frequent basis.
In the Burgundian Netherlands, distances and long travels were much less problematic. This was helped by the existence of three and later four separate audit chambers in Lille, Brussels, The Hague, and eventually Arnhem, for various groups of territories. At times, some of these chambers were merged, both to save money and as part of the centralization schemes of Duke Charles the Bold (r. 1467-1477). In 1463, the Chamber of The Hague was moved to Brussels. That Chamber was itself merged with all the others to one central institution in Malines in 1473 (see map 1.2). However, in the ‘Great Privilege’ that the various States forced upon heiress Mary of Burgundy after the death of Charles the Bold, the old Chambers were reinstated. They clearly expressed a wish to have an auditing institution nearer at hand than was possible in far-away Malines.
In the period that the auditors from Holland had to travel to Brussels or Malines, various smaller accountants handed over their accounts to more important officials with a larger financial responsibility. This is a mechanism similar to that observed in Scotland. Centralization might have offered certain practical advantages, such as a complete archive and the availability of specialists from throughout the Burgundian Netherlands. The founding ordinance of the central Audit Chamb
er of Malines states that ‘it is not possible to conduct an audit quickly and coherently as the required exchange of information between de audit offices often leads to great delays, which in turn leads to high costs.’ Still, the symbolical argument in favour of an own Audit Chamber in Holland – and presumably the much increased travel costs – motivated the States to strive to undo this reform.
When Archduke Philip of Austria tried to repeat his grandfather Charles’ experiment of moving all Chambers to Malines in 1496, this unsurprisingly caused a whirlwind of protest from his subjects. A copy of a charter found between the folios of the Memorial Book of the Audit Chamber of Holland sheds light on the political counteractions of the States of Holland. It describes how two procureurs, Aelbrecht van Loo and Anthonis Janszoon, were delegated to protest against the course of events at 6 June 1496. The representatives appealed against the decision to merge the Audit Chambers because it was ‘against earlier charters and promises made by our merciful lord’.
The failed Burgundian centralization projects show that while bureaucratization of the audit process had certain advantages, it could also be taken too far. The representatives of the cities and nobility of Holland did not want to remove the audits too far out of their personal control. The old comital residence in The Hague possessed a certain aura of legitimacy that was lost when the institution moved away from the older ducal palaces to Malines.
In Scotland, the Exchequer did not face this problem for a long time. Thanks to the peripatetic nature of the court and the intimate connections between central institutions and local sheriffdoms, the king remained close to its proceedings as a source of legitimacy. Once the Exchequer settled in Edinburgh in the second half of the fifteenth century, flexibility such as that shown to later arriving local officials like the chamberlain of Kintyre proved to be a good alternative for decentralization, which might otherwise have been a necessity due to the difficult geographical circumstances faced by auditors and accountants alike.