“First Female Chancellor of the Exchequer in Eight-Hundred Years”
So said most of the UK media on Friday about Rachel Reeves’ appointment. But was there a woman in the role 800 years ago?
A friend of mine, Rebecca Menmuir, commented on Twitter/X that the reporting made it sound like there had been a woman as chancellor under King John or his son Henry III. Indeed, Henry III’s wife, Eleanor of Provence was Lord Chancellor [the legal office] in 1253, when she was also regent. Sadly, Rachel Reeves is not reviving a glorious lost medieval tradition of women in the financial offices of State (spoiler: there wasn’t one). She is doing something new in the modern era of Cabinet government.
But since my research is partially about women in the exchequer, I thought it would be interesting to write about the forgotten women who did indeed work in the English exchequer nearly seven-hundred years ago. Unlike today, some roles in the king’s government might be inherited. Usually, this was father-to-eldest-son, as you might expect. Sometimes though, women would inherit. Louise Wilkinson and others have shown that women might inherit (some) local government roles, such as that of sheriff. Nicholaa de la Haye and Ela de Longspée both will have sent their clerks to Westminster to return the sheriff’s accounts for Lincolnshire in the exchequer. Alice ‘the sheriff’ from the powerful de Clare family similarly gets a mention in 1205 in Dorset.
But that’s local government for you. What about central government? For starters, there’s much less inheritance floating around. Medieval kings did not like losing control of their officials and liked to appoint their own people, who were always men. But there were still a few hereditary posts. One of those was that of chief usher in the exchequer, seen here in the top left-hand corner of the illustration of the Irish exchequer at work, going to get the next individual to appear before the court.
The chief usher was a role that could be inherited, sold or shared. Around 1284, when Simon de Scaccario inherited the role from his father he was just a boy. The records note that he was to take up the role when he was an adult and in the meantime, it was granted temporarily to Richard Wood. But sadly, Simon died less than a year after he became chief usher. The role was then split between his three sisters, Maud Dagworth, Lora Peyforer and Beatrice Peverel. They each had official letters of appointment on 6 May 1292. How the sisters managed the job is unknown- possibly by taking the fees for themselves and paying someone else to do the work day-to-day. But notably, they seem to have stayed involved in some capacity until their deaths. Maud’s son John Dagworth inherited the office from his mother and then added the other shares over time from his aunts and cousins.
There were two other medieval cases where women inherited this job. Sisters Christiana Gaunt, Maud Croxton, and Beatrice Rayner inherited the chief ushership in 1369 from their nephew, but quickly seem to have sold the role to John Kevermond I and were never seemingly active in the exchequer. John Kevermond and his dynasty did involve women. His son’s widow, also Maud, inherited part of the job in her turn in 1435 as did his granddaughter Agnes Billesby. Agnes was involved at some level at the exchequer for over thirty-five years, until her death in 1470. One final interesting quirk though is that Agnes’ grandson John Billesby inherited the post of chief usher from her. Almost two centuries after Maud, Lora and Beatrice, Agnes Billesby had continued their tradition of women inheriting and carrying out in some way the role of chief usher of the Exchequer.
Further Reading
Louise J. Wilkinson, “Women as Sheriffs in Early Thirteenth Century England,” in English Government in the Thirteenth Century, ed. Adrian Jobson (Woodbridge, 2004): 111–124.
Wilkinson, “Women in English Local Government: Sheriffs, Castellans and Foresters” in The Growth of Royal Government Under Henry III, eds. David Crook and Louise J. Wilkinson (Woodbridge, 2015), 212–226.
J.C. Sainty, Officers of the Exchequer, List and Index Society Special Series 18 (1983).