Historians have rivalled one another in their witness to the extraordinary interest and importance of the twelfth-century Exchequer. “The whole framework of society,” writes the Bishop of Oxford, “may be said to have passed annually under its review.... The regular action of the central power of the kingdom becomes known to us first in the proceedings of the Exchequer.” Gneist insists on “its paramount importance” while “finance is the centre of all government”; and in her brilliant monograph on Henry the Second, Mrs. Green asserts “that the study of the Exchequer is in effect the key to English history at this time.... It was the fount of English law and English freedom.” One can, therefore, understand Mr. Hall’s enthusiasm for “the most characteristic of all our national institutions ... the stock from which the several branches of the administration originally sprang.” Nor does this study appeal to us only on account of its importance. A glamour, picturesque, sentimental it may be, and yet dazzling in its splendour, surrounds an institution possessing so immemorial an antiquity that “Barons of the Exchequer” meet us alike in the days of our Norman kings and in those of Queen Victoria. Its “tellers,” at least coeval with the Conquest, were only finally abolished some sixty years ago, while the Chancellor of the Exchequer is believed to represent that “clericus cancellarii” whose seat at the Exchequer of the second Henry was close to that of the official ancestor of the present secretary to the Treasury. Yet, older than these, older even than the very name of the Exchequer, was its wondrous system of wooden tallies, that hieroglyphic method of account which carries us back to a distant past, but which, Sir John Lubbock has observed, was “actually in use at the Exchequer until the year 1824.” Of all survivals of an archaic age this was, probably, the most marvellous; it is not easy to realize that even in the present century English officials were keeping their accounts with pieces of wood which “had attained the dimensions, and presented somewhat the appearance, of one of the wooden swords of the South Sea Islanders.” It was an almost tragic feature in the passing of “the old order” that when these antique relics were finally committed to the flames, there perished, in the conflagration said to have been thus caused, that Palace of Parliament which, like themselves, had lingered on to witness the birth of the era of Reform.