FINANCE

Q/F

FINANCE

The Poor Relief Act of 1601 (43 Eliz. I, c.2), which was the main basis of the old poor law, authorized the justices in Quarter Sessions to levy annual rates for the relief of poor prisoners in the King's Bench and Marshal-sea prisons (The meagre allowance thus provided was known as the 'county bread'.) and inmates of local hospitals and alms-houses. The proceeds were to be administered by two treasurers chosen by the justices of the peace and qualified for office either by being themselves justices or by being assessed to taxation at not less than £5 in lands or £10 in goods. By another Act of the same year (43 Eliz. I, c.3), rates could be levied for pensions to maimed soldiers and mariners, and two treasurers were similarly to be appointed, either justices or assessed at £10 in lands or £15 in goods. These two Acts were the beginning of county finance, and from the treasurers thus established the modern county treasurer is more or less directly descended. Local decisions added to their duties, and so did later statutes, such as those which enacted that sums raised for the support of houses of correction (7 Jas. I, c.4) and for the repair of county bridges (1 Anne, st.1, c.12) were to be paid to the county treasurers. Treasurerships for the various purposes described above were eventually merged in one office. In some counties the system of joint treasurers, or a treasurer for each division of the county, long continued, but Gloucestershire had a single treasurer in 1672, when the earliest extant Order Book begins, and although for a few years two treasurers were again appointed, all references from 1689 onwards are to 'The County Treasurer', or 'The Treasurer of the County Stock'.

The status of county treasurers was to some extent standardized by the Act of 12 Geo. II, c.29 (1738-39) which laid down general rating regulations. Treasurers or a single treasurer were to give fidelity bonds to Quarter Sessions and to render proper accounts with vouchers. They were to continue in office at the will of Quarter Sessions and to be paid an allowance not exceeding £20. Whereas in many counties a salaried treasurer was appointed early in the 18th Century, the nominal and honorary holder of the office continued in Gloucestershire to be a justice until as late as 1823, when something like a professional accountant was at last appointed in the person of Henry Hooper Wilton, a Gloucester solicitor and private banker. However, as early as Easter 1674 (Order Book No. 1) the justices agreed that an annual allowance of £6:13:4 should be paid to the county treasurer for persons employed by him to keep the accounts. By 1726, when the honorary county treasurer was Nathaniel Lye, J.P., archdeacon of Gloucester, the allowance had been raised to £10; from 1753 it was twelve guineas, plus a fee of five guineas for writing the abstract of accounts; in 1810 it was at last raised to the statutory maximum of £20. From 1741 the accounts are presented by a deputy treasurer, not a justice. The value of money having fallen heavily through the Napoleonic Wars, a general Act of 1815 made the salaries of county treasurers discretionary, but it was not until the appointment of H. H. Wilton as a salaried treasurer in 1823 that the pay was spectacularly raised from £20 to £120 a year. The deputy treasurer had, however, been granted in 1796 a yearly salary of £42 while the militia was embodied.

English