Chancery: Memorial Rolls of Annuities

C 63

1813-1854

These rolls contain abstracts of deeds granting annuities or rent charges, that is legally binding payments made annually from one party to another, the rent charges drawing on income from real estate.

The documents include the following information: the date of the instrument creating the annuity; the nature of the instrument; the names of the parties; the names of the witnesses and their 'description'; the names of persons receiving the benefit of the annuity; names of persons for whose lives the annuity is granted; the 'consideration' (that is, the capital invested) and how paid; and the amount of the annuity.

Many of the annuities, themselves so often in effect a penalty for debt to be redeemed by spreading the payment of it year by year, entail additional penalties, in the form of securities exacted from the parties making the grants. The crudest is the 'bond in penalty', which stipulates a sum to be paid by the guarantor if he fails to pay the annuity.

Public Record(s)

English

136 roll(s)

Topics

Pay and pensions

Debt

Banking

The records in this series were formerly housed in the Rolls Chapel.

The abstracts of deeds contained in this series were required to be enrolled by the clerks of the Enrolment Office in Chancery under a statute of 1813. This replaced another of 1776, which required similar enrolments to be made, in full, on the close rolls. The 1813 act was repealed in 1854, and registration of annuities passed in turn to the Common Pleas and the Central Office of the Supreme Court of Judicature, before being vested after 1900 in the Land Registry.