Exchequer: King's Remembrancer: Depositions taken by Commission

This series contains surviving depositions relating to cases heard on the King's Remembrancer's side of the Exchequer, taken by commissioners appointed by the Court of Exchequer, with associated documents. Local commissioners were appointed only when the witness to be examined lived outside a ten mile radius of London. The series includes both equity and revenue cases.

Depositions, or statements of witnesses, were answers to a pre-agreed set of questions known as interrogatories. The taking of these proofs followed the initial proceedings of the case in which the plaintiff and defendant set out the matter in dispute by the bill and answer process.

Disputes covered a wide range of topics: title, tithe and testamentary disputes; manorial customs and disputes over common lands; mining and minerals; commercial ventures both on land and at sea, including fraudulent insurance claims; and a wide spectrum of revenue matters of direct interest to the Crown, including customs evasion and maladministration by Crown officials.

Documents in this series include commissions, by which individuals were empowered to take evidence on oath from deponents. From 1726 commissioners themselves swore oaths of secrecy and impartiality. Certificates on how they had fulfilled the terms of their commission were sometimes also returned, which might highlight the degree of intimidation or obstruction that one or other party to the case imposed. Interrogatories were prepared in advance and agreed by the court. Finally, depositions record the name, residence, age and occupation of the deponent, as well as their evidence. The names of over 80,000 deponents, up to 1685, were added in 2023 from the work of Dr Alice Whiteoak, using the unpublished listing of the Genealogical Co-operative Research Club, 1916-1918: a later listing is available at the Society of Genealogists.

Most disputes in this series arose within England and Wales, but some cases also relate to Ireland, Europe, and the Americas.

Original finding aids are in E 501

The commission, interrogatories and depositions in each suit are joined together on a string and the resulting file has been labelled with the county, regnal year and law term in which the depositions were returned to the court. The individual suit files within each law term are then numbered from 1 onwards. The files are not necessarily complete.

A chronological calendar of depositions, 1760-1841, may be found in E 501

Fragment transferred to

LR 7/154

Topics

Common land

Manors

Litigation

Trade and commerce

Tithes

Europe and Russia

Ireland

Wills and probate