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 1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 117 comptabilite * In them were copied out the transactions between the treasury and the various accounting officers, the baittis from the north, the senechals from the south, the royal officers charged with missions, the financial chiefs of the king's and queen's households, and a great variety of individuals or corporations who owed something to the Crown or to whom the Crown was itself indebted. Such method as the journals had was simply chronological. The transactions of each day were recorded under the heading of that day. But under the daily entries were con- fused receipts, expenses, and elaborate credit transactions by which the accountants were duly credited with sums that they had been authorized to expend and their amounts set off rigidly against the dues and taxes which they had collected. In English language the journal, though in form somewhat analogous to our jornalia garderobe, was both an issue roll and a receipt roll. The result is somewhat confusing, but the confusion is minimized by the precision with which the various entries are dis- tinguished into three main categories. All treasury receipts are set down as de such and such a person, while the issues are entered on the roll by the name of the recipient being recorded in the nominative. But the bulk of the journal is devoted to complicated operations of credit, where no cash changed hands, but where the accounting officer's receipts from taxation were balanced against the sums he had distributed by royal order from the amounts already collected by him. Here the formula is cepimus supra regem to chronicle credits and reddidimus as the corresponding phrase for the recording of debts. It follows that the cash transactions of the French treasury are even more clearly distinguished from its book- keeping operations than are those of the English exchequer. Indeed we have only recently been taught to understand how much this element of book credits entered into the exchequer accounts by reason of our system of advances on tally and the like. It follows that both the French treasury journals and the English issue and receipt rolls represent not merely cash transactions, but current accounts like those which a banker keeps for his clients, involving in each case a mere transference of balances. Besides the journals there were some six other types of limes du tresor accounts which supplemented their limitations. Among these were the extractus thesauri, the register of the campsor (exchanger or cashier), the ordinarium thesauri, the compotus thesauri, and the limes des recettes and limes des depenses. These latter two categories of accounts were, however, preliminary repertories, much corrected, differing in kind from the formal and orderly receipt rolls and issue rolls of our English exchequer. We may well congratulate ourselves on the superior abundance of our English records as compared with the very scanty fragments surviving of the seven sorts of treasury books enumerated by M. Viard. But French historians may well be credited with the good use that they are now making of fragmentary authorities. The blind guesswork and wild hypo- theses of which Colonel Borelli has justly complained represent a rapidly vanishing stage of French scholarship. The oldest Journaux du tresor extant go back to the days when the Temple at Paris was substantially the seat of the treasury. Next come 1 Recherches sur divers services publiquts ii. 104 f. (1904).