Definition
Camera Scaccarii is the Latin name for the Exchequer Chamber, a term used in early English legal records and historical texts to denote the court or administrative chamber associated with the Court of Exchequer. The phrase translates literally as "chamber of the exchequer." It appears principally in medieval and early modern legal sources and is now encountered only in historical legal research. The term is not in active use in any modern jurisdiction.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in pre-modern English legal records — plea rolls, writs, treatises, and year books — may encounter Camera Scaccarii as a procedural or institutional designation before the standardized English label "Exchequer Chamber" became dominant. The Latin form persisted longer in formal records than in practitioner literature. Because "Exchequer Chamber" itself changed meaning across centuries — referring at different periods to an informal consultative assembly of judges, a statutory appellate court created in 1357, and later a reconstituted appellate court established in 1830 — researchers must be careful not to assume that every instance of Camera Scaccarii points to the same institution. The appellate Exchequer Chamber of the nineteenth century and the medieval Camera Scaccarii occupy different positions in the English judicial hierarchy. Corpus searches on the Latin form will tend to surface the earlier, pre-statutory institution; searches on the English form will cast a wider and chronologically later net. Treat the two labels as overlapping but not interchangeable across time.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three shelf sources agree on the core identification: Camera Scaccarii is the old Latin name for the Exchequer Chamber, and all three redirect the reader to that entry for substantive treatment. Black's and Burrill's are consistent and clean. The Rapalje & Lawrence entry as preserved contains what appears to be a transcription artifact ("confederated together to defend the country of") that makes no legal sense in context and should be disregarded; the operative content of that entry matches the other two sources. None of the historical dictionaries elaborate on the institutional history within this entry, treating Camera Scaccarii purely as a cross-reference term. That restraint is appropriate given the term's function as a Latin variant rather than a distinct legal concept, but it means researchers must follow through to the Exchequer Chamber entries in those same dictionaries for substantive content.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Exchequer Chamber; Court of Exchequer