Definition
An archaic Law French term for the Exchequer — the English royal treasury and the court associated with it. "Escheker" is an orthographic variant reflecting the Anglo-Norman French pronunciation and spelling conventions of medieval English legal texts. It denotes the same institution referred to in modern usage as the Court of Exchequer or, in its fiscal sense, the royal treasury responsible for receiving and auditing crown revenues.
Common Confusion
"Escheker" should not be confused with "escheat" (the reversion of property to the crown upon failure of heirs or attainder) despite the superficial resemblance in spelling and the shared association with the crown. The two terms are etymologically and institutionally distinct. "Escheat" derives from a different Old French root (escheoir, to fall to) and refers to a specific property doctrine, not to the treasury or its court. The visual proximity of "escheker" and "escheat" in historical documents can mislead a researcher scanning unfamiliar Law French text.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval and early modern English legal sources will encounter "escheker" as a variant spelling of "exchequer" in primary texts, particularly in Law French materials predating the standardization of legal spelling. The term signals that a document or passage is drawn from an older stratum of the common law corpus — likely thirteenth- or fourteenth-century in origin — where Anglo-Norman orthography governed legal drafting.
The practical trap is spelling variation. Searches for "exchequer" in digitized historical sources will not return "escheker," and vice versa. Researchers consulting Britton, Bracton-era materials, or early plea rolls must account for this divergence. Related spellings across the corpus may include "eschequier," "eschiquier," and "escheker" as near-equivalents, all rendering the same institutional referent.
The phrase preserved in Burrill — "envoyes a nostre escheker" (sent to our exchequer) — is characteristic of royal writs and orders directing parties or records to the Exchequer for audit or adjudication. Encountering this construction in a primary source indicates a command or reference flowing from the crown to its fiscal-judicial tribunal, not merely an administrative notation.
Because the Exchequer functioned as both a revenue-collection body and a court of law, context matters when the term appears: a researcher must determine whether the reference is to the treasury function (receipt and accounting of crown revenues) or to the judicial function (the Court of Exchequer, which heard equity and common law cases, particularly revenue disputes). "Escheker" in medieval sources almost always appears in the fiscal or administrative command context rather than in reference to the court's adjudicative role, which became more prominent in later centuries.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole shelf source for this entry and treats "escheker" economically: it identifies the term as Law French for "Exchequer" and anchors it with a citation to Britton, chapter 26. Britton (c. 1290) is one of the foundational treatises of early English common law, written in Law French and attributed — likely fictively — to Edward I. The citation confirms the term's genuine medieval provenance and its institutional meaning as the crown's financial tribunal.
Burrill does not elaborate on the Exchequer itself under this headword, treating "escheker" as a variant entry that directs the reader to the parent institution. This is consistent with Burrill's general method of capturing Law French and Latin variants as discrete entries while reserving substantive treatment for the anglicized form. Historical dictionaries uniformly agree on the identification: "escheker" is the exchequer, nothing more and nothing less. There is no divergence among sources on this point, nor any recorded ambiguity in the medieval sources where the term appears.
What historical dictionaries do not address — and where modern researchers must supply their own framework — is the dual nature of the Exchequer as both treasury and court, a distinction that becomes legally consequential by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but is largely collapsed in the thirteenth-century usage this term reflects.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Court of Exchequer; Exchequer (Royal Treasury); Law French in the Common Law Tradition