Definition
Icus Pellis was a historical officer of the English Exchequer responsible for maintaining two formal parchment rolls that recorded the financial transactions of the Crown. The officer entered all moneys received from the tellers onto a roll called the Pellis receptorum and recorded all payments and disbursements on a separate roll called the Pellis exituum. The title derives from the Latin for the parchment (pellis, meaning skin or hide) on which these records were inscribed. The office persisted long after parchment rolls gave way to other record-keeping methods and was not formally abolished until 1834.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter this term almost exclusively in historical sources dealing with the English Exchequer, medieval and early modern Crown finance, or the administrative history of English government. Its practical relevance is archival: the Pellis receptorum and Pellis exituum were formal instruments of record, and documents referencing them may surface in research touching on royal revenue, land grants, fines, amercements, or payments to the Crown in the period before modern public accounting was established.
The key trap for researchers is terminological drift. Because the physical medium (parchment rolls) eventually became obsolete while the office survived, later references to the Icus Pellis or the Clerk of the Pells may appear in contexts where no actual parchment rolls were being produced. The functional role of the officer — maintaining the official ledger of receipts and disbursements — remained constant even as the material form of those records changed. Do not assume that the absence of parchment rolls in a given period means the office or its records are absent from the historical corpus.
The abolition in 1834 connects this term to the broader wave of English administrative reform in that era, when numerous sinecure and vestigial Crown offices were dissolved. Researchers working on the Reform Acts, the reorganization of the Exchequer, or the history of public accounts will find the Icus Pellis appearing in that context as one of many offices swept away by rationalization efforts.
The Pellis rolls themselves, where they survive, are primary sources for historians of royal finance and may be relevant to researchers tracing the history of a particular estate, debt, or financial obligation to the Crown.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the sole entry among the Law Mind shelf sources, and it is brief. Bouvier describes the officer's dual function — maintaining the Pellis receptorum for receipts and the Pellis exituum for payments — and notes that the title and office outlasted the parchment medium by a considerable period before abolition in 1834. Bouvier cites Byrne as authority, a reference to a treatise on legal glossary or Exchequer practice.
No other shelf source carries an entry for this term, which reflects both its specialized historical character and its purely English provenance. Terms of this kind — defining officers of the medieval and early modern English fiscal administration — are generally absent from American legal dictionaries, as the Exchequer structure had no direct counterpart in the United States. Researchers should not expect to find treatment of this term in standard American legal references and should look instead to English administrative history, histories of the Exchequer such as those by Madox, and archival guides to Exchequer records held at the National Archives (Kew).
Jurisdictional Note
This term is exclusively English in origin and application. It has no equivalent in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. Research use is confined to English legal and administrative history prior to 1834.