Definition
Liber Ruber Scaccarii (Law Latin: "Red Book of the Exchequer") is a medieval English administrative record compiled under the authority of the Court of Exchequer. The Red Book of the Exchequer was a large manuscript compilation assembled in the late thirteenth century, attributed principally to Alexander de Swereford, a clerk of the Exchequer. It gathered together feudal surveys, returns of knights' fees, records of homage and fealty, writs, precedents, and other administrative materials of significance to the Exchequer's fiscal and jurisdictional functions. The manuscript survives and was edited and published by the Rolls Series in the nineteenth century.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears in historical legal dictionaries almost exclusively as a cross-reference pointer, not as a substantive legal concept. Researchers encountering the Latin form in footnotes, older treatises, or medieval legal sources should recognize it as a direct equivalent to "Red Book of the Exchequer" — the two forms are interchangeable in the secondary literature, but older texts sometimes use the Latin without explanation.
The primary research significance of the Red Book itself lies in its value as a feudal and fiscal source. It contains the Testa de Nevill (returns of knights' fees and feudal tenure from the reigns of Henry III and Edward I), making it an essential reference for questions of tenure, knight service, and the feudal incidents that underpinned much of medieval English property and inheritance law. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus on topics such as tenure, scutage, wardship, or the jurisdiction of the Exchequer will find the Red Book cited as background authority in treatises on English legal history from Reeves onward.
A critical caution: the Red Book was the subject of substantial scholarly controversy following its Rolls Series publication in 1896. The editor, Hubert Hall, was accused by John Horace Round of significant errors, interpolations, and misattributions in the edition. Researchers relying on the printed Rolls Series text should be aware that it is not uniformly reliable, and the editorial controversies affected how citations to the Red Book's contents were received in late nineteenth and early twentieth century legal historiography. Citations to the Red Book in that period sometimes carry embedded disputes about authenticity and content that are invisible from the citation alone.
The Reeves reference in both Black's and Burrill's points to John Reeves's History of the English Law, a foundational work in the Law Mind corpus. Reeves cites the Red Book in his account of Exchequer records and feudal administration, situating it within the broader development of English fiscal institutions.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's and Burrill's entries are functionally identical: both provide the English translation and cite to the same page of Reeves's History of the English Law. Neither entry elaborates on the manuscript's contents or significance. Burrill adds a cross-reference to a separate "Red Book" entry, which may provide additional navigational utility within that dictionary. Neither source engages with the manuscript's complex editorial history or its contents beyond bare identification.
The entries reflect the standard treatment of such terms in nineteenth-century legal dictionaries — Latin administrative terms from medieval English sources were glossed with English equivalents and a single authority citation, leaving substantive discussion to the historical treatises themselves. Researchers should not expect the dictionary entries to serve as anything more than translation aids pointing toward Reeves.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Court of Exchequer; Feudal Tenure; Testa de Nevill