“ Experiments in Exchequer Procedure ” may suggest a series of unimportant financial developments, with only a remote interest for students of medieval history, and of no value to anyone else. But finance lies at the bottom of most medieval, as well as of most modern, historical problems: the complaints of the barons in 1215 are chiefly financial in origin, while the struggle over the Charters is the central point round which our enquiry is built. Moreover, in these years changes took place in exchequer procedure which laid the foundations for the new structure which gradually superseded the old in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—a structure different from its predecessor, though the old forms were maintained, a not uncommon feature in English administrative history.