Living standards of the small trader class in fifteenth-century Canterbury: evidence of escheators’ records

Abstract

The escheator was an important royal official who, by the fifteenth century, had accumulated a wide range of responsibilities. Escheators were accountable to the exchequer, and each official was responsible for ‘escheats’ arising to the crown within a county or pair of counties, called an ‘escheatry’. One of the escheator’s roles was to account for goods and chattels forfeited to the crown by felons, fugitives and outlaws: people who had been convicted or indicted of felonies (including suicides); who had fled following an accusation of felony; or who had been outlawed following repeated failure to appear in court to answer a charge of felony, or to respond to a civil suit.