Probably few people know anything about The Office of the
King's Remembrancer, so that Sir G. A. Bonner, who, as Senior Master of the Supreme Court (King's Bench), has held the office since 1926, has done well to write its history and describe its duties (Butterworth, 21s.). The Remembrancer was attached to the Court of Exchequer in the twelfth century,
and it is still his duty to take charge of the Great Seal of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Moreover, he presides at the -Trial of the Pyx—the regular testing of our coinage—and assists at the nomination of sheriffs on November 12th. He receives from the City authorities yearly the two faggots cut with a hatchet and a billhook which from the thirteenth century onward have been rendered as quit-rent for some Shropshire land, and also the six horseshoes and sixty-one nails rendered for " The Forge " in the parish of St. Clement Danes. It seems that the same set of horseshoes and nails have been kept by the Remembrancer for five hundred years, so that the City Corporation should not be troubled to produce new ones. Sir George Boner's book illustrates the extreme antiquity of our administrative system and the tenacity of our old legal customs.
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