The escheator was the local official responsible for 'escheats', that is broadly speaking for upholding the king's rights as feudal lord, and for holding the majority of Inquisitions Post Mortems (a few were held by specially appointed commissioners). In the thirteenth century there had only been two escheators, with responsibility north and south of the river Trent, who supervised under-escheators working at the county level; by the second half of the fourteenth century, the escheator's bailiwick was established as the county or, in cases like Oxfordshire/Berkshire and Norfolk/Suffolk, pair of counties.
Despite relatively full documentation, including extensive series of escheators' accounts, the office of escheator has been neglected by historians: it has never been the subject of a full-length study, and existing accounts deal largely with the period before about 1350. [1. S. L. Waugh, The Lordship of England: Royal Wardships and Marriages in English Society and Politics, 1217-1327 (Princeton, 1988), esp. ch. 3; Stevenson, Escheator.] County-based studies of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century gentry give relatively little attention to the office, the escheator being considered a ‘relatively minor figure compared with the sheriff', ‘unlikely to be held by a man of real local stature', and furthermore an officer of declining importance over the fifteenth century. [2. C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society 1401-1499 (Cambridge, 1992), 265; Carpenter, ‘General Introduction', 8 (with full references). ] This neglect was surely encouraged by the omission of escheators' names in the IPM calendars, at least before the volumes for 1422 onwards. That implied, intentionally or otherwise, that the escheators were figures of little interest and with no bearing on the findings of the inquisitions themselves. At the time of writing the escheator even lacks an entry in Wikipedia.
Differences in social standing between the escheator and the sheriff, the most important of the crown's local officials, should not be exaggerated. Indeed the landed qualification for holding the office of escheator - £20 p.a. – was established in parliament in 1368, and only in 1371 did the Commons attempt to extend this to sheriffs. [3. PROME, Parl. May 1368, item 14 (Rot. Parl. ii. 296a); N. Saul, Knights and Esquires: The Gloucestershire Gentry in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1981), 136-7.] While it is generally true that escheators tended to be somewhat less wealthy and important than sheriffs, their ranks included some knights and a good number of future and indeed former sheriffs. The knights included Sir John Lestrange, who officiated at Thomas Robell's IPM, explored in a previous feature. He was a prominent member of Norfolk society, active as commissioner and justice of the peace, and also a prominent member of the royal household, where he was controller 1405-13. He was appointed escheator on 12 November 1403; as usual, the appointment was at the king's pleasure and lasted until an escheator was notified of his successor. Less usually, Strange held office for over two years before he was replaced, on 1 December 1405, by
