Exchequer (Latin scaccarium, “chessboard”), department of the British government charged with the receipt and disbursement of national revenues. It is administered by a cabinet-level chancellor of the Exchequer, who is the national finance minister.

Following the Norman conquest of England, the Exchequer was a part of the royal household, or Curia Regis. The body that corresponds to the present Exchequer was known as the Upper Exchequer (scaccarium superius) and comprised a number of high state officials who met for the transaction of revenue business. The officials sat at a table covered by a checkered cloth resembling a chessboard—hence the name Exchequer. They kept records of the collection and expenditure of the royal revenues and heard and disposed of related pleas. The Court of the Exchequer, a court hearing appeals from the common-law courts and subject to review by the House of Lords, later developed from the Upper Exchequer. In 1873 this court became a division of the High Court of Justice. The Lower Exchequer (scaccarium inferius), or Exchequer of Receipt, which was the ancestor of the present Treasury of the British government, was concerned with the actual receipt and disbursement of money.

In 1834 Parliament passed an Exchequer Act, directing that all government revenues be paid into the Bank of England and deposited there in an Exchequer, or Consolidated Fund, Account. The act also altered the constitution of the Lower Exchequer, replacing its leading officials with a comptroller general of the Exchequer and a small staff; the task of the comptroller general was to see that disbursements were made from the Exchequer, as before, on orders from the Treasury. The comptroller general's special function was to see that these disbursements were made in accordance with the decisions of Parliament and in the amounts it authorized. In 1866 Parliament merged the Exchequer with the Audit Department of the government to form the Exchequer and Audit Department; the reorganized Exchequer was subject to the control of a newly created official, the “Comptroller General of H.M.'s Exchequer and Auditor General of the Public Accounts.”