Sixty-one nails go onto a chequered cloth, one at a time, and a judge in a full wig and a black tricorn hat watches them land. Six horseshoes follow, each big enough to look like a mistake. When the count is done he says two words: "Good number." Then the City of London has paid its rent.
This is the Ceremony of Quit Rents, held each October in a courtroom of the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand. The judge is the King's Remembrancer, an office created under Henry II to keep track of what was owed to the Crown and now held by the Senior Master of the King's Bench Division. The cloth is the point. It is the chequered table that gave the Exchequer its name, and for the length of the ceremony the old Court of Exchequer sits again.
Two rents, one receipt
The horseshoes pay for a forge. The land, in Tweezer's Alley just south of St Clement Danes, was let to a blacksmith, and the Exchequer's Great Roll has carried the rent since 1235. The usual first tenant named is Walter le Brun, a farrier on the Strand. Brewer's Victorian dictionary of phrase put his grant in 1251 instead, which is a fair reminder that even old dates have arguments. Either way, the rent was six horseshoes and 61 nails, and the City, which took over the tenancy long ago, pays exactly that.
The second rent is older. A tract of Shropshire known as The Moors, somewhere south of Bridgnorth, is recorded in 1211. Its rent was two knives, one blunt and one sharp. Today the City's Comptroller and City Solicitor hand over a billhook and a hatchet, and the Remembrancer tests them in the manner of a medieval tally. A hazel rod is bent over the billhook so that it takes a mark, then split with the hatchet, a notched stick cut in two so each side keeps half. The verdict is "Good service."
The newly elected sheriffs of the City are presented at the same sitting. The National Archives' Presentation Rolls, the official record of that admission, begin noting the hatchet, the bill hook, the six horseshoes and the 61 nails in 1858. The rents themselves were centuries old by then.
What is lore and what is record
The horseshoes have a story attached. They are said to date from 1361 and to have been made for big tournament or war horses, which would make them some of the oldest horseshoes anywhere. Heritage writers repeat the claim; none of them shows the evidence, so treat it as lore.
The record is plainer and somehow stranger. It is the same set of horseshoes and nails every year. After the ceremony they go to the Remembrancer's office, and the Crown lends them back to the City so that the City can pay them again the following October.
Nobody knows exactly where The Moors were. The forge is long gone. The rent survives because the Exchequer never stopped writing it down, and because somebody, every autumn, still counts the nails.