A special office, that of sub-commissioner, to superintend the arranging, repairing, and binding of records, was created for him, with a salary of £500 a year, besides retaining his two keeperships.
His library, rich in topography and collections of reports and searches made by him as a legal antiquary during a period of fifty years, was sold by Evans in the following July.
In 1813, he engaged, in conjunction with Bulkeley Bandinel and Sir Henry Ellis, to prepare a new edition of William Dugdale's Monasticon, which extended to six volumes, the first of which appeared in 1817, the last in 1830.
Caley was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in March 1786, and contributed a memoir "On the Origin of the Jews in England" to the eighth volume of the Archæologia (pp.
389–405) His other contributions were: in 1789 an extract from a manuscript in the Augmentation Office relative to a wardrobe account of Henry VIII (ix.
Applicants for historical documents had to apply at Caley's private house, a costly and unreliable process.