In 1158 or 1159 Nigel, Bishop of Ely, paid Henry II to appoint his natural son, Richard FitzNeal, as the king's treasurer.
[1][2] Richard was the great nephew of Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, who had organized the exchequer under Henry I, when it was separated from the Chamberlain's office in the king's household.
The book, Dialogue Concerning the Exchequer (Dialogus de Scaccari), is the first administrative treatise of the Middle Ages, a unique source of information on royal finances and the methods of collecting them in the twelfth century.
Its preface instructs the novice in governance that it is not the function of the exchequer officials to decide on the merit of royal policy, merely to execute it.
[citation needed] He wrote at the end of the work that he had "laid my axe to the virgin and rough wood and cut for the royal buildings' timber that a more skilled builder may smooth with his adze".