It has become almost axiomatic among historians that the start of King John's reign in 1199 saw the introduction of the English chancery rolls. In other words, the rolls began at the point from which they actually survive in The National Archives at Kew. When Nicholas Vincent entitled a recent paper ‘Why 1199? Bureaucracy and Enrolment under John and his Contemporaries’, his question was not, as it might have been, ‘why all this misplaced fuss about 1199?’, but, as he put it, ‘why should it have been in 1199 that the record keeping of the royal chancery took the quantum leap into enrolment?’ Vincent was in good company, for the assumption underlying his question had been shared by historians as diverse and distinguished as Duffus Hardy, Maxwell-Lyte, Galbraith, Painter, Cheney, Chaplais and Clanchy, a veritable galaxy of the good and the great. One hesitates to cite Robert Bartlett for a mere summary of current orthodoxies but that, in effect, is what he provides in his new Oxford history of England. In a discussion of what he calls ‘The Record Revolution’, he observes that ‘From John's reign the Chancery adopted the system of enrolling copies of the charters and letters that it issued.’ ‘The Chancellor at the time of the innovation’, Bartlett continues, ‘was Hubert Walter, archbishop of Canterbury, and there is every reason to assume that he was personally responsible.’