Chancellor of the Exchequer his duty to distribute as fairly as he can." The chancellor has considerable control over other departments as it is the Treasury which sets Departmental Expenditure Limits. The amount of power this gives to an individual chancellor depends on his personal forcefulness, his status within his party and his relationship with the prime minister. Gordon Brown, who became chancellor when Labour came into Government in 1997, had a large personal power base in the party. Perhaps as a result, Tony Blair chose to keep him in the same position throughout his ten years as prime minister; making Brown an unusually
Exchequer of Pleas was held in York, London and Northampton at various times. By the late 12th century it had taken to sitting in a fixed location (the one body of government in England to do so), and by the 1170s it was possible to distinguish the Exchequer's work from that of the other parts of the "curia regis", although the king of the time considered the Exchequer to simply be an element of the "curia"; indeed, it was referred to as the "Curia Regis ad Scaccarium", or King's Court at Exchequer. The word "Exchequer" derives from the chequered cloth laid on a