A procurator-fiscal is a procurator or court representative connected with the fisc or Treasury, and hence with the collection of fines or dues. In official records, a king's procurator-fiscal is referred to in 1457. Such an officer appears to have emerged first in the ecclesiastical courts. In the "St Andrew's Formulare" of 1514, there is reference to an episcopal appointment of a man as "procuratorem et advocatum nostrum fiscalem" in all the bishop's causes, spiritual, civil and criminal, with wide powers; it contains a reference also to power which attaches "ex officio procuratoris fiscalis". He was assigned the duty of seeking out and prosecuting delinquents and disobedient people. In the mid-16th century, Cardinal Beaton had two procurators-fiscal. At this stage, it appears clear that a procurator-fiscal was competent in civil, criminal and spiritual causes. These duties of looking for and then prosecuting people may be the forerunner of policing in Scotland, which was established very considerably later (in 1800). This may explain why, in Scotland, the police are under a legal obligation to comply with the directions of the procurator fiscal in matters concerning the investigation of crime, since the fiscal was himself once an investigator and so did the same job.