FITZ NEAL or FITZ NIGEL, RICHARD (d. 1198), treasurer of Henry II. and Richard I. of England, and bishop of London. His great uncle Roger, bishop of Salisbury, had held the office of treasurer under Henry I. and his father Nigel, under Henry I. and Stephen. Richard, who was born before his father's elevation to the episcopate (1133), succeeded to the office of treasurer in 1158, and held it continuously for 4o years. His name appears in the lists of itinerant justices for 1179 and but these are the only occasions on which he exercised that office. Before 1184 he became dean of Lincoln and in 1189 Bishop of London.
Richard Fitz Neal's De necessariis observantiis Scaccarii dia logus, commonly called the Dialogus de Scaccario, is of unique interest to the historian. It is an account, in two books, of the procedure followed by the exchequer in the author's time, a pro cedure which was largely the creation of his own family. When read in connection with the Pipe Rolls the Dialogus furnishes a most faithful and detailed picture of English fiscal arrangements under Henry II. The speakers in the dialogue are Richard him self and an anonymous pupil. The date of the conversation is given in the prologue as 1176-77. This probably marks the date at which the book was begun; it was not completed before I178 or 1179. Soon after the author's death we find it already recog nized as the standard manual for exchequer officials. It was frequently transcribed and has been used by English antiqua rians of every period. Hence it is the more necessary to insist that the historical statements which the treatise contains are sometimes demonstrably erroneous; the author appears to have relied excessively upon oral tradition. Richard Fitz Neal also compiled in his earlier years a register or chronicle of contem porary affairs, arranged in three parallel columns. This was pre served in the exchequer at the time when he wrote the Dialogus, but has since disappeared. Stubbs' conjectural identification of this Liber tricolumnis with the first part of the Gesta Henrici (formerly attributed to Benedictus Abbas) is now abandoned as untenable.
See Madox's edition in his History of the Exchequer (1769) ; and that of A. Hughes, C. G. Crump and C. Johnson (Oxford, 1902). F. Liebermann's Einleitung in den Dialogus de Scaccario (Gottingen, i875) contains the fullest account of the author.