\

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

DIVISION OF ECONOMICS AND HISTORY John Bates Clark, LL.D., Director

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE WORLD WAR

(BRITISH SERIES) JAMES T. SHOTWELL, Pn.D.

GENERAL EDITOR

WITH THE COLLABORATION OF THE BRITISH EDITORIAL BOARD

OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTOKY OF THE WOULD WAE

BRITISH EDITORIAL BOARD

Sir William H. Beveridge, K.C.B., M.A., B.C.L. (Chairman).

H. W. C. Davis, C.B.E., M.A.

Sir Edward C. K. Gonner, K.B.E., M.A., Litt.D.

F. W. Hirst, Esq.

Thomas Jones, M.A.

J. M. Keynes, C.B., M.A.

Professor W. R. Scott, D.Phil., Litt.D., LL.D., F.B.A.

Professor J. T. Shotwell, Ph.D. (ex officio).

For List of other Editors and the plan of the Series see end of this volume.

A MANUAL OF

ARCHIVE ADMINISTRATION

INCLUDING THE PROBLEMS OF

WAR ARCHIVES AND ARCHIVE MAKING

BY

HILARY JENEINSON, M.A., F.S.A.

SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF PEMBROKE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

F. W. MAITLAND MEMORIAL LECTURER IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

LECTURER ON PALAEOGRAPHY AND ARCHIVES IN THE

UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

OXFORD : AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

London, Edinburgh, New York, Toronto, Melbourne and Bombay

HUMPHREY MILFORD

1922

CD

950

PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY

EDITOR'S PEEFACE

IN the autumn of 1914 when the scientific study of the effects of war upon modern life passed suddenly from theory to history, the Division of Economics and History of the Carnegie Endow- ment for International Peace proposed to adjust the programme of its researches to the new and altered problems which the War presented. The existing programme, which had been prepared as the result of a conference of economists held at Berne in 1911, and which dealt with the facts then at hand, had just begun to show the quality of its contributions ; but for many reasons it could no longer be followed out. A plan was therefore drawn up at the request of the Director of the Division, in which it was proposed by means of an historical survey, to attempt to measure the economic cost of the War and the displacement which it was causing in the processes of civilization. Such an * Economic and Social History of the World War ', it was felt, if undertaken by men of judicial temper and adequate training, might ultimately, by reason of its scientific obligations to truth, furnish data for the forming of sound public opinion, and thus contribute fundamentally toward the aims of an institution dedicated to the cause of international peace.

The need for such an analysis, conceived and executed in the spirit of historical research, was increasingly obvious as the War developed, releasing complex forces of national life not only for the vast process of destruction but also for the stimulation of new capacities for production. This new economic activity, which under normal conditions of peace might have been a gain to society, and the surprising capacity exhibited by the belligerent nations for enduring long and increasing loss — often while pre- senting the outward semblance of new prosperity — made necessary a reconsideration of the whole field of war economics. A double obligation was therefore placed upon the Division of Economics and History. It was obliged to concentrate its work upon the

vi EDITOR'S PREFACE

problem thus presented, and to study it as a whole ; in other words, to apply to it the tests and disciplines of history. Just as the War itself was a single event, though penetrating by seem- ingly unconnected ways to the remotest parts of the world, so the analysis of it must be developed according to a plan at once all embracing and yet adjustable to the practical limits of the available data.

During the actual progress of the War, however, the execution of this plan for a scientific and objective study of war economics proved impossible in any large and authoritative way. Incidental studies and surveys of portions of the field could be made and were made under the direction of the Division, but it was impossible to undertake a general history for obvious reasons. In the first place, an authoritative statement of the resources of belligerents bore directly on the conduct of armies in the field. The result was to remove as far as possible from scrutiny those dat§, of the economic life of the countries at war which would ordinarily, in time of peace, be readily available for investigation. In addition to this difficulty of consulting documents, collaborators competent to deal with them were for the most part called into national service in the belligerent countries and so were unavailable for research. The plan for a war history was therefore postponed until condi- tions should arise which would make possible not only access to essential documents but also the co-operation of economists, historians, and men of affairs in the nations chiefly concerned, whose joint work would not be misunderstood either in purpose or in content.

Upon the termination of the War the Endowment once more took up the original plan, and it was found with but slight modification to be applicable to the situation. Work was begun in the summer and autumn of 1919. In the first place a final conference of the Advisory Board of Economists of the Division of Economics and History was held in Paris, which limited itself to planning a series of short preliminary surveys of special fields. Since, however, the purely preliminary character of such studies was further emphasized by the fact that they were

EDITOR'S PREFACE vii

directed more especially towards those problems which were then fronting Europe as questions of urgency, it was considered best not to treat them as part of the general survey but rather as of contemporary value in the period of war settlement. It was clear that not only could no general programme be laid down a priori by this conference as a whole, but that a new and more highly specialized research organization than that already existing would be needed to undertake the Economic and Social History of the War, one based more upon national grounds in the first instance and less upon purely international co-operation. Until the facts of national history could be ascertained, it would be impossible to proceed with comparative analysis ; and the different national histories were themselves of almost baffling intricacy and variety. Consequently the former European Committee of Research was dissolved, and in its place it was decided to erect an Editorial Board in each of the larger countries and to nominate special editors in the smaller ones, who should concentrate, for the present at least, upon their own economic and social war history.

The nomination of these boards by the General Editor was the first step taken in every country where the work has begun. And if any justification was needed for the plan of the Endowment, it at once may be found in the lists of those, distinguished in scholarship or in public affairs, who have accepted the responsi- bility of editorship. This responsibility is by no means light, involving, as it does, the adaptation of the general editorial plan to the varying demands of national circumstances or methods of work ; and the measure of success attained is due to the generous and earnest co-operation of those in charge in each country.

Once the editorial organization was established there could be little doubt as to the first step which should be taken in each instance toward the actual preparation of the history. Without documents there can be no history. The essential records of the War, local as well as central, have therefore to be preserved and to be made available for research in so far as is compatible with public interest. But this archival task is a very great one, belonging of right to the governments and other owners of historical sources

viii EDITOR'S PREFACE

and not to the historian or economist who proposes to use them. It is an obligation of ownership ; for all such documents are public trust. The collaborators on this section of the war history, there- fore, working within their own field as researchers, could only survey the situation as they found it and report their findings in the form of guides or manuals ; and perhaps, by stimulating a comparison of methods, help to further the adoption of those found to be most practical. In every country, therefore, this was the point of departure for actual work ; although special mono- graphs have not been written in every instance.

This first stage of the work upon the war history, dealing with little more than the externals of archives, seemed for a while to exhaust the possibilities of research. And had the plan of the history been limited to research based upon official documents, little more could have been done, for once documents have been labelled ' secret ' few government officials can" be found with sufficient courage or initiative to break open the seal. Thus vast masses of source material essential for the historian were effec- tively placed beyond his reach, although much of it was quite harmless from any point of view. While war conditions thus continued to hamper research, and were likely to do so for many years to come, some alternative had to be found.

Fortunately such an alternative was at hand in the narrative, amply supported by documentary evidence, of those who had played some part in the conduct of affairs during the war, or who, as close observers in privileged positions, were able to record from first or at least second-hand knowledge the economic history of different phases of the great war, and of its effect upon society. Thus a series of monographs was planned consisting for the most part of unofficial yet authoritative statements, descriptive or historical, which may best be described as about half-way between memoirs and blue-books. These monographs make up the main body of the work assigned so far. They are not limited to con- temporary, war-time studies ; for the economic history of the war must deal with a longer period than that of the actual fighting. It must cover the years of ' deflation ' as well, at least sufficiently

EDITOR'S PREFACE ix

to secure some fairer measure of the economic displacement than is possible in purely contemporary judgments.

With this phase of the work, the editorial problems assumed a new aspect. The series of monographs had to be planned primarily with regard to the availability of contributors, rather than of source material as in the case of most histories ; for the contributors themselves controlled the sources. This in turn involved a new attitude towards those two ideals which historians have sought to emphasize, consistency and objectivity. In order to bring out the chief contribution of each writer it was impossible to keep within narrowly logical outlines ; facts would have to be repeated in different settings and seen from different angles, and sections included which do not lie within the strict limits of history ; and absolute objectivity could not be obtained in every part. Under the stress of controversy or apology, partial views would here and there find their expression. But these views are in some instances an intrinsic part of the history itself, contemporary measurements of facts as significant as the facts with which they deal. Moreover, the work as a whole is planned to furnish its own corrective; and where it does not, others will.

In addition to this monographic treatment of source material, a number of studies by specialists is already in preparation, dealing with technical or limited subjects, historical or statistical. These monographs also partake to some extent of the nature of first-hand material, registering as they do the data of history close enough to the source to permit verification in ways impossible later. But they also belong to that constructive process by which history passes from analysis to synthesis. The process is a long and difficult one, however, and work upon it has only just begun. To quote an apt characterization, in the first stages of a history like this one is only ' picking cotton '. The tangled threads of events have still to be woven into the pattern of history ; and for this creative and constructive work different plans and organiza- tions may be needed.

In a work which is the product of so complex and varied co-operation as this, it is impossible to indicate in any but

1569*40 A 3

x EDITOR'S PREFACE

a most general way the apportionment of responsibility of editors and authors for the contents of the different monographs. For the plan of the History as a whole and its effective execution the General Editor is responsible ; but the arrangement of the detailed programmes of study has been largely the work of the different Editorial Boards and divisional Editors, who have also read the manuscripts prepared under their direction. The acceptance of a monograph in this series, however, does not commit the editors to the opinions or conclusions of the authors. Like other editors, they are asked to vouch for the scientific merit, the appropriate- ness and usefulness of the volumes admitted to the series ; but the authors are naturally free to make their individual contribu- tions in their own way. In like manner the publication of the monographs does not commit the Endowment to agreement with any specific conclusions which may be expressed therein. The responsibility of the Endowment is to History itself — an obligation not to avoid but to secure and preserve variant narra- tives and points of view, in so far as they are essential for the understanding of the War as a whole.

J. T. S.

PREFACE

THE object and scope of this book are explained in the Introduction (Part I, especially §§ 5 and 8 to 11). It was originally intended to put forward chiefly a scheme for the Management of War Archives with some special reflections relating to the making of Archives in the future. The problem, however, when one comes to consider it in detail, does not work out exactly as might have been anticipated. The first question that suggests itself is — ' Do we wish War Archives and the Archives of the Future to possess the same Character- istics as those of the Past ? ' If the answer is ' yes ' (and I can see no other) a considerable part of that body of things necessary for every War Archivist to know which we wish to lay down must be the ordinary rules governing the administration of ordinary Archives. But here arises an initial difficulty : there is no complete treatise on this subject in the English Language ; * or indeed in any language, for the well-known Treatise of Muller, Feith, and Fruin relates only to questions of Classifica- tion and Arrangement ; and, moreover, there are certain aspects of that and other divisions of Archive Economy upon which I have ventured to think that an English Archivist might have a new point of view to suggest; notably in the matter of custody.2

Even the problems which seem at first to be peculiar to War Archives, or at least to Archives of the present day, turn out upon examination to be no more than intensifications of the old ones.3 They actually cannot, in most cases, be properly understood except by an Archivist trained in the history of

1 See Part I, § 6. 2 See Part I, § 2 (/).

3 In talking to American Archivists I have been particularly struck by the aptness with which their present-day problems may be illustrated from the history of Archives in England in the first half of the nineteenth century.

xii PREFACE

Archives of the past : just as no one can have a really sound knowledge of Elizabethan handwritings who has not come to them through the medieval ones out of which they were deve- loped. There is, I believe, only one series of modern Archive questions which could not be answered — and answered best — by a properly trained Archivist drawing directly upon his experience with ancient collections : that is the series of questions referring to the relative positions of the Archivist and the Maker of Archives, and to Archive-making generally ; in which cases a new point of view is possible because we can here, so to speak, get at the Archives before they are made.

; Under these circumstances, however much I might desire to dwell upon the extreme importance of War Archives, I have found it necessary, in order to justify what I conceive to be the necessary rules, or rather principles, to be observed in their management, to begin with a general treatise applicable to 1 Archives of all periods and illustrated from Archives of the Past. As a result the portion of the book dedicated to Archives of the Past may appear at a first glance to dwarf the final parts in which the special problems of the Present and Future are treated. But I cannot think that any other procedure would have met the requirements it was desired to meet ; and I hope that this explanation may give it that unity in appearance which I am convinced it possesses in fact.

One other .matter requires mention here. The principles and rules suggested are in all cases what I consider ideal ones. Naturally ideals cannot always be realized; compromise is sometimes unavoidable:1 we seldom have the chance, for example, of securing ideal Repository accommodation in this country (we are too much hampered by our long Archive history and its remains) ; Archives have sometimes to be left under a bad arrangement fastened on them in the past ; binding,

1 Cp. the special proposals made in relation to War Archives, in Part V.

PREFACE xiii

stamping, repairing, numbering — all the processes to which Archives are subjected, must be to some extent governed by circumstances. But the best Archivist is the one who frees himself most from circumstances and, knowing the ideal, gets as near as possible to it.

I have many obligations to acknowledge. A number of individual ones, together with those which I owe to various distinguished writers (such as Messrs* Muller, Feith, and Fruin, and some of the contributors to the work of the Royal Com- mission on Public Records 1), are indicated in footnotes ; though my collection of illustrative matter has been spread over so many years that I fear some acknowledgements may have been accidentally omitted — for which I would apologise in advance. I must record separately my gratitude to three colleagues at the Public Record Office, Messrs. C. G. Crump, M. S. Giuseppi, and Charles Johnson, who have read the whole or part of my proofs and made many valuable suggestions ; to Mr. A. I. Ellis, of the Printed Books Department of the British Museum; and to M. Charles Schmidt, of the Archives Nationales at Paris.

H. J. CHELSEA, 1921.

1 I have been much indebted to many admirable articles in the Appendices, especially those of the Second and Third Reports. The Reports themselves, from an Archivist's point of view, rather suffer from lack of expressed Archive theory or principle : their appeal is more to the Historian.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART I INTRODUCTORY

PAGE

1. General Introduction ........ 1

2. What are Archives ? 2

(a) The Official Character — (b) The Circumstances of Writing —

(c) A Definition of Documents — (d) Archives Public and Private — (e) When Documents become Archives — (/) Custody.

3. Definition of Archives 11

4. Archive Quality and the Historical Criticism of Archives . . 11

5. The Duties of the Archivist .15

6. Illustration from English Archives 16

7. Standardization of Method .17

8. The appearance of this book in its present connexion ... 20

9. A new Problem: the making of the Archives of the Future . . 21

10. Summarizing .22

11. War Archives .22

PART II

ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF ARCHIVES AND RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING

1. The Evolution of Archives 23

(a) Primary Division of Archives — (fe) Earliest Archives : the File

of Miscellanea — (c) Differentiation of Classes — (d) Differentia- tion continued — (e) The varying careers of Archive Classes — (/) Differentiation of Archive Classes and the redistribution of duties among personnel — (g) Archives Ancient and Modern, Public and Private — (h) Order of Differentiation — (i) The Hands of former Archivists.

2. Transmission of Archives : the Question of Custody ... 33 (a) Where the Administration which produced the Archives continues

to function — (b) Where a new Administration carries on the same Functions — (c) Where the Function ceases but the Administration goes on — (d) Where both Administration and Function cease — (e) Mixed cases — (/) Custody : what is a responsible Person ?

3. What is an Archivist ? 39

4. Archives and Museums 42

5. Primary Duties of the Archivist : (i) Physical Defence of

Archives . ... . . . . ' . . 44

(a) The Repository — (b) The Repository, continued — (c) The Repository : Provision of Accommodation for Students — (d) The Repository : Economy of Space — (e) Shelving — (/) Receptacles — (g) Handling and Damage — (h) Theft — (i) Misplacing —

xvi TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

(j) Repairing : Implements : Materials : Preparation of Material : Gauze : Paste : Size : Leather : General Supervision — (k) Re- agents — (1) Seals — (m) Special Dangers — (w) Archive Museums.

6. Primary Duties of the Archivist : (ii) Moral Defence of Archives . 66 (a) Introductory — (b) Reception : Old Numeration and Lists :

Order of Arrival — (c) Accession Numbers — (d) Original Files, Bindings, &c. — (e) Stamping and Numbering : Methods and Rules — (/) Stamping and Numbering : the Accession Register — (g) Stamping and Numbering : the Single Document : the File or Volume ; the Enclosure, Schedule, or Insertion — (h) First Packing — (i) The Alteration of References — (j) The Archivist's Notes — (k) Archive Arrangement : its Object — (I) Arrangement : Chief Principle — (m) Arrangement : Pro- cedure — (n) Arrangement : Slip-making — (o) Arrangement : the Vertical Divisions of Archives — (p) The 4 Fonds ' or Archive Group : Definition — (g) Where one series of Archives is divided between two Archive Groups — (r) Arrangement within the Archive Group : accepted theories and some difficulties — (s) Arrangement : another suggestion — (f) Arrangement : Class Headings — (u) Old Series, New Series, and Miscellanea — (v) The case of Archives misplaced or never arranged — (w) The Making of the Inventory — (#) Final Packing and Numeration — (y) The Making of the Inventory : continued — (z) Deposited Collections and Transcripts — (aa) Repository Lists — (66) In- dexes.

7. The Archivist, the Administrator, and the Historian . . .106

8. Secondary Duties of the Archivist 108

(a) The Guide — (6) Indexes and Repertories — (c) Calendars —

(d) Printed Transcripts.

9. References to Archives printed or used by Students • . .113

PART III MODERN ARCHIVES

1. Introductory: old Archives and new Tendencies . . . .115

2. The General Practice with regard to Selection and Destruction . 117

3. Destruction : Grounds and Justification alleged . . . .118

4. Destruction : the usual methods of selection for this purpose . 119 (a) Word for Word Duplicates — (6) Museum Specimens and Com- posite Classes — (c) Sense Duplicates — (d) Documents not considered to be of sufficient value to justify their preservation.

5. Destruction of Ancient Archives : who is to be responsible for it ? . 124

6. Present provision for Destruction ; and the future of Archives . 126

7. The Selection of Modern Archives 128

8. Summarizing . . 130

9. The work of the Archive Maker 131

10. The Golden Rule of Archive Making . .... 131

11. Conclusion .... 133

TABLE OF CONTENTS xvii

PART IV

ARCHIVE MAKING PAGE

1. Introductory . . . .134

2. Materials, Old and New 135

(a) Paper— (6) Inks — (c) Stamps and Stamping Inks — (d) Transfer

Papers and Ribbons for typewriters — (e) Other materials.

3. New Methods of doing Business ; and their appearance in Archives 138 (a) Conversations and Telephone Messages — (&) Copies of Dictated

Letters and Telegrams — (c) Personal Letters — (d) General Results of the New Methods.

4. Indexes ........... 141

5. Over-production of Documents . . . . . . .142

6. A Remedy : Re-introduction of Control 142

7. New Functions of the Registry ....... 143

(a) Materials — (&) Methods employed — (c) Preservation and

Destruction.

8. The Records of the Registry itself 145

(a) Accession of Documents — (6) Placing Documents and connect- ing them with others — (c) Description of Documents : Subject

— (d) Description of Documents : Nature — (e) Distribution of Documents in the Office — (/) The Resulting Register ; and subsidiary documents.

9. Minutes and Accounts 149

10. The Use of the Register 150

(a) Documents which may be destroyed immediately — (6) Cases

reserved — (c) The Routine of Destruction — (d) Cases for further consideration — (e) Final disposal — (/) The limit of current use and the passing of Documents into Archives.

11. Classes of Documents not registered ; and some other considerations 156 (a) Minutes, Proceedings, and Accounts — (6) Separate Treatment

of ' Annexed ' Documents — (c) Confidential Documents — (d) Indexes and Subsidiary Documents of Registry.

12. The Staffing and Organization of Registry 159

13. Registry and the Archivist . . . . . . .161

14. Summary and Conclusion \ 162

PART V

WAR ARCHIVES

1. Introductory 163

2. The First Consideration 165

3. Bulk and the Question of Selection . . . . . .166

4. Relation of Local and Central War Archives . . . .167

5. Necessary Work preliminary to the Settlement of Local War

Archives . . . . . . » . . . 170

6. Minutes, Accounts, and other Special Archives . • € . . . 172

7. Collection and Arrangement 173

8. Final Custody . . 175

9. Summary and 'Conclusion 176

xviii TABLE OF CONTENTS

APPENDICES

PAGE

I. Conspectus of the Divisions of Administrations and Archives, Public and Private, in England : with lists of Archives used in illustra- tion in the present work . . . . . . .179

II. Outline for a Bibliography of Archive Science . . . . 191

III. Sketches :

(i) Sketch of a Box to hold Documents . . . . '.. . 198

(ii) Sketch of a proposed File for binding Documents . ' . . 198

IV. Specimen set of Rules for an Archive Repairing Department . 199 V. Illustrations and Charts :

(i) Archive History of the Exchequer of Receipt .... 206 (a) Origin, Functions, and Earliest Archives — (b) The Receipt Roll — (c) The Liberate Roll — (d) The Issue Roll — (e) Differentia- tions — (/) The Triplicate Arrangement — (g) Further Develop- ments — (h) Final Form — (i) The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries — (j) New Classes of Archives at the Receipt — (k) The Clerk of the Pells and the Auditor of the Receipt — (1) The Receipt Archives in the Nineteenth Century — (ra) The First Attempt at Arrangement : Westminster, Whitehall, and Somerset House — (ri) Removal to the Record Office — (o) 'Auditors and Pells' — (p) The Results — (g) Earlier Con- fusions — (r) The Excusable and the Inexcusable, (ii) Chart to illustrate Development of Records of Issue in the Ex- chequer of Receipt : with some notes on the ' Main Record ' Theory of Arrangement . . . . . . . 220

(iii) Chart of Specimen Arrangement of Archives : shewing Adminis- trative and Documentary Divisions, and Corresponding References 22 3

VI. Specimen set of Rules for Transcribing Documents . . . 224

A LIST OF SOME LONGER FOOTNOTES

Maps and Plans .......... 6

Printing and Mechanical Reproductions in Archives . . . .6

Private Archives .......... 8

Forgeries 10, 11

American Works on Archive Administration . . . . 16, 19

Early Archivists' Work in England 25

The Archivist's Notes ......... 54

Bookbindings and Historical Criticism 71,72

The Numbering of Leaves and Membranes . . . . .74

The Art of Sorting . . . . ( . . . . . .75

War and the ' Restitution ' of Archives . , . . . .86

The Dating of Documents and of Archives . . , . .102

Casual Preservation and Inserted Documents 121

Modern Formal Archives . . . ... . . .141

Ministers of State and Public Records . 158

.

ABBREVIATIONS

The following abbreviated References have been used :

D. K.'s Reports : — Public Record Office. Reports of the Deputy Keeper of the

Public Records (London : 1840, &c.).

E. 401 (and other Numbers) : — Exchequer Records. E. H. R. : — English Historical Review.

Hall : — Hall, H. Studies in English Official Historical Documents (Cambridge : 1908).

Johnson : — Johnson, C. The Care of Documents (S.P.C.K. Helps for Students of History : No. 5).

K.R. : — Exchequer Records, King's Remembrancer's Division.

L.T.R. : — Exchequer Records, Lord Treasurer's Remembrancer's Division.

Muller, Feith, and Fruin :— Muller, S. ; Feith, J. A. ; and Fruin, R. Hand- hiding voor het ordenen en beschrijven van Archieven . . . (Groningen: 1898) : quoted in the French Edition Manuel pour V arrangement et la description des Archives . . . (La Haye : 1910).

Palgrave : — Palgrave, Sir F. The Antient Kakndars and Inventories of the Treasury of His Majesty's Exchequer (Record Commission ; London : 1836).

Royal Commission : — Royal Commission on Public Records (1910). First, Second, and Third Reports (London : 1912, 1914, 1919).

T. R. : — Exchequer, Treasury of the Receipt.

PART I

INTRODUCTORY

§ 1. General Introduction

IT is hardly necessary to say that History, as it is understood now, has become very largely dependent on Archives. New varieties have been added to it, Personal Narrative or Political History making way to some extent for Constitutional History, Legal History, Economic and Social History, and finally Administrative History ; * and it is possible that there may be others to come. This growth of scope has resulted largely from the opening up of new material and new possibilities by the recognition, especially towards the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, of the value of Archive sources, and by the gradual process of making them available — physically available to those who can spend time in Archive Repositories and Muniment Rooms and available to all the world by printed List, Index, and Calendar. Pre- served oral tradition, contemporary narrative, comment and criticism, personal memoirs, official or semi-official compilations — these will no doubt continue to hold a position, often very important, among the sources upon which the ultimate his- torian draws for his final synthesis of the facts about any given period, movement, crisis, or relation. But it is more than doubtful if any authoritative historical work will ever again be published without copious notes referring to verifiable manu- script sources ; and it has become a recognized fact that such a work must be preceded by and dependent on the cumulative

1 In England Professor Tout's Chapters in Medieval Administrative History : the Wardrobe, the Chamber and the Small Seals (1920) comes recently to fill a gap beside Stubbs's Constitutional History and Maitland's work on the History of English Law ; and the useful series of Helps for Students of History now being published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge is supplying a number of short detailed studies.

1569-40

2 INTRODUCTORY PART i

effect of a quantity of studies by other hands ] in which settled opinion upon comparatively small points is based upon the laborious examination and analysis of details in Archives.

If this is so it is clear that some of us should be concerned with the keeping of the Archives of the past and perhaps with the making of the Archives of the future.

§ 2. What are Archives ?

We are faced at once with the necessity of choosing a nomenclature and fixing a definition. With regard to the name, we have a choice between Records and Archives. The first of these is highly technical and narrow in its correct sense 2 and exceedingly loose in its ordinary usage. There is little doubt that we must adopt the second — Archives 3 — which has the advantage of being common to many languages. Yet this too rather lacks preciseness in its ordinary use : no less an authority than the Director of the French Archives Nationales has used 4 the word as excluding among ancient documents only 4 les ceuvres historiques, scientifiques et litteraires, qui ont leur place, non dans les archives, mais dans les bibliotheques ' ; and another distinguished French author makes the difference between archives and documents mainly a matter of the

1 ' The great man when he comes may fling a footnote of gratitude to those who have smoothed his way, who have saved his eyes and his time ' : F. W. Maitland on the spade-work of history, quoted in H. A. L. Fisher's Biographical Sketch, p. 36.

2 * An authentick and uncontravertable testimony in writing contained in rolls of parchment and preserved in Courts of Record,' is a typical definition. With this may be compared the carefully observed distinction (see below, App. V(i) (k)) between the Clerk of the Pells who recorded at the Exchequer of Receipt and the Auditor of the same Department who merely entered : this though the documents kept by the two might be duplicates. See also the statement made in the eighteenth century that an Office copy could not be made at the Treasury of the Receipt from the Archives of the Mint because these were not Records (Palgrave, vol. i, p. cxi).

3 The use of the word has a respectable antiquity in England : for example — Sir Thomas Smyth, De Republica Anglie (London, 1583), p. 53, calls the Master of the Rolls Gustos Archiuorum Regis.

4 Langlois et Stein, Les Archives de rHistoire de France, p. 1. Cf. the same author's definition in the Revue Internationale des Archives, des Bibliotheques et des Musees (1895-6), Part I, p. 7 : ' depots de titres et de documents authentiques de toute esp&ce qui interessent un fitat, une province, une ville . . . ', &c.

§ 2 WHAT ARE ARCHIVES ? 3

subject dealt with.1 The Oxford English Dictionary, while deriving the word from the Greek dpxeiov, which is explained as meaning a magisterial residence or public office, gives the meanings of the English word as (1) a place in which public records or other historic documents are kept ; and (2) a historic record or document so preserved. Here the absence of any distinction between a ' historic record ' and a ' document ' does not appear to be altogether supported by the quotations given, and in any case we are rather left where we were in our quest for a definition. We shall perhaps do best, keeping the deriva- tion of the word in mind, to make one for ourselves by com- paring in some well-known case documents which are obviously archives with others which are obviously not.

Thus in 1914 England broke off relations with Germany. The historian of the future who desires to write an account of that historic fact will, we may assume, examine the written information contained in various apx««? in the offices, in fact, of the various Public Departments of the time. He will find that he can draw from the collections preserved for its own reference by the Foreign Office the official copies of the Treaties which had at various times been made between the nations concerned ; from the same source he will obtain the correspon- dence that had passed between Ambassadors and Secretaries of State ; the Admiralty and War Office will furnish Accounts, Reports, Returns and Copies of Orders and Memoranda accu- mulated in preparation for a possible war ; contemporary police arrangements will be revealed by a study of papers from the Home Office. These and their like are clearly Archive authorities for that historic fact, the Outbreak of War ; and the quality common to all of them is that they are actual material parts of the administrative and executive transactions connected with it. The historian, coming afterwards, may examine, interpret, analyse, and arrange them for the purposes

1 A. Lelong, article on Archives in the Repertoire general alpMbetique du Droit Jrancais (1889), vol. v, chap. 1 : cf. chap. 3, §4. Note also the loose use of the words Archivist and Manuscripts in the Official Pamphlet of the Library of Congress (below, § 6 note). Monsieur Cuvelier, in his Role des Archives (Bruxelles, 1911), instances other definitions, all very loose and all different.

B2

4 INTRODUCTORY PART i

of his treatise : they themselves state no opinion, voice no conjecture ; they are simply written memorials, authenticated by the fact of their official preservation, of events which actually occurred and of which they themselves formed a part.

The Reports, more or less unofficial, of speeches which com- mented on the situation in the House of Commons, the leaders in The Times, the official communiques set out in the Press, the memoirs of the German Chancellor — these are supple- mentary evidences, possibly valuable ; but they are not in any primary sense Archives.

On the one hand, therefore, we have documents which are material survivals of certain administrative or executive transactions in the past, preserved for their own reference by the responsible persons concerned : first-hand evidence, because they form an actual part of the corpus, of the facts of the case. On the other hand we have statements and expressions of opinion by persons who may, or may not, have been capable reasoners, in a position to know the facts, and unprejudiced. It is clear that if enough of the first class of these evidences survive and if he be able to appreciate their significance the historian will have in them material for an exact statement of the historic facts. Given the opportunity he will probably use both classes because he will want to know not only the facts but the circumstances of the case ; but the first is indispensable.

(a) The Official Character. We have thus reached the first stage of our definition. Archives are documents which formed part of an official transaction and were preserved for official reference.

(b) The circumstances of writing. But now let us take a step farther. We excluded from the ranks of the Archives a copy of The Times. But this is not to say that The Times or any other written or printed expression of opinion may not under certain circumstances be included among Archives. For example, we may imagine a copy of The Times filed in the Foreign Office, with a note that the Secretary of State wishes copies (with or without correction) to be dispatched with covering letter to certain British Ambassadors : such a copy

§ 2 WHAT ARE ARCHIVES ? 5

would of course form an evidence of the activities of the Foreign Office in a certain direction.1 It would seem, therefore, that our definition must include both documents specially made for, and documents included in,2 an official transaction.

(c) A definition of Documents. It will be noticed that printed matter has become, incidentally, included among our Archives. The fact is that in modern times the word document, which we use in default of a better, is very difficult to define ; and at any time the line between Documents and what are known in English Law as Exhibits 3 is an uneasy one to draw. Thus we cannot say that a document is something which gives information in writing ; for the Record Office series of Port Books gives us examples where the mere formal title, or other identification mark on the cover, converts an absolutely blank book into a perfectly good Archive : 4 we cannot rule that to come into our purview a piece of printed matter must have some MS. added or attached ; for the official copies of printed 6 Acts ' among the Records of the Colonial Office (not to speak of printed Proclamations 5 among the State Papers) are equally authenticated by the absence as by the addition of MS. com- ments. Again there is a case where an undoubted Archive consists of an old pair of military epaulettes ; and among

1 The distinction between the ordinary copy of the paper and one thus preserved in Foreign Office Archives may be seen if we imagine the comment of the Historian : * the direction taken by popular feeling is clearly shown in an article which appeared in The Times on this date . . . that the Government was anxious to take full advantage of this is evidenced by the fact that the Foreign Secretary thought it worth while to forward a copy . . . '.

2 We need hardly say that these partake of the character of Archives only as from the time when official use was made of them. Thus a document may be itself of the twelfth century but as an Archive date from the twentieth : cf . below, Part II, § 6 (g) and (x).

3 The word Exhibit itself originally refers to documents, and the Oxford Dictionary, which quotes a use in this sense in 1626 (cf. its use in a statute of 14 Charles II), can only produce a quotation of 1888 for its use in the sense of material objects other than writings.

4 K. R., Port Books : these blank books are a substitute for the more usual ' nil return '.

5 For example those which occur among the State Papers Henry VIII in the Record Office, many of which are known in unofficial copies in private collections such as that of the Earl of Crawford.

6 INTRODUCTORY PART i

enclosures to letters, forming in each case an integral part of the document, the writer can recall portraits and other pictures, maps,1 human hair, whip-cord (part of a cat-o'-nine-tails), a penny piece inscribed with disloyal sentiments and a packet of strange powder destined to cure cancer. The line between what is and what is not, by a little writing added or attached to it, converted into a document is one so difficult to draw, and the question of separating enclosed objects from the document to which they belong raises so many difficulties and objections, that probably our best course is to be dogmatic ; including under ' Documents ' for the purposes of our definition (i. e. as things admissible to the class of Archives) all manuscript in whatever materials'2 made, all script produced by writing machines, and all script mechanically reproduced 3 by means of type, type- blocks and engraved plates or blocks : 4 adding to these all other material evidences, whether or no they include alphabetical or numerical signs, which form part of or are annexed to, or may be

1 Maps or Plans are among the most usual things enclosed in or annexed to docu- ments, and examples might be cited from many' classes of Public Records both ancient and modern, but especially such Archives as those of the Colonial Office and Treasury and the State Papers. To give only one instance, examples of printed maps of America, dated 1763, which have been applied to special uses and now form part of the Archives of the Treasury, will be found in T. 1/476.

2 The Public Record Office collections alone oblige us to include parchment, vellum, paper, paper- and card-boards, leather of various kinds, wood, and varieties of woven material.

3 For some notes upon the entry of printed matter into Administrative use in England see a paper on English Current Writing and Early Printing in the Trans- actions of the Bibliographical Society for 1915.

4 Examples of Archives in type have already been given. Type-block is the term usually employed of printed letters as reproduced in the Elizabethan and later Writing Masters' Books. The writer has noted no instance of the use of such blocks amongst Archives, but it might quite well occur. The word ' engraved ' is intended here to include all kinds of modern photographic processes in which engraving by acid is employed : but early examples of the use of tool-engraved plates for Archive purposes can be found ; for example amongst Bishops' Certificates of Institutions to Benefices of the eighteenth century (e. g. Bishop's Cert. Bristol 25 : which may be compared with contemporary MS. examples) and in early nineteenth- century forms used by the Commissioners of the Treasury in addressing the officers of the Exchequer of Receipt, by the War Office (e. g. in W. O. 25, 745) for Returns of Officers' Services, and so forth. Engraved titles and headings are not uncommon in the eighteenth century. Modern photographic process reproductions are common amongst the Copyright Records in the Public Record Office, but these are generally cases of ' annexing '.

\

§ 2 WHAT ARE ARCHIVES ? 7

reasonably assumed to have formed part of or been annexed to9 specific documents thus defined.

We differ here slightly from the Continental Authorities who, in their definition of Archives, include maps and plans and the like, but make no mention of the case of blank books or of material evidences annexed, even fastened, to documents : they prefer, indeed, to separate these last and relegate them to Museums, a procedure to which we object because it cannot be carried out to its logical conclusion in all cases without damage to Archives or Archive quality.1 We use of course the word 4 annexed ' literally as meaning something of a size to be fastened to or conveniently associated with the document to which it belongs. The distinction between what can and cannot be 4 annexed ' to a document is like all fine distinctions, difficult. Its particular difficulty may perhaps be illustrated best by a reductio ad absurdum. Supposing for example that a Viceroy sends home to the Secretary of State in England an elephant with a suitable covering-note or label ; or supposing, to take a more actual example, that the Government of a Colony presents to the First Commissioner of Works in London a two- hundred-foot spar of Douglas Pine : the question may be imagined to arise : Is the spar c annexed ' to correspondence with the Government of British Columbia ? Is the elephant attached to the label or the label to the elephant ?

The answer to those who would put this dilemma to us in the present connexion is that the Administration would be obliged in all such cases to solve the question of housing — to send the spar to Kew Gardens or the elephant to the Zoo — long before the label or letter comes into charge of the Archivist :2 the problem is an Administrative, not an Archive one.

(d) Archives Public and Private. But we have not yet done with our copy of The Times. Let us consider the case of an authenticated copy of that paper filed not in the Foreign Office

1 It is quite opposed to the spirit of the rule (approved by all continental autho- rities) which bases all modern arrangement of Archives upon that of their original compilers — the ordre primitif: see below, Part II, § 6 (r).

2 See below, the section dealing with the point at which his duties begin.

8 INTRODUCTORY PAET i

but in the Office of the Newspaper itself. This is obviously part of the Archives of the Paper. It is true that it proves no more than that The Times was published on a certain day and contained certain statements : but its archive quality is exactly the same as that of the Treaty Paper preserved in the Foreign Office ; it is as incontrovertible evidence for the History of Journalism as is the Foreign Office paper for the History of our Diplomatic Relations. It seems then that Archives as a term must be extended to collections made by private or semi-private bodies or persons, acting in their official or business capacities.* Local Authorities, Commercial Firms, the responsible Heads of any undertakings may, probably will, leave behind them Archives. Many, to quote a distinguished Belgian Archivist, do so as Monsieur Jourdain wrote prose.

(e) When Documents become Archives. We are progressing with our definition but we have not yet finished. It is clear that documents written in and for any ' Office ' are, from the time of their writing, ' Official ' documents and that others of external origin (letters received, for example) become ' Official ' as soon as they are taken in for ' office ' purposes. But we have not yet decided the point at which Letters or Memoranda cease to be Office Files and become Archives. Perhaps on account of a false derivation 2 the test of Archive quality has been generally taken to be that of age ; but a more satisfactory limitation would probably be the point at which, having ceased to be in current use,3 they are definitely set aside for preservation,

1 The word is also understood as including the documentary collections of private persons by Muller, Feith, and Fruin (§1) and by Langlois (article in the Revue Inter- nationale des Archives . . . , quoted above) : cf. Mr. Gilson's notice of Mr. Johnson's book in History, April 1920, p. 42. Indeed the use goes back so far as to the remark- able Ministerial Circular of April 16, 1841, quoted by Bordier, Les Archives de la France (Paris, 1855), p. 8.

An interesting example of the formality ascribed to the keeping of private (family) archives in England in quite early times is supplied by the use of the formal word irrotulatur in a note in an Inquisition post mortem (37 Edward III, First Numbers, 98) * et sic dies obitus eiusdem irrotulatur in Psalterio apud Midhurst ' : the entry in the family bible was, quite rightly, considered as an archive.

2 The Greek word is upxtiov not dpxaiov.

3 Not necessarily ceased to be in use altogether. There are plenty of cases where documents have been drawn into the administrative circle again after a century or more of idleness : for example, see below, Part II, § 2 (a), note.

§ 2 WHAT ARE ARCHIVES ? 9

tacitly adjudged worthy of being kept. Unfortunately the time at which this occurs must obviously vary with circumstances. The closest definition, therefore, that we can use in this matter is to say that the documents are set aside for preservation in official custody.

(/) Custody. The last point needs perhaps a little extension. Indeed we shall do well to stress it, for it is upon this question of custody that English Archives and Archive practice may make some real contribution to the sum of Archive Science. How distinctive the question of custody is may be seen by contrasting the English Deputy Keeper's Reports, with their chronicle of severely official accretions, with the accroissements by gift and by purchase which occupy so many pages in the Annuaire of the Belgian State Archives.1

Are all documents which owe their preservation to an administrative or official quality in their origin Archives ? Are the Additional Charters, for example, in the British Museum, the cream of so many private collections — are these Archives ? they certainly were so at one stage of their existence : or are they to be condemned because they have slipped from that official custody ? And what of the numerous collections of State Papers in private hands ? 2 When the head of a London business firm buys in the sale-room a quantity of the Medici papers,3 exported from Italy for the purpose, are these Archives ? If the modern purchaser of an estate, finding himself also the purchaser of documents, presents a number of accounts, with wooden tallies attached, to an Anthropological Museum,4 are these Archives ? and if all these are Archives, whose Archives

1 Compare, for example, the interesting Archives de VEtat en Belgique pendant la guerre, 1914-1918, recently published under the direction of M. Joseph Cuvelier, with the 79th-81st Reports of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records.

2 See below, Part II, § 2 (e).

3 Some of these documents, to which the owner, Mr. Selfridge, was good enough to allow me access, were certainly at one time a portion of the Archives of the business house of the Medici.

.4 The Science Museum at South Kensington possesses the only complete Exchequer Tally (stock and foil together) that I have seen ; I believe there is also an Exchequer Tally in the Museum at Kew Gardens, and no doubt other specimens (Exchequer or private) are scattered in Museums all over the country and in private collections.

10 INTRODUCTORY PART i

are they ? if they are not, at what stage did they cease to possess that quality ?

The position of Records of the Common Law in England may help here to clear our conceptions. There are many series of Public Records, preserved at the Public Record Office in London, of which certain numbers have escaped through various vicissitudes in the past into various private or public collections, such as the British Museum.1 Now a certified copy from one of the main body of these in the Record Office would be received in any Court of Law as evidence of the transactions it records : for one in the British Museum to receive the same credence would involve almost certainly the production of the actual document in Court and certainly its support by a body of expert testimony to its authenticity. The echo of this legal point in a literary or historical setting may be seen in the case of the well-known volume,2 part of the Accounts of the Master of the Revels, which was for a considerable time in the possession of the antiquary Peter Cunningham though it has long since been restored to official custody. No certified copy from this document is given by the Record Office without a statement of the above fact in its history and those interested in Shake- spearian chronology are still disputing 3 (and unless some new external evidence is discovered will continue always to dispute) whether the entries on one page are or are not an interpolation by Cunningham. So great is the value of custody that the constant effort of private forgers in all periods has been to get copies of their forgeries enrolled in some public series, because they knew that the authenticity of the enrolment would never be called in question 4 and hoped that by a confusion of ideas the

1 Examples are given below (Part IV, § 11, note) of State Papers which have suffered in this way. Here we may quote the recently discovered case of original Papal Bulls formerly preserved in the Exchequer of Receipt and calendared there by Stapleton in 1323 (see Part II, § 1 (c), note) which are now in the British Museum.

2 Audit Office 3/908, No. 13.

3 See Ernest Law, Some supposed Shakespearean Forgeries (London, 1911) and subsequent criticisms in the Athenaeum : with Mr. Law's Reply (London, 1913). The subject has again been raised recently (December 1920) in the Times Literary

4 Compare the forgeries of early Royal Charters enrolled upon the later

§§ 2, 3, 4 WHAT ARE ARCHIVES ? 11

thing enrolled would pass uncriticized. As will appear later,1 we do not wish to press for a purely legal definition of custody ; but the above examples make it clear that Archive quality is dependent upon the possibility of proving an unblemished line of responsible custodians.2

§ 3. Definition of Archives

We may now attempt a definition which shall cover all the possibilities mentioned above. First we have defined a docu- ment as covering for our purpose manuscript, type-script, and printed matter, with any other material evidence which forms part of it or is annexed to it. A document which may be said to belong to the class of Archives is one which was drawn up or used in the course of an administrative or executive transaction (whether public or private) of which itself formed a part ; and subsequently preserved in their own custody for their own in- formation by the person or persons responsible for that transaction and their legitimate successors.

To this Definition we may add a corollary. Archives were not drawn up in the interest or for the information of Posterity.

§ 4. Archive Quality and the Historical Criticism of Archives

Outside this definition we have nothing but plain docu- ments— pieces of written evidence each one of which must be

Charter Rolls, e. g. the Charter to Wikes Priory, the two originals of which (quoted in the present writer's Palaeography and the dating of Court Hand), whether or no they were prepared at the time of the confirmation of one of them by Edward III, are certainly not authentic productions of Henry II's Chancery. Another remarkable case in point is the document, now in the possession of Sir Thomas Barrett Lennard, Bart., which purports to give the arbitrement of Edward IV, under his sign manual and privy seal, in the case of the Dacre Barony, or Baronies ; and which was enrolled in Chancery, not without scrutiny, in the reign of Elizabeth. Had this been a normal Writ of Privy Seal it would have come down to us in official custody, whereas its authority, upon a point of some importance, must now depend upon the respective weights of its handwriting, which seems quite genuine, and other facts about it, which are more open to suspicion. See the article on Barony Jure Uxoris, to be published in a forthcoming volume of the Complete Peerage by Mr. H. A. Doubleday, to whom I am indebted for my acquaintance with a very singular document.

1 See below, Part II, § 2 (/).

2 On the subject of Forgery, see again § 4 below.

12 INTRODUCTORY PART i

treated upon its individual merits by the historian or other student who would use it for his own purposes. Inside it, we are dealing with an enormous mass of documents which, however varied their origin and contents and the appeal which they make to students, however far apart their respective dates, have at least two common grounds upon which they can be analysed and tested, two common features of extraordinary value and importance.

The first of these features is Impartiality. Drawn up for purposes almost infinitely varying — the administrative or exe- cutive control of every species of human undertaking — they are potentially useful to students for the information they can give on a range of subjects totally different but equally wide : the only safe prediction, in fact, concerning the Research ends which Archives may be made to serve is that with one partial exception these will not be the purposes which were contem- plated by the people by whom the Archives were drawn up and preserved. The single partly exceptional case is the one where they are examined for the light they throw upon the history of one branch or another of public or private Administration — the branch to which they themselves belonged. Provided,1 then, that the student understands their administrative significance they cannot tell him anything but the truth.

Impartiality is a gift which results from the first part of our definition of Archives. In the second part of that definition we stated that Archives were preserved in official custody and for official information only ; and this gives us the second of their distinguishing qualities, Authenticity. It would appear that not only are Archives by their origin free from the suspicion of prejudice in regard to the interests in which we now use them : they are also by reason of their subsequent history

1 The proviso is, of course, sometimes a large one. For example, the series of Receipt Rolls of the Exchequer at the Public Record Office has more than once been used by students under the impression that they furnished a complete and accurately reckoned list of moneys received by the Crown : whereas they were in fact inaccurate and incomplete and at certain periods did not represent receipts. See the article on Tallies in Archaeologia, Ixii, p. 367 ; and a continuation in Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries, second series, xxv, p. 34.

§ 4 HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF ARCHIVES 13

equally free from the suspicion of having been tampered with in those interests.

The consideration of these qualities of Archives leads us on to that of the Historical criticism of Documents1 in general. One or two special Archive points may conveniently be dealt with here.

In the first place, the possibility of forgery in the literary or historical interest may be practically ruled out: we have seen one example, or alleged example, it is true : 2 but forgery of this kind could not be of anything save the rarest occurrence, for it means that custody has been broken with the deliberate intention of falsification ; and that this has happened in comparatively recent times — in the case of many historical interests which are of modern growth one might say in very recent times — and without the custodians becoming aware of it.

It is not to be supposed of course that forgeries of other kinds do not occur among documents which have come down to us in custody. They do ; both actual fabrications of documents and cases where documents have been tampered with after the date of their writing in the way either of sup- pressio veri or suggestio falsi : indeed we have already had some examples ; 3 and plenty of others might be found — forged Tallies,4 forged Fines 5 and other forgeries, some of them dis- covered in their own day, some which it has been reserved for modern scholarship to detect.

Now, from the point of view of their writing there are, as

1 My original intention had been to develop this at more length in an Appendix with special reference to Archives : but a recent publication (R. L. Marshall, Historical Criticism of Documents : S.P.C.K., Helps for Students of History, 1920) which puts within the reach of all students a convenient resume of the conclusions of Bernheim, Freeman, Seignobos, and others, makes this unnecessary ; especially as we should have been mainly concerned to point out that most of the critical tests usually applied to historical documents are not, in view of the qualities described above, required in the case of Archives.

2 The alleged Cunningham forgery referred to above, § 2.

3 Cf. ibid., the reference to forgery of Koyal Charters.

4 See an article in Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries, second series, vol. xxv, p. 34 : a recently noted example communicated to me by Professor Willard, of the University of Colorado, is in Exchequer L. T. R. Memoranda Roll, 69 (1297), m. 32.

5 See a note by Mr. H. G. Richardson in E. H. R., vol. xxxv (1920), p. 405.

14 INTRODUCTORY PART i

we have seen, two kinds of Archives ; those actually written by the persons who used them for the same administrative purposes which have caused them to be preserved down to our time, and those which were indeed used by those persons, have perhaps even come down to us in a copy by their hands, but which were written originally by some other persons and possibly in some other interest. In the case of the first of these classes we may once more practically rule out the possi- bility of forgery : the persons who wrote did so for their own reference and what motive could they have for deceit ? It is true that we have cases where, as in the two examples of forged Fines quoted by Mr. Richardson, custody has been violated and forged documents inserted in a genuine series by persons from without ; but these are altogether exceptional — it is noteworthy that both were speedily discovered and on the other hand that this class, perhaps the most commonly used of all Public Records, has yielded no other case of forgery to the examination of modern scholarship. In any case, given an unbroken custody, the possibility of forgery is practically nil.

Turning to the other kind of Archives, that of documents written originally by one person or body and preserved by another, we have not of course the same guarantee against forgery or tampering, because there are now two sides involved and either may have a motive for deceiving the other. Thus A., the body which preserved and was the means of the Archive coming down to us, may wish to foist upon B. the responsibility for a document purporting to be written by B. but really fabricated or garbled by A. : for example, the owner of a collec- tion of deeds from other persons may quite well insert amongst them one forged by himself.1

On the other hand A. may have foisted upon it by B.

1 To take again the example of the Fine, which was an Indenture made in triplicate, though it is, as we have said, so rare as to be almost impossible for a forgery to occur among the Feet (the parts of it preserved in the Court of Common Pleas), there were no doubt plenty of pretended second or third parts of a fine — forgeries — pre- served in private collections (cp. again Mr. Richardson's article) ready to be used on any occasion when appeal was not likely to be made to the official collection.

§§ 4, 5 HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF ARCHIVES 15

a document which is not genuine and may innocently accept it and include it among its own Archives. We have seen already the case where forgeries of Royal Charters were pre- sented to the Chancery for confirmation, accepted by it and preserved to us both as originals1 and in copies by its own hand on the Charter Roll.

Summarizing, we may repeat that forgery or falsification is to be regarded as altogether exceptional among Archives. It is only to be expected (1) in the rare case where custody has been violated though the fact is not known, (2) where the Archive in question is not a single production but is of the kind made by one person or body and preserved by another. In such cases it is always open to the critic to ask if either party had any interest in deceiving the other. At the same time we are to remember that both parties had an interest in detecting each other's malpractices ; and that neither had any interest in deceiving us.

§ 5. The Duties of the Archivist

The duties of the Archivist, as it is one of the chief functions of this volume to point out, become under these circumstances very obvious, at least in their main lines. They are primary and secondary. In the first place he has to take all possible precautions for the safeguarding of his Archives and for their custody, which is the safeguarding of their essential qualities. Subject to the discharge of these duties he has in the second place to provide to the best of his ability for the needs of historians and other research workers. But the position of primary and secondary must not be reversed?

It is not his business to deal with questions of policy — to decide whether twenty thousand pounds, or one thousand or

1 All early charters copied in confirmation have to be subjected to careful criticism owing to the ignorance of the clerks who copied them : cp. the case of the Wikes Charters already quoted. Compare also Ballard, An Eleventh Century Inquisi- tion . . . (British Academy, Records of Social and Economic History . . . , vol. iv (1920), p. ix. where the ignorance of the Norman clerks of Domesday is illustrated.

2 Cp. Muller, Feith, and Fruin, § 19. We deal with these duties in detail in Part II, especially §§ 3 and 5-9.

16 INTRODUCTORY PART i

nothing should be spent on printing transcripts of his Archives ; whether the student would be best served by having the Archives in a Metropolis, or in the Provinces ; at what date modern ' confidential ' Archives should be thrown open to the public. He will doubtless take an intelligent interest in such subjects, but as an Archivist he is not concerned with them : they are questions for Historians, Politicians, Administrators ; whom, at most, he may advise.

We touch this point again later when dealing with the Secondary Duties of the Archivist.1

§ 6. Illustration from English Archives

If the duties of the Archivist are simple in broad outline they are by no means so in detail ; and he can very easily by a very small ignorance do incalculable damage. It is therefore highly important that he should be supported by a theory based on the widest possible experience ; and it is a distinct lack that England, a country which, by reason of its unrevolutionary history and conservative habits and in spite of a long period of neglectfulness, has preserved a greater number of long and continuous Archive series than any other in Europe, should have made up to the present so small a contribution to the Science of Archives. An official pamphlet published in America though in English does not refer to English Archives.2 With the exception of Mr. Charles Johnson 3

1 See below, Part II, § 8.

2 Notes on the Cataloguing, Calendaring, and Arranging of Manuscripts, pub- lished by the Library of Congress (Washington, 1913). The circumstances of the publication of this book give it naturally so much prestige that I feel bound to remark that among many excellent precepts it contains (especially in the part devoted to Arrangement) some statements and suggestions which are contrary to the experience and rules not only of English but of Belgian, Dutch, and French Archivists. The writer, though he alludes more than once to ' the trained Archivist ', speaks throughout of Manuscripts and does not seem to be aware of any distinction between documents and Archives ; for the latter at any rate one or two of his proposals (e. g. that of sortation by ' less expert hands ' on p. 9) would be definitely dangerous — have indeed been proved to be disastrous in specific instances.

3 The Care of Documents. I have excluded the Reports of the Royal Commission (mentioned below in another note) because they deal rather with special cases than with general principles and are, moreover, concerned as a rule more with national

§§ 5, 6, 7 ILLUSTRATION FROM ENGLISH ARCHIVES 17

(and his work is limited by its format1) no one has yet attempted to draw from the extraordinarily wide field of English Adminis- trative History and Administrative Remains anything like a complete body of illustration of general Archive theory and practice. And the present 2 seems a favourable time for an attempt to fill this gap.

As we propose to illustrate throughout from English Archives we shall need for reference purposes a Conspectus of the Divisions of Administrative Documents, Public and Private, in England. This will be found in Appendix I at the end of the present volume. It distinguishes those used in our illustrations.

§ 7. Standardization of Method

We have been concerned so far to show that, within certain strictly defined limits, the word Archives is one of very general applicability. The circumstances which produce Archives being common and commonly recurrent in administration in all countries, and in all grades of administration, from the most private to the most public, it would seem, at first, easy to secure an advantageous standardization of all rules, great and small, for dealing with all Archives : some Authorities have aimed even at a standardization of terminology and of such small matters as the ways of expressing dates in inventories. This has been the aim of the learned authors of the Manuel pour le Classement des Archives? and they have been so far

Archive policy than with practical rules for Archive keeping : though the existence of such rules may often be inferred from their recommendations.

1 M. Langlois (Revue Internationale des Archives . . . , 1895/6, Part I, p. 9) in criticizing von Helfert's Staatliches Archivwesen (Wien, 1893) does so on the ground that it consists of 48 pages only ; but Mr. Johnson has contrived to compress a large amount into 47.

2 The reasons for the appearance of this book in its present connexion are dealt with below. The recent publication (1919) of the last of the three Reports of the Royal Commission on Public Records, the Appendices of which bring together much information as to English Archives never before assembled, is another favourable conjunction ; as is also, on a smaller scale, the much increased attention now given in this country to Librarianship and the inclusion of Archive Science in that subject.

3 Muller, Feith, and Fruin formulate one hundred rules for classing and arrange- ment, each supplied with a considerable amount of illustrative matter drawn from the Archives of Holland, Belgium, or France.

1569-40 r>

18 INTRODUCTORY PART i

successful that their work is the recognized authority in more than one country besides their own. It may be questioned, however, whether quite so rigid an application of principle is desirable, or at any rate possible, in all cases. They themselves, for example, have called attention 1 to the profound difference between Continental and English Archives caused by the absence in England of the disruptive and again assimilative influence of the French Revolution and of the circumstances which attended it at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries (the most formative period in modern archive history) ; and even in the case of the countries for which they particularly legislated they have found it necessary to recognize that compromise may in certain circum- stances be desirable or even necessary. And there are other difficulties : in most countries (in France, for example, as well as in England) 2 the old methods of arranging and classifying have left their mark — a mark differing in different cases but unlikely in any case ever to be entirely effaced : again pro- found differences in methods of administration,3 reacting upon the records which survive, must have some influence upon nomenclature and perhaps even on arrangement : and the same may be said of different systems of Archive organization at the present day.4 Similarly between us and any complete standardization there rises, among other difficulties, the great bar of language : who shall translate satisfactorily into English, for example, the word fonds ? and can we really, as a matter of practical policy, import into English archive practice the distinction implied by the use of the word protocol ?

On the other hand the few great principles which have governed and must govern the making, and should therefore

1 Muller, Feith, and Fruin, § 36.

2 The Archives Nationales still retain many traces of their old arrangement under subjects.

3 The contrast between English Law and the various representatives of Roman Law is an obvious instance.

4 The enormous number of authorities that control archive collections of a more or less public character in England at the present day, as shown by the late Com- mission's Reports, forms a good illustration of this point when compared with the centralized Archive Administration of (for example) Holland or Belgium.

§ 7 STANDARDIZATION OF METHOD 19

govern also the classification, handling and use, of Archives cannot but be the same everywhere. It has seemed best, therefore, to the present writer to allow these leading principles and their corollaries to emerge from an independent examination into the nature,1 the evolution,2 and the stages in transmission 3 of Archives as they may be traced in this country, and, without any attempt at the formulation of rules which should cover all individual cases, to show how the same large principles may be applied, invariably, as criteria of correct procedure not only in the matters of arrangement and classification but upon any and every side of the Archivist's work — in his care for the physical state of his documents, his preservation of their moral qualities as Archives, his methods of listing, his procedure in calendaring and printing, his communications with the world of Research, and one other matter which is dealt with in sections 8 and 9 of this Part. In one or two cases (notably the question of custody to which reference has already been made) the result may be to lead us away from the conclusions of the Authorities of the Foreign School ; 4 and we may find ourselves dealing with certain matters which they have not considered. For the most part, however, our view should be the same as theirs though taken from a different angle. And if the Archivist is here provided with a general guide rather than a detailed set of rules at least we should be sure that no theories are enunciated which are not applicable to archive work in any country, nor on the other hand any first principles omitted. In most sciences and arts it will be found that special cases can be satisfactorily met by any one who combines a sound theory with ordinary common sense and both with practical experience. It is that combination that we wish to commend to the Archivist.5

1 See above, §§ 2, 3, and 4, the definition of Archive qualities.

2 See below, Part II, § 1.

3 Ibid., §§ 2 and 3.

4 Where such differences occur they are generally indicated in the text or in footnotes.

5 I had written the larger part of this work when my attention was called to the * tentative outline ' for a Manual of Archive Management contributed by

c 2

20 INTRODUCTORY PART i

§ 8. The appearance of this book in its present connexion

The practical side of historical study has been much emphasized by the events of the last five years. From the naval strategy x of Great Britain at the beginning of the war to the work, largely historical, which preceded the Peace Conference 2 at the end of it, few important branches of war-time administration, whether on the military or the civil side,3 have been without a trace of the activities of the Historian ; and certainly none have omitted to bring themselves into that position with regard to History which is implied in the amassing of Archives. In England some Public Departments have gone farther and have experimented in the production of something more than the customary Blue Book. For the War Office and Admiralty to issue their own versions of the Military and Naval History of a war is no new thing ; but the compilation by the Ministry of Munitions of an elaborate Economic Treatise, in the shape of its own History drawn from its own Archives, is distinctly a departure.4 Such activities reflect the addition of a new series of Archive problems to the already considerable number which faced us. The fact is that the enormous stock of fresh experience which has been accumulated during the War and which will be material for the work of the future historian, not to mention students in other branches of learning, is hidden in a mass of documents so colossal that the question

Mr. Victor Palsits to the Report of the Archives Commission of the American Historical Association for 1913-14 ; published during the War this excellent scheme had escaped my notice. A manual completed on the lines there laid down should contain, when it is issued, a large amount of what the Archivist requires in the way of sugges- tion and precept. But I still venture to hope that the present book, based on those Archives which have inspired the work of so many American scholars, may be found to contain a point of view and illustrations worthy of some attention.

1 Many of the volumes of the Navy Record Society bear directly on modern naval problems : cp. also the Official Publication of all the varying Logs of the Battle of Trafalgar.

2 Cp. the History of the Peace Conference of Paris, now being published under the auspices of the Institute of International Affairs (Oxford, 1920).

3 On the civil side an interesting example, in England, is the question raised by the de Keyser Hotel Case of the Government's right to commandeer houses in war-time : this is almost entirely an historical question.

4 See below, § 9, note.

§§8,9 ARCHIVES OF THE FUTURE 21

of their housing alone (apart from those of their handling, sifting and use) presents quite novel features.1 Nor is bulk the only problem. The questions raised already by the intro- duction into administration of new methods of communication and of recording (the telephone, for example, and the type- writer) become now pressing. In fine, it is largely the addition, of this abnormal mass of new Archive matter to our existing collections which compels us to face the fact that we must make at any rate a beginning of settling our archive problems, old and new, if we are to deal satisfactorily with the present and safeguard the future of research work.

§ 9. A new Problem : the Making of the Archives of the Future

It is, however, the chief claim of this work to its present position that it purposes to raise at least one new question in Archive Science ; one which has up to now been little con- sidered and for the forcing of which upon our attention these impossibly bulky War Archives are largely responsible. That question is the making of the Archives of the future.2 Can we, faced with the accumulations which the War has left us and the difficulties they involve, leave any longer to chance the question what Archives are to be preserved ? Can we on the other hand attempt to regulate them without destroying that precious characteristic of impartiality which results, in the case of the older archives, from the very fact that their preservation was settled either by pure chance or at least by considerations which did not include the possible requirements of future Historians? There is considerable danger that a periodical compilation made by an office from its own Archives definitely for historical purposes 3 — even for publication

1 The Royal Commission (Third Report, vol. i, p. 38 : cp. ibid., vol. ii, pp. 120 et seqq.) estimates that the bulk is as large as that of the total previous contents of the Public Record Office.

2 Some indication of the existence of this problem appeared in an article in the London Mercury in April 1920.

3 On the lines of the larger work above mentioned which is at present in hand at the Ministry of Munitions. Note that what is here said does not apply to a Summary or Digest made for Office purposes. The distinction is a delicate one but

M INTRODUCTORY PART i

— may come to be treated, by the uncritical historian, not as a guide, but as an efficient substitute for the Archives them- selves. Can we prevent this and at the same time neutralize the threat of hopeless unwieldiness ? If we can do something to solve this problem, which, by the way, is not entirely a new one though presented to us now in a new light, we shall have done something to earn the gratitude of future research workers.

§ 10. Summarizing

The first aim of this book must, it seems, be twofold. It is required to lay down in outline a plan of our duties to the Archives which have been left to us by the past ; a plan which shall be conditioned entirely by their own fundamental characteristics. From this first process we are to draw certain general principles of archive values which we may attempt to apply to a new problem — the direction, without altering their Archive character, of the formation of the Archives of the future. Towards this end we have gone some distance by defining the word Archives and deducing from that definition certain ideas as to Archive Quality.1

§ 11. War Archives

When, not before, we have completed this double task, we may be able to touch upon an independent question which lies midway between the two just mentioned — the question of the treatment of those accumulations left upon our hands not by the past but by the abnormal events of our own times.

of extreme importance. See below, Part IV, § 12, the discussion of the character of the Register in a modern office. Of course the copy of an officially compiled History which is filed for Record purposes becomes itself an Archive from the time of filing : it is evidence that a certain Historical View was officially put forward ; but not evidence of the Historic Pacts. 1 Above, §§ 2, 3, and 4.

PART II

ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF ARCHIVES AND RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING *

§ 1. The Evolution of Archives

(a) Primary Division of Archives. The starting-point of the compilation of Archives in early times is an easy thing to imagine or even in the case of ancient collections to see in action. The official or responsible person — let us call him the Administrator — who has to preside over any continuous series of business functions, the manager of a small estate at one end of the scale, the controller of a kingdom's finances at the other, relies for the support of his authority on memory : so soon as writing becomes general in use he adopts the preservation of pieces of writing as a convenient form of artificial memory ; and in doing so starts a collection of Archives. He avails himself of this convenience by preserving :

the originals of written instructions or information he has

received ;

copies of similar documents which he has issued, and

memoranda (a diary as it were) of his own proceedings.

All Archives must necessarily fall into these three groups — documents which come into an office ; (copies of) documents which go out ; and documents which do neither, which circulate within it.

(b) Earliest Archives : the File. We see our Administrator, then, starting with the simplest of all Archive forms, a file ; which we use as a generic term for a sack or box or hamper

1 Where Archives are mentioned in illustration reference should be made through- out to the Conspectus of the Divisions of Administrations and Archives, Public and Private, in England, in Appendix I.

24 RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING PART n

or other receptacle 1 in which are contained, or a string on which are threaded, a miscellaneous collection of scraps of paper or parchment of these three kinds.

In the case of English Public Archives, putting aside the contentious question whether we have or have not surviving fragments of Chancery Archives previous to the Enrolment period, we need go no further than to the famous Dialogus de Scaccario for evidence that this primitive state once existed in both the Chancellor's department and the Treasurer's. The Archives of the first of these, as they are known to Richard Fitz Niel, are the contrabrevia? copies of those Royal Writs issued by the department of which it was desired to retain memory : in the case of the Exchequer the Dialogus gives us no hint, it is true, of a period when the Pipe Roll itself, the most venerable of English Records, was anything but a complete roll ; and it is possible that this most formidable of Archives was born like Athena : but it does clearly indicate a period, before the Pipe Roll existed, when the records of the finance department consisted of no more than bundles of wooden tallies.3 As to other ' proceedings ' of the Royal Court in this country the writer has suggested elsewhere4 that the beginnings of another most venerable series, that of the Memoranda Rolls of the Exchequer, may be clearly traced in certain very fragmentary pieces which have come down to us ; and it is possible that the earliest archives of the third great division of Medieval Royal Administration — the Legal — were of a nature to include those filed Feet of Fines of which we have the first notice in connexion with the year 1163.5

So much for the second and third of our primary Archive classes (documents issued and proceedings). In the case of the

1 White leather and other bags to hold records survive even now in many cases ; the ' Hanaper ' (hamper) gave its name to a whole Archive Department ; and the Domesday and other chests are prominent features in the Record Office Museum.

2 Oxford ed., p. 82. The Dialogus was written in the latter half of the twelfth century by Richard Fitz Niel.

» Ibid., p. 60.

4 In an article on the Financial Records of the Reign of King John in the Magna Carta Commemoration volume published by the Royal Historical Society : the view is again supported by passages in the Dialogus.

6 At a later date we get clear indications of an intermediate stage between Miscellanea on files and the fully developed and formal legal record, the Plea Roll. These may be found in the class which represents the ' Ancient Miscellanea ' of the Court of King's Bench — that known as Ancient Indictments, which frequently contain fragments very closely parallel to the class of Assize Rolls, &c. For these see an article by Miss B. H. Putnam in E. H. R., xxix, 1914, p. 479 ; and for the Fine cited here, L. F. Salzmann (ibid., xxv, 1910, p. 708). On the subject of Feet of Fines see below Part II, § 2 (c), note.

§ i THE EVOLUTION OF ARCHIVES 25

first, that of documents received l by the Royal Court, we are on even surer ground. It is hardly necessary to offer any proof that from the earliest times such documents, in the form of a miscellaneous collection of isolated pieces, introduce some- thing which may be called an Archive Class into the contents of the Royal Treasury. Such is indeed the normal procedure in all countries and all ages ; as Palgrave reminds us in an apt quotation from the Book of Ezra.

But we have gone a little in advance of our theme and must turn back to a consideration of the next stage in Archive evolution.

(c) Differentiation. We come here upon the first of a series of steps in the evolution of Archives consisting of the separation of bulky or important classes from the main series of Miscellanea into separate files, boxes, &c. The very important single document may have a box or pyx or other receptacle all to itself, as is seen in various cases in the first of the Record Inventories printed by Palgrave,2 cases which doubtless were a survival from still earlier times. Speaking, however, of the generality of Archives we may -say that from an original collection not arranged upon any particular principle there will very soon be separated off such classes as by reason of their numbers or the fact that they are frequently required for reference are judged worthy of the dignity of a separate file.3

1 On the subject of these early collections of Documents Received see Hall, pp. 13 et seqq., with the Authorities there quoted : cf. Tout, vol. i, p. 69.

2 The Antient Kalendars and Inventories of the Treasury of His Majesty's Exchequer (Record Commission, 1832) : the Inventory here referred to is that of Stapleton, completed in 1323. The curious will find in this work some pictures of receptacles anciently used for the storing of Archives. The whole work, which contains specimens of English Archivists' work from the fourteenth century (Stapleton) to the seven- teenth (Agarde) is of great historical interest to Archivists.

3 An obvious class of these would be those writs which are periodically required for reference — the contrdbrevia already mentioned, copies of Royal Writs issued by the Chancery which had some connexion with or bearing upon the Royal finances and would therefore be required at Audit. We may remark that once a class is thus differentiated it is a very small step, where the documents consist of copies or memoranda, from the making of such copies or memoranda on a series of scraps of parchment to their making upon scraps of an equal size which may be made up into a register or a roll : accordingly we shall presently find these contrabrevia taking the form of a roll.

26 RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING PART n

(d) Differentiation : continued. Differentiation may be based upon either the form or the subject-matter of the documents in question, the word ' form ' being understood in the sense both of physical shape and of diplomatic con- ception.

It is very possible that the irregular but large size of the Inquisitions post mortem, among the Chancery Records, the Escheats as they were generally called, was the original cause of their being placed in separate files : x it is quite clear, to take a later example, that the reason why, among the Archives of the African Company,2 the Journals of Cape Coast Castle formed a large separate series while the Day Books of that and other forts in Africa lay hid 3 amongst masses of miscellaneous papers, was that the second of these series was contained in small paper-bound books while the first was an imposing collection of large volumes. An instance of differentiation based on another kind of form (the diplomatic form of the document)4 is that of the earlier Norman Rolls? which are enrolments of copies of such letters under the great seal as were made and dated in Normandy. While an example of differentiation based on subject-matter (and incidentally of a modern mistake in classification) 6 is supplied by the later rolls in the same class 7 (dating from the fifth to the tenth year of Henry V), which are rolls

1 These documents, inquiries regarding the property held by tenants-in-ehief of the Crown, take the form of writs ordering the inquiries to be made (these were returned to the Chancery after execution) and the result of the inquiries in the form of parchments of an almost infinite variety of sizes and shapes according to the amount of the property to be described.

That they occupied separate files as early as the reign of Edward III is well established. That other Inquisitions (such as those of the classes known now as Criminal and Miscellaneous) had their place on the Miscellaneous Files of the Chancery is equally certain (see Record Office Calendar of Miscellaneous Inquisitions, vol. i, preface, pp. vii and viii). There is further an inolication that this distinction of the ' Escheats ' might occasionally be forgotten (ibid., p. xii, the Case of the * Proofs of Age ' found in 1841 on the ordinary Chancery Files). A good example will be found in the same place (p. xiii) of the rise of a small class — in this case the Inquisitions de Rebellious — to the temporary dignity of a separate file.

2 The Records of three companies which traded to Africa under Letters Patent of Incorporation came into the possession of the Treasury and are now among the Archives of that Department in the Public Record Office : see below, Part II, § 2 (/).

3 They have now been sorted out.

4 It is possible that the Inquisitions post mortem should properly be assigned to this class.

5 1 to 6 John, Numbers 1 to 7 in the present class at the Public Record Office.

6 See the article on the Records of John already quoted.

7 Numbers 8 to 17.

§ i THE EVOLUTION OF ARCHIVES 27

of matters relating to Normandy ; having no better connexion than the chance identity of name with the earlier Rolls.

It is worth while, in this connexion, to take a general view of differen- tiation in the Chancery. The original Miscellanea, or Files of Archives of all kinds, are split up into (1) Chancery Files — documents infilaciis — and (2) Chancery Enrolments. Amongst (1) we may distinguish Miscellaneous Files and Files dealing with particular subjects, while (2) immediately splits again into. Patent, Charter, and Liberate Rolls, being rolls of three different kinds of letter under the Great Seal. Now note the progress of the Liberate Roll.1 When we first meet it we recognize merely an enrolment form of the old file of contrabrevia already mentioned. Contrabrevia all take the form of letters close and it is only one step farther to add other letters close, not interesting the Exchequer, to those already enrolled, and our Liberate Roll becomes the Close Roll so well known to students in Record Commission and Record Office Calendars. But there is yet another step to come. The need for a roll containing only the Exchequer subjects is again felt and we get presently a new Liberate Roll split off from the Close Roll, which continues to exist separately.

By a further extension this new Liberate Roll has added to it copies of other writs of the same name authorizing the ' livery ' not of moneys but of lands in the hands of various of the King's officials.

We have gone into this case in some detail because in it we may see that the process of bifurcation is always going on, being indeed a condition of healthy active life, just as reproduction and increase are conditions of healthy active life elsewhere. But we may see some- thing else. Behind the newly-made series — in the case of the Chancery, the enrolments — there lies always a residuum of the undifferentiated, the old files, the classes which in the case of all English Medieval Courts have come to be known ultimately as the ' Ancient Miscellanea ' : and these, too, continue capable of throwing up new classes, which in their turn may bifurcate and carry on the development. Thus the Chancery Files contained always a certain number of Petitions referred by the Crown to the Chancellor or addressed to him directly. These might or might not be formed into special Files ; but out of them grew ultimately, some two hundred years after the system of Chancery Rolls had become an established thing, the great system of Equity

1 Liberate is the name given to writs authorizing delivery of money out of the Treasury. The Liberate Rolls here instanced must be carefully distinguished from the series bearing, at any rate in modern times, the same name which was kept at the Exchequer of Receipt. This second series is interesting because it is made up from the same writs which gave us the Chancery Roll, but at the other end : i. e. the Chancery Liberate are rolls of letters issued, the Exchequer series are rolls of letters received ; both are copied from the same originals.

28 RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING PART n

procedure l at the Chancery and the great separate classes of files of Chancery Proceedings ; which in due course themselves split up into divisions — the divisions of the six Clerks — besides throwing off all kinds of subordinate Archive Series.2

We are coming here to a fresh subject, that of the connexion between classes of Archives and classes of functions and functionaries in the Administrations which produce them. But before we deal with this it may be well to glance at the varying careers of all these generations of Archives.

(e) The varying careers of Archive Classes. While the original stock, the Ancient Miscellanea, continues to flourish and perhaps to throw out fresh branches, what may be the fate of its various offshoots ? There are several possibilities :

(1) An archive class may die out with the circumstances which brought it into being.

Thus the presence of the Jews in England and the special business which resulted caused the appearance at the Exchequer of Receipt, where money was paid in, of two special classes, separated off from the normal series of Receipt Rolls — the Rolls of Receipts from Jewish Talliages and from other Jewish sources.3 There was also a special legal Court, the Scaccarium ludeorum, with Records which were probably4 a differentiation from the contemporary Memoranda Rolls. Naturally with the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 all these Archive Classes lapsed. We have seen already a small instance of a short-lived Archive Class in the case of the Inquisitions de Rebellious.

(2) A class may be reabsorbed into the class from which it was differentiated.

Thus in the period of Edward I and Edward II there arose gradually a habit of recording receipts from taxation separately at the end of the ordinary Receipt Roll ; sometimes separate membranes were used and a separate roll resulted. Later these entries returned to the main roll.

1 The distinctive feature of this Equity Procedure was that it began with a petition— a Bill of Complaint — addressed to the Chancellor.

2 Chancery Depositions, Chancery Decrees and Orders, and the like.

3 See an article on Receipts from the English Jewry in Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society, vol. viii, pp. 19 et seqq.

4 This suggestion as to the origin of the Scaccarium ludeorum has been made elsewhere but has not yet been fully substantiated.

§ i THE EVOLUTION OF ARCHIVES 29

(3) Some or all of the functions of an Archive Class may pass from it.

Thus of the various uses of the Charter, the most formal of medieval letters under the great seal of England, which are summarized by Hardy in his introduction to the Rotuli Cartarum 1 most, during the fourteenth century, passed to another form of Royal letter, the letter patent, with a corresponding modification to the Charter Roll and Patent Roll.2

(4) Occasionally a series may be replaced by another having apparently the same functions and differing only in name.

Thus the function of recording confirmations passed from the Patent and Charter Rolls in 1483 to the series of Confirmation Rolls, and these again gave way to the Patent Roll later.3

(5) A class may become itself so important that its original connexion with the parent stock is almost or entirely lost sight of.

Thus the Exchequer of Pleas Plea Roll (the Record of a Common Law jurisdiction in the King's Remembrancer's department of the Exchequer) was probably in origin no more than a section split off from the Memoranda Roll ; but that origin (if it is the correct one) has be- come almost entirely obscured owing to its later growth and importance.

(/) Differentiation of Archive Classes and the redistribution of duties among personnel. All this changing of function is of course closely parallel to, in many cases directly caused by, changes in the staff of the Office to which they belong or at any rate in the allotment of the staff's duties. Nothing is more important in a study of the growth of archives than a study of the growth of the personnel of administration.4

1 Record Commission edition (1837).

2 Perhaps an even better example is that of the Close Roll, the chief interest of which in the time of John and Henry III is that it contains the King's personal letters. The custom grew up of enrolling on this private deeds (in consideration of a fee) for safe custody. Ultimately this became the sole use of the Roll, for which indeed it still exists.

3 The Charter Roll finally lapsed in 1516.

4 Professor Tout in his recent Chapters in Administrative History calls attention more than once to the necessity for a close study of appointments on the staffs of the various offices and the compilation of Lists of their holders.

30 RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING PART n

New offices, as a rule, tend naturally and immediately (as we have had opportunity of observing in England during the recent war) to increase the efficiency of their internal machinery by increasing their staff ; they always tend to rearrange and reshuffle duties as soon as they have had some experience of administration. Few things are so striking in administrative history as the way in which most high functionaries of our own day have developed out of very humble medieval begin- nings.

Thus the keeper of the Domus Conversorum had added to his duties about the time of the expulsion of the Jews that of keeping the Rolls of Chancery ; to-day the Master of the Rolls is titular head not only of the Chancery Records but of all the more important Public Archives of the Kingdom ; * besides enjoying eminent judicial functions and position : the Chancellor of the Exchequer of our day is an obscure clerk, hardly worthy of mention, in the time of the Dialogus : what had been subordinate posts about the medieval Exchequer became the prizes of Prime Ministers' sons in the days of Horace Walpole. To these large changes of function the Archive changes are always, as we have said, closely parallel ; but it is equally true that small changes in Archives generally connote some small change in the occupation of the places and functions of which the Archives are the visible sign. Probably the comparatively small changes in the functions of the various Chancery Enrolments are just as closely bound up with changes in the clerical staff as the appearance of the State Papers, so violently different in their form, or lack of form, from the executive instruments of earlier times, is bound up with the violent readjustment of the position and importance of the King's Secretary under the Tudors.2

(g) Archives, Ancient and Modern, Public and Private. It is important to observe that all the foregoing remarks, though we have illustrated them, for reasons of simplicity, mainly from Medieval Public Collections, apply equally to Ancient and Modern, Public and Private : there is practically — can be — no difference in the manner of development of functions and Archives which have existed a tempore de quo non exstat

1 By this survival, together with a number of more or less chance circumstances, the present Public Record Office occupies the site of the old Bolls Buildings and Chapel : cp. Hall, p. 118, quoting 57th Report of the Deputy Keeper.

2 On the early history of the State Paper Office, see Hall, pp. 30 et seqq.

§ i THE EVOLUTION OF ARCHIVES 31

memoria, and of the statute-provided Administrations and Registers of later days. At most, the latter, having the benefit of many analogies to guide them, may start at the second of the stages of evolution we have noted : may skip the stage of Miscellanea. Thus Parish Registers for the entering of Weddings, Christenings and Baptisms came into existence without any noteworthy preliminaries as the result of Cromwell's injunctions in 1538 : though even so, the Archives thus started have not been without important subsequent modification, notably that effected by the Act of 1812, which provided separate printed books for the three classes of entries — an obvious example of differentiation.1 Similarly a modern business firm when it comes into existence will not experiment but will start straight away with such books as the analogous experience of countless other firms of the same kind suggests to be suitable. It is hardly necessary to add that it is im- material for our purpose whether the Authority which calls such Archives into existence be internal or external, the head of an office on the one hand, or on the other, Parliament, directing by statute that such and such Archives shall be kept : by one process or another they come to life and, having come, live and develop along certain lines.

(h) Order of Differentiation. We have now two natural classifications of Archives. First, we saw that all Archives fall into three classes — things received, things issued, and proceedings : secondly, we found that they might be divided into two classes of undifferentiated on the one hand and on the other those which had been differentiated out, according to subject or form, into regular series. Whether these take the form of Rolls, Registers, or Files does not particularly affect us, nor alter the archive character of the documents themselves : for example Close Rolls have since 1903 taken the form of Books without causing any break in the continuous series running from the time of John to our own day. We

1 For a convenient summary of the history of Parish Register Form see A. Hamilton Thompson, Parish History and Records (Helps for Students of History : S.P.C.K.), pp. 42 et seqq.

32 RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING PART n

also saw that the process of differentiation is always going on — may affect a single set of Archives again and again.

It is to be noticed that these two classifications do not always work into each other in the same way : we cannot say, for example, that any one of the three divisions of receipts, issues, and proceedings is always the first to be differentiated off from a class which contains all three.

Thus at the Medieval Exchequer of Audit the two first series to be differentiated are the Pipe Roll (proceedings only) and the Memoranda Roll (which summarizes the whole business of the Department, In- letters, Out-letters, and Proceedings) : the Chancery on the other hand appears to have differentiated first the Out-letters (copies, mostly on Rolls), then certain classes of the In-letters (returns to writs, on files) ; while no Proceedings appear as a separate class for quite a con- siderable time. Medieval Legal Administration in England for a long time differentiates little save proceedings (Plea Rolls and the files of Feet of Fines). Among semi-public and private Archives, Bishops' Registers show us, it is true, archives kept in a standard form, but the contents of the Registers are miscellaneous and a similar remark may be made of the Cartularies of private persons or Religious Houses.

(i) The Hands of Former Archivists. Before we conclude this section we must not omit to mention one further stage in the evolution of archives ; the stage, or stages, of development through which they have passed in the hands of other Archivists before they reach us. Unfortunately the earlier custodians of the Public Records in England (for example) have not always been as reasonable as we could wish in their treatment of their charges. To take only one instance the State Papers x are known to have had one classification in 1545 and to have been re- classified by Sir Thomas Wilson about 1620 and again by Sir Joseph Williamson about 1680 ; they were then ' methodized ' between 1764 and 1800 ; and between 1848 and 1862 came under the State Paper Office classification : all this before they reached the Public Record Office, to undergo arrangement there. This again is a matter we shall have to consider later ; mean- while we may remark that it is clear the very dating of a paper

1 See Hall, pp. 134 et seqq.

§§ i, 2 THE EVOLUTION OF ARCHIVES 33

or the identification of its writer may depend upon our know- ledge of its whereabouts at a date far removed, perhaps, from our own, but equally long after its original compilation.

§ 2. Transmission of Archives : the Question of Custody

In previous sections we have dwelt upon the extreme importance, for the preservation of Archive character in documents, of the question of Custody. In Section 1 of this part we have seen something of the evolution of Archives and of the Classes into which they fell and fall ; and in the last part of that section we referred to the stages through which any Archive Classes which are handed down to the modern Archivist may have passed in the hands of other Archivists, his prede- cessors. This may serve to introduce us to a consideration of the ways in which Ancient Archives have been commonly transmitted to our own times. Only upon a consideration of such details in Archive history can we found a system of keeping and classification which may be held reasonably safe.

(a) Where the Administration which produced the Archives continues to function. So long as the administrative or executive office discharged by the original owner of the Archives con- tinues to function, so long may this ' Administrator ' be con- sidered to be undying. His successor or successors take over, by themselves or their deputies, his collections of written memorials and use them, when occasion arises, as their original compiler would have used them.1 Thus the Heads of the Courts of Common Pleas and of King's Bench in (say) 1800 were the possessors of what we may call a joint official memory dating

1 A good deal of the history of early consultation of Records is to be found in the case of the Public Records of England in the class at the Public Record Office known formerly as ' County Plaeita ' and now in the Chancery Miscellanea, being information transmitted to the Chancery by officials in charge of Archives elsewhere, such for example as Agarde and Fanshawe, whose signatures will be found in (e. g.) bundle 71, file 2.

A good example of early consultation of Ancient Archives was noted recently in a Plea Roll of Edward Ill's reign, which bears a note (the copy of a writ) as to its consultation added in 16 James I (Chester 29/67, m. 114 : cp. Curia Regis Roll 160, a Plea Roll of Henry III to which are attached two writs of Edward III).

1569-40 r>

34 RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING PART n

back to the twelfth century in the shape of the Archives now known as Curia Regis Rolls.1

(b) Where a new Administration carries on the same functions. But now let us take the history a step farther. In 1873 the functions of the two Courts we have mentioned were transferred to the Supreme Court of Judicature. What then happened to their Archives ? Obviously they are transferred with the func- tions in question and start a new lease of life, the archive line re- maining still unbroken, as a part of the written memorials of this new Administrative body.2 A precisely parallel case would be (to take only one instance) the acquisition of an estate with its title deeds and other muniments from the family of A., which had held it for ten generations, by the family of B., which proceeds to hold it for ten more.

For example the Manor of Easter or High Easter, in Essex, originally in the possession of Geoffrey de Mandeville, passed through Beatrix de Say, his descendant in the female line, to Geoffrey Fitz Peter, through whose daughter it passed to the family of de Bohun, Earls of Hereford : after remaining in the de Bohun family for some generations it passed, again through the female line, to Thomas of Woodstock in 1371, thence once more through the female line to the Earls of Stafford after 1399, and thence, at the division of the Bohun inheritance in 1421, to King Henry V, who annexed it to the Duchy of Lancaster.3 According to one account 4 it was again granted out by the Crown to the Duke of

1 The earliest of these in existence dates from 5 Richard I : the Curia Regis was differentiated into two courts, known to us as the Courts of King's Bench and Common Pleas, in the thirteenth century, from which date they have separate Archives.

2 Another example is afforded by the Records of the Office of First Fruits and Tenths set up by Henry VIII after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. These records passed to the custody of the Commissioners of Queen Anne's Bounty, a body set up, on the authority of an Act of Parliament, by letters patent of Queen Anne. They passed again to the charge and superintendence of the Master of the Rolls by the Record Office Act of 1838. They have now been classed as Archives of the Exchequer (First Fruits and Tenths Division), but one class of them continued in existence after the Act of 1838 (the Bishops Certificates of Institutions and Benefices) and these properly belong to the Archives of the Commissioners. See below, Part II, § 6 (I), the remarks on Arrangement : Chief Principle.

3 Cp. Hardy, Charters of the Duchy of Lancaster, pp. 179 and 182.

4 Dugdale, Baronage, vol. i, p. 169 ; quoted by G. E. C., Complete Peerage (old and new editions). Dugdale's statement, however, rests on a sign manual of Richard III, which he saw ' in Castro de Stafford ', and, as in the case of a like docu-

§ 2 TRANSMISSION OF ARCHIVES 35

Buckingham in 1483, but it is doubtful whether this grant, if genuine, ever took effect ; if it did the manor reverted, on the Duke's execution, to the Crown and to the Duchy of Lancaster, with the estates of which it remained thereafter. A fine series 1 of Court Rolls, dating from so early as the reign of Henry III, has faithfully followed these wanderings and is now among the Records of the Duchy of Lancaster at the Public Record Office. Unfortunately for English local history private muni- ments have not always been handed over, when an estate was trans- ferred, so punctiliously or carefully as in the case of these Court Rolls ; as may indeed be seen in the parallel series of Ministers1 Accounts, showing the administrative side of the same manor, which survive only from the reign of Richard II,2 and in the even worse fate which appears to have befallen the deeds.

(c) Where the function ceases but the Administration goes on. So far there is little difficulty ; but this does not exhaust the possibilities of the case. Let us now suppose that the branch of work to which a certain class of Archives is attached ceases altogether but that other functions of the same office continue. Thus the Court of Common Pleas, which we saw handing over its functions and Archives to the Supreme Court of Judicature, had anciently a method whereby the transference of land from one private person to another could be made a matter of record in the Archives of the Court — the process known as levying a fine, after a fictitious action in the Court — and a corresponding Archive class of Feet of Fines.3 This process, and these Archives, were stopped by Act of Parliament in 1834, the other functions of the Court of Common Pleas continuing. Here, however, there is again no difficulty. The Head of the Court and his

ment already cited (above, Part I, § 2 (/)), there is no Public Record to sustain it. For the descent of the Manor see Morant, History of Essex, vol. ii, p. 455.

1 It runs from 33 Henry III (Court Rolls 62/750) to 1815 (ibid. 77/975) with comparatively few gaps. Another well-known and fine series is that of the Tooting Court Rolls, now in the possession of the London County Council, which also date from the thirteenth century.

2 Duchy of Lancaster Ministers' Accounts, bundles 42 to 52 and 58 to 72.

3 The existing class of these Feet dates from Henry II to William IV. The Record consisted of an indenture in triplicate of which the Court and the two parties preserved each one part. An interesting example of the transmigrations of private muniments is furnished by one or two cases where the muniments of the two parties having for some reason come into the hands of the Crown the Record Office is enabled to put together again the three parts : one instance is reproduced in facsimile in Johnson and Jenkinson, Court Hand Illustrated, Part II, plate XVII (6).

D 2

36 RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING PART n

successors continue to hold, as part of their official heritage, these obsolete archives, the position of which as historical, and indeed as legal, evidence is not impaired by the fact that the Office of Cheirographer, and other offices formerly connected with the process, have ceased to exist.

(d) Where both Administration and Function cease. But now let us suppose that the whole of the functions of an Archive- owning and Archive-making Office cease simultaneously. In this case one of two things may happen. Either the head of the expiring office as a part, duly authenticated, of his official 6 winding-up ' may transfer his Archives to the custody of some other Archive-keeping official. He may do this under instruction or upon his own initiative. Examples of Archives so trans- ferred are furnished by the case of Copyright Records transferred to the Public Record Office when the Act of 1911 brought the old Copyright Administration to a close ; and again, in a still more remarkable degree, by the deposit in the same office of the Archives of an ancient Inn of Court (a private institution) — those of Serjeants' Inn, abolished in 1883. In these cases the Archives pass to a fresh stage of their history in new surround- ings and with new connexions ; still, however, without any real break in the continuity of their custody, the Master of the Rolls being the Official Trustee, as it were, of an unlimited number of dead Administrations, statutory heir to their Archive-preserving functions.

Alternatively, as is the fortune of many manorial and other real property Archives in England in these days of extinction of manors and the disuse of ' long title ' to land, such Archives may lie, so to speak, where they have been left and await what fortune has in store for them. In such a case there will soon come a break in the continuity of their Archive history which no subsequent care in preservation can altogether bridge. The question of the fate of private Archives placed in such a pre- dicament is discussed below.

(e) Mixed Cases. It is to be noticed that any two or more of these adventures may befall a single Archive or set of Archives at different stages in its transmission. This will occur par-

§ 2 TRANSMISSION OF ARCHIVES 37

ticularly when an Archive preserved originally in one connexion is later made to serve a different Archive purpose.

Thus a Cartulary of the Abbey of Ramsey,1 after serving its original purpose for two centuries, passed at the Dissolution into the hands of the Cromwell Family, who obtained a portion of the Abbey lands ; it was later produced in evidence in a case .in the Court of Exchequer and remained afterwards among the Archives of that Court ; and it has now been transferred, with other Archives of the same Court, to the custody of the Master of the Rolls.2 A similar cartulary of the Abbey of Chertsey is less fortunate and its present archive quality must be held to date only from 1653 when it came to the Exchequer through Sir Henry Spiller, who had recovered it from the hands of ' Mrs. Coggs of Egham ', who almost certainly had no title to it.3 Cases of change of custody of this kind are particularly common where an Archive at a more or less late stage of its career is used as a voucher to a Public account 4 or an exhibit in a suit : and we have also the contrary case where what should have been Public Archives come down to us in private collections,5 but still with a certain Archive quality. Yet another survivor from the dissolution of the Monasteries, the Cartulary of Pershore Abbey,6 owes its present position to a different chain of adventures : it was bought in Fleet Street in 1598 by one William Bell, who has appended a note describing the transaction ; and was subsequently deposited by Fulk Greville with William Mynterne, Keeper of the Records at the Augmentation Office, becoming a Public Record as from June 20th, 1620 : of the transitions from its original owners to Bell and from Bell to Greville nothing is known.

(/) Custody : what is a Responsible Person ? We have seen

1 Printed in the series of Chronicles and Memorials : see the Introduction to that edition, p. vii.

2 K. R. Mine. Books, No. 28 : the Chertsey Cartulary is No. 25 in the same series.

3 Surrey Record Society, Chertsey Cartulary (London, 1915), p. vi.

4 Cp. an Exchequer Case noted in Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries, 2nd series, vol. xxvi, p. 36. The class of Exchequer Accounts (K. R.) in the Public Record Office is full of such examples.

6 The quality of many of the great collections of State papers not in the Public Record Office to which the Historical MSS. Commission's Reports introduce us is of course that of private Archives : such are the Cecil Papers still at Hatfield House, the Collections of the Duke of Leeds (mentioned in another connexion below, Part II, § 6 («/))» the Elizabethan Musters so frequently found amongst Private Muniments (e. g. those in the Losely MSS. printed by the Surrey Record Society), and many others.

6 Now Augmentation Office, Miscellaneous Books, 61 : see again as to this book, Part II, § 6 (z).

38 RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING PART n

that the original custodian of Archives is some person connected with the Administration which produced them : we have seen also that the administrative functions and the Archives may be transferred to a totally different administrative authority without the Archives losing their character ; nay, the functions may lapse and the Archives be taken over by some person or office totally unconnected with them and yet the chain of custody remain unbroken.

A final example shows all these processes occurring, that of the African Company : * in this case the Archives of the first Company (incorporated 1662) passed to the second Company (incorporated 1672), whose collec- tions passed in turn to a third with a quite different constitution (incorporated 1750) : upon the abolition of this last Company by Act of Parliament in 1820 its Archives passed to the Treasury : and they are now in the Public Record Office with the Archives of that Depart- ment.

The question naturally suggests itself, what is the criterion of custody ? It would seem that the custody of any given person or official must not cease without his expressly handing over his functions as Archive-keeper to some other responsible person. But this merely leaves us the task of denning a ' responsible person '.

It is at this point that, for Archive purposes, we must part company with the legal definition of custody.2 The matter is one for a separate section, but an example may make clearer what is the exact point to be discussed. The writer was recently confronted with the case where a Public Librarian had, for the safety of the document, accepted custody of an old Parish Register. Now although from a legal point of view this Archive would certainly have lost evidential value in passing from the custody of its proper guardian, the Rector of the parish, was it not arguable, historically speaking, that if the book had been handed over upon an undertaking that certain forms of custody should be observed its archive quality might be reasonably

1 For a note on the Archives of this Company see Transactions of the Royal His- torical Society, 3rd series, vol. vi, pp. 185 et seqq.

2 See above, Part I, § 2 (/).

§§ 2, 3 TRANSMISSION OF ARCHIVES 39

assumed to be intact ? In point of fact in the particular case instanced the book proved to have been, amongst other adven- tures, through at least one Sale Room 1 and the question of continuous custody could no longer arise. But in other cases it might — and does — arise, and it will be well for us to be prepared with an answer.

§ 3. What is an Archivist?

Here, put baldly, is the real point at issue. So far we have classed as an Archivist (by the terms of our definition of Archives) either the person who takes over, by himself or his deputy, as part of the legitimate inheritance of an office he fulfils the written memorials of its activities in the past, or, as in the case of an official of the Public Record Office, a person charged with the duty of receiving from the functionaries of (some- times) expiring other institutions the inheritance for which there will be no direct heir, a kind of Public Trustee. The question now arises — supposing there is neither heir nor any one willing to take the first step of depositing, can the Public Archivist go out of his way and intervene uninvited to save the life and character of the Archives ? More important still, since the official Archivist has very generally his hands full, can any public body, not being an official receiver of other people's Archives, constitute itself an Archivist ad hoc ? And, if so, upon what conditions ?

There are numerous and valuable classes of Archive collection in England, and no doubt elsewhere, in the case of which such action would undoubtedly be desirable, but it will be sufficient to take one as an example. Owing to the modern legislation 2 by which only proof of ; short title ' is now required in the transference of real property, collections of old deeds formerly preserved for a practical legal purpose (that of showing title) have ceased to have any raison d'etre save an historical one. The result is that they are perishing daily in the lumber rooms of

1 Compare the case of the Pershore Cartulary, cited above, (e).

2 The Conveyancing Act of 37/38 Victoria.

40 RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING PART n

solicitors and the like places ; or, dragged out of those doubtful refuges, are being dismembered, sold (whether to the antique dealer or the glue merchant or the Museum) and dispersed. Merely to save archives so important for local history by offering them an asylum is a work of piety and usefulness ; but the question may also be raised whether they (and, consequently, any other collections of unwanted Archives which may be found anywhere in a similar plight) can be preserved with full status as Archives.

We make no apology for emphasizing this most important point. Here is no question of legal transfer as in the case of the Common Pleas Records instanced above ; no question of the last official of a vanishing Administration deliberately handing over custody (as in the case of the Copyright Records already cited) to a competent authority, i. e. to one already functioning as an Archive-keeper. It is the case of the Archivist making the first move, intervening in order to preserve : or even of a suitable public body constituting itself an Archivist for the purposes of the case.

It is the undoubted duty of the Official Custodian of Archives which regularly accrue1 to remind the depositing Administration of his existence from time to time and to offer any useful suggestions.2 The question is — can we also lay it down that a Public Authority not primarily concerned with the keeping of any Archives save its own may declare itself a responsible custodian prepared to take over such archives as those referred to above and not merely to keep them safe but to give them continuous custody ? Such a course may obviously be most desirable, and it seems to the present writer equally obvious that such an authority may perfectly well take it under certain conditions, conditions which will ensure the continuance of such a measure of custody as would have been the portion of the Archives had they been and remained intensely important for the practical purposes of administration.3

Let us put down, then, here the conditions which would

1 e. g. the Records of the Supreme Court which are deposited at regular intervals at the Public Record Office.

2 See below, Part IV, § 13.

3 See also the note on foreign practice in this matter in the next section.

§3 WHAT IS AN ARCHIVIST ? 41

make a collection of private deeds or papers taken over by (say) a Public Library as safe physically and as secure in their reputation for impartiality and authenticity as the Muniments of the Crown, preserved once in the Treasury of the Receipt of the Exchequer at Westminster and now in the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane.

(1) There must be reasonable probability of the Authority's own continued existence. Thus a Borough Library or a County Muniment Room is a stable thing : it is hardly conceivable that such Authority should come to a sudden end, without at least handing over its functions to a regular successor.1

(2) The Archives must be taken over direct from the original owner or his official heir or representative.

(3) The authority taking over must be prepared to subscribe to the ordinary rules of Archive management directed to the preservation of Archive character. What these are in the matter of safety, custody, and methods of arrangement we have tried to indicate in §§ 5 and 6 of this part of the present work ; but we may notice one in particular here.

(4) In all cases, then, the Authority taking over must be prepared to take over en bloc : there must be no selecting of ' pretty ' specimens.

It is not to be said, of course, that short of these conditions no one may house and preserve documents which would other- wise be derelict ; but it seems clear that, with them, all con- ditions of Archive value may be preserved so far as concerns the Research worker. A good example of the preservation of private collections in some such way as the above is furnished by the case of the Watt Papers now in the Birmingham Free Library.2 These do not entirely fulfil our conditions, for they

1 It is at this point that we note the extreme importance from our point of view of the arrangement by which the study of Librarianship in this country is now made to include some study of Archive Science. The first important step towards the proper conservation of private and local muniments in England was probably taken when the Library Association decided to include this study in the training of the Librarian.

2 I am indebted for the details of this example to my former student, Mr. L. Chubb, of the Birmingham Free Library.

42 RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING PART n

were purchased by a private owner when the works closed down about 1893, though up to then custody had been continuous ; and only acquired by the Library in 1911. They have, however, been preserved from dispersal. In many counties also the voluntary effort of Local Authorities x or Local Societies is doing something to rescue private muniments from destruction if not always from the loss of their archive characteristics. If the present note does anything to increase such activities it will have been useful.

§ 4 Archives and Museums

The rule as to taking over en bloc will, it may be feared, be one that rules out Museums in many cases. The British Museum, for example, has a collection of Administrative documents which is formed out of the wreck of hundreds of earlier sets of muniments : an interesting, valuable, and beautiful accumula- tion 2 which is, of course, admirably selected and most carefully conserved. No Archivist could wish (it is almost superfluous to say) for better guardianship or custody than these documents receive. At the same time no Archivist, even in the cases where these documents have been taken over direct from the original owners 3 and custody has consequently been preserved un- broken, could possibly allow full Archive value to documents which have been violently torn from the connexion in which they were originally preserved, a connexion which in nine cases out of ten is important, if not vital, for the full understanding of their significance.

Museums are naturally restricted to preserving Museum specimens and it may be questioned, therefore, whether an

1 The collections, to take one example, of the Bedfordshire County Council include, I understand, much beside the Records in the statutory keeping of the Clerk of the Peace and the Clerk to the County Council.

2 For a general summary of this collection and an explanation of its existence see Sir Frederick Kenyon's note in the Royal Commission's First Report, vol. ii, pp. 25, 26.

3 In many cases, of course, they have been obtained through the Sale Room. If an Archivist may venture to offer a suggestion to Museums in general it would be well if, in their Catalogues, they informed students in every case of the provenance of the documents described.

§§ 3, 4 ARCHIVES AND MUSEUMS 43

ideal arrangement would not be one by which they took over only isolated specimens whose connexions were already lost, leaving the Archivist to deal with all more or less intact col- lections.1 There can be no doubt that the latter should not, if he can help it, take in, by way of gift or otherwise, documents which have not an Archive quality, saving where they are strays which fill gaps in existing series and can be preserved accordingly, with a suitable distinguishing mark,2 in company with the others to which they historically belong. Thus the deposit of the Rodney Papers and the Chatham MSS.3 at the Public Record Office may be justified on the grounds of Archive quality, though in view of the character, strictly relating to Public Administration, of the other Archives preserved there, the policy is perhaps doubtful. There can be no reasonable ground for the gift 4 of a single Saxon charter being made to that office instead of to the British Museum.5

We cannot close this section without a word as to the foreign practice in regard to the matter of which we have been speaking. We have already indicated that one of the main distinctions between English and foreign Archive practice lies in the emphasizing of Custody in this country ; and have given reasons for thinking that this emphasis is by no means undue.6 We are bound therefore to note here that the practice of French, and still more of Belgian, Archivists in the matter of the re- ception into their Archives of documents of both public and private nature from all kinds of sources goes quite contrary to

1 Since this passage was written the question has been specifically raised in connexion with the breaking up of large estates in England at the present time and the consequent possible danger to their Muniments, by a letter to the newspapers from the Director of the British Museum, in which the policy of selection is inciden- tally stated. See The Times, August 20, 1921, and a letter on the subject by Mr. Minet published in the same paper on August 23.

2 At the Public Record Office such recovered strays are stamped with a special inscription ' some time out of custody '.

3 The first were deposited by Mr. Harley Rodney in 1906 ; the second by Admiral Pringle in 1888.

4 There is one such in the ' Miscellaneous ' section of the Deposited Documents.

5 For an early example of a private archive deposited in a Public Record Office see the case of the Pershore Abbey Cartulary, quoted above, Part II, § 2 (e).

• Above, Part I, § 2 (/).

44 RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING PART n

our doctrine. Not content with receiving deposits of private archives from their original owners (which, as we have sug- gested, may be a very desirable course under certain conditions), the Belgian authorities apparently buy isolated specimens on a large scale : their Archives, in fact, represent a kind of com- bination of the British Museum Manuscripts and the Public Record Office Archives. No doubt the accession numbers given to all such accroissements distinguish them adequately, for those who like to probe deeply enough into the Official Reports, from the genuine Archives ; but we cannot help regretting that an Archive Service which is regarded as one of the first in the world should in this matter deviate from one of the chief principles laid down in the Manuel — that for the Archivist, Archive interests should be primary and Historical ones secondary. For with all respect to the eminent authorities of the Belgian Archives, we cannot think that a stray paper from some dis- persed family collection, itself picked up in a sale, is a fit inmate for a National Archive Establishment.1

§ 5. The Primary Duties of an Archivist : (i) Physical Defence

of Archives

In dealing with these we must premise that we are con- cerned with the Archivist at present only as a person owing service to the past and to the memorials of the past. What, if any, should be his relations to Administrators now engaged in compiling the Archives of the future or to those who may come after them is a question we shall have to put and answer later. Up to now we are concerned with his duties to the more or less formed collections of Archives that he has already taken over. These duties, it may be recalled, we have already 2 divided into Primary and Secondary : the first being his duties towards the Archives themselves ; the second (to be considered only when the first have been satisfactorily discharged) his duties in the matter of publication and generally making avail-

1 See the various sections showing such accessions in Lea Archives de Vfitat en Belgique pendant la guerre.

2 Above, Part I, § 5.

§§ 4, 5 PHYSICAL DEFENCE OF ARCHIVES 45

able for use by students. The subject being somewhat long we propose to treat these two varieties of duty under separate sections, and moreover to divide the first again into two parts. In effect it is obvious that duties to the Archives themselves consist in their defence against all kinds of dangers ; but these dangers fall into two clearly defined classes, Physical and Moral. The present section will accordingly treat of the first of these — the Physical ; l which are mainly external, i. e. pro- ceeding from sources other than the Archivist himself.

c There is a fower-fould hurte ', said Agarde,2 writing in 1610, c that by negligence may bringe wracke to records ; that is to say Fier, Water, Rates and Mice, Misplacinge.' The summary is not, perhaps, quite complete from a modern point of view, but may serve as a text to our notes on the physical dangers against which Archives are to be defended.

(a) The Repository.3 From the point of view of safety from fire and damp the Archivist, if he has the supervision of construction, should have, with the modern resources of asbestos, steel, stone, and concrete4 at his disposal, little difficulty. The chief danger in fact is not lest the building itself, in such a case, should catch fire or suffer from damp but lest neighbouring buildings should catch fire and by their collapse, by flying fragments of flaming material, by the mere heat generated in their burning, or by the water poured in to save them, damage the Repository or its contents. It is easy, in fact, to specify for

1 Many of these have been admirably dealt with by Mr. Johnson and are only recapitulated here for the sake of completeness and because the present treatment of the subject demands a different arrangement. Much information on the subject will also be found scattered in the Reports of the late Royal Commission on Public Records, especially in the appendices dealing with the visits of Commissioners to various foreign and other Archive Repositories.

2 Palgrave, vol. ii, p. 313.

3 On the subject of Foreign Archive Repositories see the Royal Commission's First Report, vol. ii, pp. 130, 140, &c. ; especially concerning the Provincial Archives at Antwerp and the Town Archives at Rotterdam : together with various articles there quoted.

4 Steel and stone or concrete construction for buildings is naturally indicated and steel or iron and slate may serve for a considerable part of modern library fittings. The National Library of Wales has adopted the plan of wooden doors lined with asbestos.

46 RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING PARTII

a fire-proof and damp-proof building, and the Archivist's chief trouble will probably be to secure that the Repository shall be sufficiently isolated from other buildings.1 At the same time no precautions in the way of hose and sand apparatus, fire alarms, direct telephonic communication with the Fire Brigade, and a regular Fire Drill for the staff should be omitted.

After our experience in the late war of the penetrating power of heavy bombs dropped from aircraft, it is doubtful whether any provision can be made against such a danger, these bombs being generally fitted with a ' delay action fuse ' ; but some form of ' arresting ' and ' bursting courses ' in the shape of stone or concrete roofs and floors would at least do no harm.

Heating, which must be thoroughly efficient, is probably best supplied by hot- water pipes, with a furnace outside the building ; and lighting by electricity, all wires being enclosed in external metal pipes. For special cases portable electric stoves may be useful : but it is to be noticed that for the most part documents need not warmth but dryness ; and this should be assured once and for all.

Possible burglary will be provided against, presumably, by the usual means and by either an efficient patrolling during off- hours or by a very carefully devised system for the custody of keys ; none of which, saving external ones (and those only in the custody of selected officials), should be allowed to go outside the building. At least one person officially connected with the Archives should always be within reach in case of an emergency.2

If the Archivist has not the supervision of construction and must utilize an old building, he can only endeavour to incor- porate as many of the above features as possible and increase,

1 Cf. on this and some other Repository questions M. Joseph Cuvelier in the Bibliographe Moderne (1909), pp. 241 et seqq., and an article by Mr. Louis A. Simon in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1916, p. 147.

2 It follows that in the case of a large Repository there should be an official residence annexed to, though separate from, the Repository. The policy of separating all staff quarters from the Repository is a good one because it renders unnecessary certain restrictions upon the staff in the matter of fires, &c. Except for this reason I am not disposed to consider it so essential as do some authorities ; and it is not always compatible with convenience in working.

§ 5 PHYSICAL DEFENCE OF ARCHIVES 47

if possible, all precautions and supervision. He should clearly, in such circumstances, pay particular attention to the question of the accessibility of his more important archives, to schemes for evacuation in case of need (having special regard to windows which can be opened easily, widely and outwards), and to the ready availability, for those responsible, of information as to the whereabouts of particular classes of Archives.

(b) The Repository (continued). Of other considerations in the planning of repositories perhaps the most important is that of Air, which is the best of all preservatives of parchment and paper.1 It should be possible to secure at will a through draught in any room or space in which documents are stored ; and pro- vision should be made for this being utilized as often as possible. If it is absolutely necessary even considerations of Cleanliness, as we have pointed out elsewhere, must come second to this of Air. So true is this that in some situations where dust and dirt are acute problems the experiment has been tried (as at the John Rylands Library in Manchester) of filtering the air through cotton waste or other material: though if this is done the screens presumably need very frequent cleansing or renewal.

Light is also valuable, though it is not wise to expose docu- ments too much to the direct rays of the sun because of their possible effect in 4 fading ' the ink or warping the parchment or paper. Too much sunlight is also definitely harmful to leather bindings.

Cleaning space should always be left on every floor into which documents can be removed while their place is being cleaned, painted, &c.2 No large collection should be without the installation of a vacuum cleaner, with brush attachment, for the cleansing of the parcels, &c., themselves : though dirt, of course, is a danger of varying intensity3 according to the situation of the Repository.

1 Particularly fine provision for Light and Air is made in the storing accommo- dation of the new National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth : but most Archivists cannot command unlimited space.

2 The best system of cleaning for a large Repository is one of regular rotation by which one space on each floor is always empty and in process of being cleaned, &c.

3 On the subject of air and of dirt see also below, the remarks as to receptacles.

48 RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING PARTII

Convenience in working should be consulted by the pro- vision, first, of easy means of communication between all parts of the building ; second, of a space (capable of being locked up) reserved for reception, sortation, stamping and numbering; third, of lifts, in the case of large buildings, placed centrally and capable of accommodating a man and a barrow (a lock-up Lift-Room at top and bottom is also a desirable feature) ; and fourth, of accommodation for students in a like central position. All these things make for a decrease in the handling and a consequent increase in the safety of documents.

(c) The Repository : provision of accommodation for students. Since this subject has been mentioned, it may be worth while to mention one or two notable requirements. Natural light should come, in as large quantities as possible, from one side, the left, of the reader (so that no shadow is cast by his writing hand) : the ideal would probably be a long room having one side almost entirely of windows, from which narrow tables (with the students' chairs on one side only) should project not quite at right angles, so that every one sat slightly in advance of his left- hand neighbour. Overhead lighting is not desirable 1 if good side-lighting can be obtained. It is important that handling and rubbing of documents should be minimized, and therefore stands for volumes (and, if possible, special stands for rolls and other particular forms of documents) should be provided and their use made obligatory. Artificial light should take the form of shaded electric lights which can be lowered to within a few inches of the documents. Shelves for Indexes and Reference Books 2 are as obvious a provision as tables and chairs. Other arrangements with regard to the use of archives by the public are mentioned below.3

1 The two chief Search Rooms at the Public Record Office afford an opportunity of comparing the two methods of lighting. The overhead lighting of the Literary Search Room has been praised by more than one foreign authority (e. g. M. Cuvelier, op. cit.), but there is no doubt that the side-lighting from the readers' left hand, if it can be obtained in sufficient strength, is better. It might possibly be supplemented by partial overhead lighting, the side windows being continued as it were in a roof the lower edge of which was glazed.

2 A rough sketch of an Archivist's Minimum Bibliography is attempted in Appendix II : it applies almost equally to the requirements of a Student's Room.

3 Paragraphs (/) to (»'), (fc), and (TO) of this section.

§ 5 PHYSICAL DEFENCE OF ARCHIVES 49

(d) The Repository : Economy of Space. We come finally to what, for most Archivists securing the building of a Reposi- tory, would probably be an essential feature. We discuss below the question of shelving, but so far as the actual building is concerned there is no doubt that the best plan is, as a rule, the stack system. By this the space wasted on corridors and party walls is saved, the divisions of the Repository being by floors only. These, however, whether they are iron stages in a single lofty hall or room or actual ceilings and floors, should not be far apart : it is undesirable to have shelves out of easy reach ; because this may lead to the damaging of documents, especially heavy ones, when they are being taken out from a top shelf.

(e) Shelving. The original idea of a Library or Repository as a room having its walls covered with shelving has now long given way to that of a series of spaces filled to about half their capacity, or perhaps less, by means of presses projecting at right angles from the wall and having, as it were, short passages between them ; each of these ' passages ' starting from a win- dow. There is no doubt that this is the ideal from the points of view of air, light, and convenience. In most cases, however, the plan which is most economical of cubic capacity must be chosen, and this is undoubtedly the arrangement by which presses projecting from each of two opposite walls to a depth of nearly one-third of the total available breadth have practically no space left between them : the remaining third of the room space forms a central passage between the two sets of presses and into this, by means of an arrangement of small wheels on rails, any one of the presses may be pulled so as to give access to its contents. By this plan nearly two-thirds of the total cubic capacity is filled ; and with reasonable care the necessary circulation of air can still be secured.

The uprights of such cases could probably be made only of steel. The principal objection of those who dislike the system is that the steel shelves are destructive of bindings and covers. Given the steel uprights, however, there is nothing to prevent the shelves being of any material. The danger from fire is very

E

1569-40

50 RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING PART n

little increased if they are made of wood, the kindliest of all materials, as is the case in the Library of Wales : the Record Office has slates, covered in some cases with leather ; and possibly the idea of thus lining the shelves for the lighter and the more valuable documents (especially those in small books) might still be used : very thick plate-glass would probably be the ideal, owing to the absence of friction ; and this material was employed, we believe, for shelving the precious library of the late Mr. Pierpont Morgan. Possibly the solution of the future will be some form of enamelled (not painted) metal. In Belgium a kind of smooth beton arme has been tried with success. The walls of the presses (between the uprights) should be of some form of skeleton work or netting in metal so as to allow of the passage of air.

(/) Receptacles. Coming now to the system of packing we are dealing with a subject one side of which (the arrangement of documents from the point of view of packing convenience) remains to be discussed below under the heading of Arrangement and Classification. But there are certain simple facts which may be stated here. The chief difficulty lies in reconciling the necessity of letting in air with the necessity (in such places as London, particularly) of keeping out dirt in the form of dust. Different shapes and forms of documents lend themselves to a greater or less degree to boxing and enveloping and in some instances it may be necessary to choose between cleanliness and air, in which case air must have the first place. As a rule, however, it is possible to meet both. At the Public Record Office parchment deeds, for example, are loosely folded1 and slipped each into a stout, square, flapless envelope, numbered with the same number as the deed : a box the dimensions of which in section are slightly larger than those of the envelopes receives them in the fashion of cards in a card-index : a loose lid with a deep brim closes it. For loose small documents of

1 Documents on paper should never be folded if it can be avoided, but it is better to fold than to mutilate by cutting them up as is suggested by some writers. A paper can nearly always be folded at a place where there is no writing and the hinge strengthened with gauze (see below, para. (ft). For extreme cases there is always the resource of a roll.

§ 5 PHYSICAL DEFENCE OF ARCHIVES 51

irregular size, or for small rolls, larger boxes of similar con- struction but having the lid hinged are used. A good plan here is to have the end of the box l opposite to that on which the lid is hinged itself hinged at the bottom : the result is that when the lid is raised a few inches the hinged end falls down and if the documents are all labelled with tagged labels facing outwards the one required can generally be extracted without taking the box off the shelf. The dimensions of box and shelf are, of course, made interdependent for economy of space in storing. The material of these boxes is stout mill-board with strong binder's cloth for all joints or as a complete covering.

Loose papers are treated in various ways in large Archive establishments. They may, of course, be simply done up in parcels. If this, the least commendable, method of packing is through necessity adopted the material of the parcels should be thin glazed packing cloth; not paper, which tears and crumbles into dust. Sometimes they are placed in box-files or portfolios. All these methods are unsatisfactory because they may mean the production to students of a number of detached documents under a single reference, an undesirable practice as is explained below ; also because they lead to crumpling. It is therefore a usual practice to bind valuable State Papers or other documents in volumes, first either guarding them (mounting them on strips of paper or parchment attached to the left-hand edge, which will be sewn in the binding) or inlaying them in a frame of paper, if considerations of time and expense permit. The process is costly and if at any time it is necessary to remove any con- siderable number the binding is spoiled. And, of course, dust is not excluded unless we go to the further expense and labour of a case of mill-board and cloth to slip over the whole volume except the back.

A cheap form of binding may be obtained by the use of file boards. In this case each of the two sides consists of two pieces of board both of the required height of the file but one being

1 If this plan is adopted the hinged end should be in the nature of a false side ; i. e. the original fixed side should remain behind it but all cut away except the corners (as shown in the illustration in Appendix III (i)) : this helps to exclude dust.

E2

52 RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING PART n

only about 1 to 1J inches broad. The two are covered with a single piece of binding cloth, a space of about one eighth of an inch being left between them ; and the result is a side like that of the ordinary cloth-bound book, but having a hinge near one edge. The documents to be bound are guarded with a guard a little broader than the narrow piece of board mentioned above and placed in a pile between two of these file-boards. Five or seven holes are then pierced through the narrow portions of the boards and the guards on the papers and the file is laced tightly through these with whipcord. At the opposite end to the hinge the file is tied round with a tape.

This form of binding has the advantage of being cheaply and quickly made, the whole of the ordinary processes of sewing, gluing-up, backing and forwarding being cut out ; and at any time the file can be broken up, certain papers extracted and the remainder bound up again at the expense of five minutes' labour and a new piece of whipcord. The method may, however, be extended. If stout mill-board is used for the sides and if the binding cloth used for one side is continued uncut and so used for the covering of the second, a back like that of a cloth-bound book may be formed (see illustration in Appendix III (ii)) and the result will be in every way as good as that of a bound volume. A final improvement is the addition of a cloth-flap along the top edge of the under board : this can be turned over the edges of the documents in the file and tucked in between the top page or membrane and the front file board. The tape round the file will keep all in position and the flap will exclude much dust. It may be added that the process of guarding papers, when carried out on a large scale, is easy and rapid l and that the same may be said of the making of file cases, such as are described above, of standard sizes in large quantities. The general introduction of files of this pattern might solve much of the difficulty at present experienced in keeping and pro- ducing miscellaneous papers in a suitable way. These files can, of course, be lettered or labelled, like books, on the back. In any case, whether file-boards or correct binding in volumes is used,

1 See the instructions given in Cockerell, Bookbinding and the Care of Books.

§ 5 PHYSICAL DEFENCE OF ARCHIVES 53

the boards should be made at least a quarter of an inch higher in proportion to the size of the papers bound than is usually done by bookbinders : otherwise if the back of the binding becomes loose the contents will drop and their lower edges will be rubbed on the shelves ; since naturally such volumes and files will be stacked on their edges as books always are ; and they will probably be heavy.

The Archivist will always be faced with special cases to be dealt with by special treatment : the writer, for example, was recently consulted as to the preservation of some very large Enclosure Award Maps and made the not very recondite sug- gestion that they should be rolled in an outer cover of cloth ; the ends not covered in but filled up with wool or cotton waste, so as to exclude dust but not air : probably the custodian thought of some even simpler and better contrivance to gain these objects. Packing is another of the Archive problems which require only two qualities for their solution — knowledge of the absolute essentials for Archives and common sense in securing them.

(g) Handling and damage. A considerable number of dangers have to be faced in connexion with the use of Archives by students : assuming that the Archivist himself is invariably above reproach he yet cannot expect the same carefulness in all the students who use Archives. To forbid smoking is an obvious precaution. To forbid ink is not so invariably a rule * ; and in fact it may be well to defend this regulation by pointing out that even fountain-pens and stylographs of the best makes in the most careful hands sometimes blot and that one blot may be infinitely disastrous. Students are apt to discredit this last suggestion and should have their attention directed to the tale of Paul-Louis Courier and the MS. of Daphnis and Chloe : it would be indiscreet to quote a more modern example. The hardship is not really a great one to those who know that writing in ' indelible pencil ' will come out like purple ink if held over a steaming kettle. The marking of Archives with any

1 Its use is permitted, for example, in the Archives Nationales at Paris and in the British Museum.

54 RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING PART n

form of writing is dealt with below, this being a danger which goes beyond the mere physical defacement ; but of course it should be absolutely forbidden to students.1 Should a mark of some kind be made, in spite of all precautions, on an Archive, the Archivist has two courses open to him. Either he may invoke the aid of an expert chemist, who will very possibly be able to remove it, or he may attach to the Archives a statement authenticated by signature and date of what has occurred. He will probably find it wisest of all to combine the two pro- cedures.2

In the turning of pages arid the like incidents of handling some people apparently find it impossible to be careful : against such dangers the Archivist has little shield except the most complete supervision possible, the enforcement by every means of regulations as to the immediate reporting of all accidents, the prevention of all unnecessary touching by means of proper stands 3 and suitably covered weights, and a jealously guarded rule by which he may at his discretion refuse to produce any* document on the ground of its physical state. It is probable that the extended use of the Photostat machine,4 which makes

1 Even in the case of a Library of Printed Books of any value it is usual to make such an offence, wilfully committed, carry with it the penalty of exclusion.

2 We have had occasion more than once to point out the usef ulness of the authen- ticated and dated note by an Archivist concerning any archive peculiarity observed by him in any of his charges. The practice of former Archivists shows that the value of this habit has been generally appreciated. Thus in what is now known as Coram Rege Roll 352, at the Public Record Office, Membrane 131 6 (dorse) ends with the words ' plus de isto placito in rotulo sequenti ' : to this is added a note 4 set in anno domini 1604 cum hoc recordum abbreuiavi non patet ubi hie Rotulus est nee aliquod signum ubi consul debet de quo miror multum. Arth' Agarde.'

I am indebted for this pleasant example to Professor Ehrlich, of the University of Lwow. An even earlier private example is afforded by a note in a fourteenth- century hand attached to a fragmentary document belonging to Winchester College, which the Bursar of the College, Mr. Herbert Chitty, was good enough to show me : ' in hoc sacculo continetur carta. R. dei gratia Regis Anglie . . . cum partibus minutis sigilli regii confracti et carta est in parte putrefacta quo minus legi potest.' Such anno- tation is, of course, not uncommon (cp. again the notes on the Pershore Cartulary quoted above). The point is that it ought to occur even more frequently.

3 See above, paragraph (c). No student should under any circumstance be allowed to write on paper placed on the document except for purpose of tracing, which should only be done by special permission and with special precautions for the use of a soft pencil.

4 The Photostat machine, working by electric light, produces negatives on

§ 5 PHYSICAL DEFENCE OF ARCHIVES 55

the production of photographic copies easy and inexpensive, will do much to help in the preservation of Archives.

(h) Theft. Against this and other ill practices of students — the actual commission of which would not be difficult where the document in question was small and the Students' Room large and full of workers — the Archivist has, apart from supervision, and moral deterrents, little defence : though supervision, if it includes the careful preservation of record of every person who studies archives and the documents to which he or she has had access, may be made tolerably adequate. It may be well to add here that if only as a technical guarantee supervision must include always the presence of an official of the Archive depart- ment in the Students' Room during the whole time it is in use. As regards theft in particular — the Archivist can at least make it unprofitable by a systematic and copious stamping of every Archive which is produced to a student. The stamp used must be a metal one and the ink of some kind which cannot easily be effaced, such as printer's ink ; 1 and, where it can be done without obliteration, the stamp should be on the back of the written surface or be made to touch the edge of the writing itself. Rubber stamps and the inks used with them are of little value. A further defence may be found in the rule that a number of unattached documents under a single reference, such as the parcel form to which objection was made above, should not be produced to students in that condition ; nor indeed should any student be allowed to have at the same time such a number of single documents (even though each has a separate reference) as would make checking difficult when they were returned. These rules are by no means invariably enforced, but they are good ones. And in any case every student should be required to give a separate signed request for every archive having a separate number.

It has seemed hardly necessary to enlarge here upon the

sensitized paper with the image reversed ; i. e. the negative, though the writing appears in white on a black ground, is otherwise a photographic facsimile of the original ; and if the writing in the latter is clear, very readable. Reference to the use of this machine is made again below, in Part V, § 7. 1 On this subject see also below, Part IV, § 2 (c).

56 RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING PART n

necessity that every student admitted to study Archives should be in some way accredited : nor to deal with the various systems1 under which he may ask for and have produced to him the Archives he requires. Forms of request and systems of produc- tion are many : in France, for example, at the Archives Nationales, with its Bureau de Renseignements, its Bulletin in quadruplicate and so forth, the system, though doubtless useful and necessary there, is more complicated and makes more demands upon both Archivist and student than that in force in England. So long as the necessity for supervision is well under- stood and so long as the rule enunciated in the next section (that there must be a signature for every stage in the production of an archive from its place in the repository to the student) is strictly enforced, the Archivist may be left to evolve for himself the most simple system his special circumstances permit. We shall have occasion to speak later of the desirability of making out of the record of archives produced to and used by any student a help for those who come after.2

(i) Misplacing. This question of the student's use of Archives may lead us to speak of the last of Agarde's dangers ; 3 though doubtless he meant more by the nvord than its literal sense. The efficient administration of Archives involves a system for their ' production ', whether on a small or large scale. The only one which is safe is one like that of a registered letter, by which no archive passes from its place on the shelves without a signature being given for every hand which touches it on the way ; its place being taken in the repository during its absence by a card, large and stout enough not to be lost, bearing its reference and the date and particulars of its removal including the identity of the remover. Its return is simply a reversal of the stages, many or few, through which it passes on its way out.4 Simplification, then, of the process of ' produc-

1 Accounts of these will be found in Royal Commission, First Report, Part II.

2 Part II, § 9.

3 Cp. a note by him, quoted above, as to a missing membrane.

4 The misplacement of a document in any large collection is so serious an incon- venience (it may be the work of many days to put the error right) that it is well to have the strictest rules in force on this subject : for example any one engaged on the

§ 5 PHYSICAL DEFENCE OF ARCHIVES 57

tion ' in a large office can only be by reduction of the number of these stages, not by the omission of any of the precautions in the way of signature.1

(j) Repairing. This is another matter directly connected with production : for while repairs, if the Archive collection is an old one, should be systematically conducted by classes, where the need for them is noticed in individual cases as single documents are produced these should be dealt with, if possible, forthwith. Repair of Archives involves the presence, temporary or permanent, of a skilled repairer on the staff — or working under the supervision of the staff — officially connected with the administration of the repository in question (on account of the question of custody). The skill, and the implements, required are mainly those of a really good bookbinder, the technicalities of whose craft we cannot here attempt to describe ; but a few special principles may be laid down.

Speaking generally we may say that in a large repository the amount of repairing work to be done will be so great that our object must be, while sacrificing no principle and no element of efficiency and safety, to secure the greatest possible economy and speed in working.

Implements include all those of the ordinary bookbinding shop, and in particular plenty of accommodation in heavy iron pressing machines provided with a sufficiency of heavy wooden slabs. It may be well to remark by the way that pressing in the iron press should come only when the repaired document is nearly dry.

Materials for repair must resemble as closely as possible (here the practical chemist may again be useful on occasion) those of the document to be repaired ; vellum or parchment being patched with the same material of the best quality ; and paper with hand-made rag papers. For making guards, how- ever, for parchment documents linen-lined paper may be used.

replacing of documents should make it a rule that once he has withdrawn a card from the shelf the document it represents must be replaced before another card is touched. 1 The question of Contents Lasts and Shelf Lists for the Repository is dealt with below (§ 6 (aa)) : see also the reference above in connexion with precautions against fire.

58 RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING PART n

Preparation of materials. The chief principle with regard to patches is the biblical one : which amounts to this — that pieces to be added to an old document must be reduced to about the same consistency, relative weight and strength as the edges to which they are to adhere, otherwise they will merely cause it to break away afresh. For this purpose patching material must be rubbed down with a rasp (in the case of parchment) or by other means : in particular the patch should neveY have a straight cut edge — it should be thinned away here to nothing.

Where a document is written on both sides the most skilled operation which can be performed is to split the paper and mount the two sides on to a new piece ; but even in the most experienced hands this is not always possible. A much simpler plan, and less dangerous, is to use a fine silk gauze (chiffon) over the writing : if thin paste is employed, the dry gauze being laid on the document (which must be smoothed by damping l) and well pasted over with a heavy brush (surplus paste being removed afterwards with a damp sponge), and if this is followed by plenty of pressure between sheets of greased-paper, this process is effective as well as safe and the gauze will practically dis- appear, whether the material on which it is used be parchment or paper : moreover, it will practically always be possible to give body to the whole by repairing the edges with the same material as the original, shaped to overlap it as little as possible and thinned down as described above. Tracing paper, goldbeaters' skin, and the like are snares, to judge by the experience of the past.2 The Prussian plan of coating documents with a solution

1 The procedure of immersing the whole document in a bath of warm water, recommended in the official pamphlet of the Library of Congress, seems to mo a dangerous one to offer for general purposes : in spite of the assurance there given that it is safe for all documents of a date earlier than 1800. I doubt whether it would be safe for any inks containing carbon, and the writer can certainly have had no experience of some of the inks of the Tudor period. In many cases, too, it would tend not to remove but to. fix the dirt.

2 Mr. Cockerell, however, tells me he has every confidence in fine Japanese paper, which he has used with great success. It is particularly necessary if this is used in pieces of any but the smallest size that it should be applied to both sides of the document, which will otherwise be warped. It is not quite so transparent as gauze

§5 PHYSICAL DEFENCE OF ARCHIVES 59

of collodion in amyl acetate has not been proved to be safe and seems laborious and unnecessary.

Paste. Except, of course, for special purposes, such as the backs of books, where glue is employed, flour paste should be the only adhesive ; and unless the materials used (including preservatives) are exactly known it is better not to buy it ready made. Either ' cornflour ' or ordinary flour make a very good smooth paste, though cornflour is perhaps preferable on the ground of greater purity : 1 after the paste has been mixed with boiling water it is again brought to the boil : a small proportion of alum 2 is generally mixed in, though in the absence of definite information it might be better to omit this. Of the two pieces to be joined the one not pasted should be damped.

Size. This is best made privately by simmering down odd fragments of clean vellum and parchment in water.3 It may be used with advantage on any paper and especially that which, without being torn, has lost stiffness and quality ; for example, the dog-eared corners of books. Where the ink is thickly laid on, the size should not be used too warm, otherwise it may lead to the ink soaking through to the other side of the paper.

The materials described above are at any rate harmless, and they should cover all ordinary repairs. The rest is a matter of practice and suitable fingers. It is to be specially noted that cases for gauze are the only ones where the repairing material is not the same as the original, and gauze should not be used unnecessarily.

Book Repairing. Coming to the subject of Book-repairing and binding we are on ground which has been very well covered

for use over pale ink. An example of the effect of the old tracing paper will be found in S. P. Dom., King William's Chest, 5, f. 78.

* It is to be regretted that the question of discoloration of paste by light has not been made the subject of scientific tests such as those carried out in the case of paper, ink, and leather.

2 About one and a half tablespoons to a quartern of flour. It is better to make fresh paste frequently and the preservatives (oil of cloves or thymol) usually recommended are then unnecessary : paste does not go bad after it has been applied and dried. See also the recipes given in Mr. Cockerell's book, cited below. Some bookbinders mix the paste cold first and then boil.

3 The recipe given in Sports Workshop Receipts (under Ivory Paper) is for a rather strong solution, but the process described is the same.

60 RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING PART n

already and in particular may refer to Mr. CockerelFs book x and to his work in restoring the standard of craftsmanship in bookbinding. It is well, however, to remember still that the ordinary sewer, forwarder or finisher is not always experienced in repairing work or in the antiquities of bookbinding and may easily do in ignorance irreparable damage. We may perhaps refer in this place without presumption to two or three points merely of Archive utility,2 not of fine craftsmanship. Thus it is still not sufficiently realized by Archivists that if old volumes are to be rebound they should be given the old system of sewing — 6 flexible ' sewing on raised bands or cords — and the old system of attachment of these to the boards. Too little attention is commonly given in Repositories to the preservation of old leather by feeding it (even a non- animal grease, such as vaseline, is useful) or when it has gone a stage further by arresting decay (here paste water followed by size is valuable). Repairs are not in general taken in hand soon enough ; partial rebacking as soon as a headband goes will save a whole binding for years, and the same may be said of the addition of vellum shoes to the two lower edges in the case of heavy books ; apart from saving the leather and board from rubbing away these add a little to the height and so help to prevent the lower edges of the pages from getting rubbed when the back has begun to get loose and the whole book has consequently dropped : but if these shoes are to be of use they must be not merely glued on but nailed with brass tacks clinched on the inside of the boards. In point of fact even if the cover has not perished a book should be rebacked if it shows this tendency to drop, because rebacking gives an opportunity to glue it up again. Much, however, can be done in the way of preservation before books reach even this point by looking to the packing of them on the shelves. It is now generally realized that packing must not be too tight ; but equal damage may be done by its being too loose so that the sheets are not properly

1 Bookbinding and the Care of Books (London, 1901), in which all the materials and processes used in bookbinding (and in book-repairing) are fully described.

2 See also the section on Binding and Rebacking in App. IV.

§5 PHYSICAL DEFENCE OF ARCHIVES 61

supported between the boards. Open cases1 may also be cheaply made and effectively used to protect frail bindings.

Leather for Bookbinding 2 was the subject of most elaborate experiments and an excellent Report to the Society of Arts twenty years ago. The question of the fading of colours was gone into at considerable length, but from our point of view (that of preservation and repairing) the most important passages are those in which the Committee states its conclusion that 4 a pure sumach tannage will provide a good and durable leather and that leather may be produced which will prove as durable as any made in the past ' ; and that, apart from the quality of the leather employed, the forces which make for destruction are too much sunlight, bad ventilation, damp, and the fumes of gas and the like. In purchasing, therefore, leather for repairs the Archivist should at least specify that it is to be non-acid tanned. Of the matter of ventilation, &c., we have already spoken.

On the technical subject of Binding new books as distinct from repairing old ones we must be content with a reference to Mr. Cockerell's book : merely remarking that if binding 3 is resorted to for Archives the best materials only should be used for the boards and sewing.

General Supervision. In conclusion we may emphasize in connexion with binding a matter which concerns every depart- ment of repairing. It is most fatally easy to destroy without knowing it what may be valuable evidence. The needleholes of old sewing, the way in which sheets were put together for binding, the method of attachment of membrane to membrane — these and the like 4 may all have the most valuable significance. Supervision then in all repairing work is of the highest impor- tance ; and in particular we would lay it down that nothing

1 See App. IV.

2 The Report was published under this title (London, 1901). Another Report to this Society (on Paper) is mentioned below, Part IV, § 2 (a).

3 See the remarks on this subject in paragraph (/) above. For qualities of mill- board, tape, &c., and on the subject of sewing and other processes, see Mr. Cockerell's book.

4 Cp. two cases noted below, § 6 (d) and (g).

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should ever be cut away, and as little as possible should be obscured, by repairing. Some Specimen Rules for an Archive Repairing Department will be found in an Appendix to this volume.1

(Jc) Re-agents. The subject of the use of Archives brings us to yet another danger, that of the use of liquids to restore faded ink. There is a natural demand for these ; and on the other hand the English Public Records 2 bear eloquent testimony to their danger. No one has yet investigated the possibility of getting rid by some chemical action of the effects of oxidiza- tion of strong 4 restoratives ' applied in the past ; and mean- while there is a natural reluctance on the part of careful people to use even such a very weak solution as is now employed at the Record Office (99 per cent, distilled water to 1 per cent, gallic acid). With regard to another well-known restorative (am- monium sulphide), the action of which is temporary, the keeper of manuscripts in the British Museum recently gave it as his opinion that this was quite safe in the case of parch- ment, but left a more or less permanent stain on paper.3

Pending further inquiries we may suggest first that the really expert reader will frequently decipher without help of ' restoratives ' a passage which has defied the less experienced, and a document should always be submitted to every possible test of this kind before any attempt is made to c restore ' it : frequently an adjustment of the light or of the angle of vision will help ; frequently also a knowledge of the form of the document. Secondly, ordinary cleaning with soft ' Draughts- man's ' rubber or with water (even with a little soap and water applied very gently with a camel's-hair brush) should be tried as a first measure in the case of parchment ; rubber, if very soft, may also be used on paper, but only by the expert. Thirdly, if restorative is used it is an easy precaution against possible

1 App. IV.

2 Many of the Public Records used by earlier generations are literally black with these : the Charter Roll of 37 Henry III (membrane 12) and Parliament Roll 61

, (last membrane) furnish two of many examples.

3 Mr. J. P. Gilson reviewing Mr. Johnson's Care of Records in History, April 1920, p. 42.

§ 5 PHYSICAL DEFENCE OF ARCHIVES 63

future oxidization to print, or at any rate preserve, a transcript of anything that may be read, and this should be insisted on ; and of course no attempt either to clean or to restore should be made by any save the official custodian. It is perhaps hardly necessary to add that gallic acid has no effect upon c coloured inks ' ; for example, on the red paint of medieval rubrics.

(I) Seals. The best method for the preservation of these is a vexed question. From the earliest times it has given trouble, if we may judge from the bags designed for them, of which speci- mens may be seen in the Public Record Office Museum. That these were of little use is demonstrated by the fact that in most cases the contents are dust,1 while large and frail seals preserved elsewhere without any precaution have remained intact.2 On the other hand, seals enclosed in contemporary c skippets ' 3 of wood or metal are nearly always unbroken although these receptacles exclude the air almost entirely. The inference drawn at Stockholm, where this matter has received consider- able attention, is that although seals, like documents, should be given plenty of air, the most directly damaging condition is that of contact with any soft material which by absorption may assist that extraction of the greasy element from the wax which (it is held) renders the seals dry and brittle. Acting upon this conclusion, the Swedish authorities 4 have devised a mixture of beeswax with turpentine and resin with which they paint seals which show signs of decay and brittleness in order to restore the ' greasy ' element ; and have made it an absolute

1 Cp. the Winchester document quoted above in paragraph (g).

2 In the case of a finely preserved collection of seals (to take the first example which comes to mind), those on the muniments of Pembroke College, Cambridge, the documents are still kept loosely done up in the old large wooden chests (also loosely done up) in which they have been for centuries ; and no doubt these seals owe their immunity to the circumstances mentioned in the text — reasonable atmo- spheric conditions, lack of handling and absence of wrappings.

3 A small box of the same shape and size as the seal. There are a number of specimens at the Public Record Office, including some fine silver ones of the period of Henry VII (T. R. Indentures of Foundation of Henry VII Chapel) and some wooden ones of German origin (Special Collections : Loose Seals, Class R).

4 I am indebted for these and other details to the Baron de Fleetwood, who is in charge of the Department of Seals in the Royal Archives of Stockholm, and who was good enough to communicate to me a copy of his notes on the subject.

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rule that seals shall never be wrapped or laid in cotton, wool, or the like materials. Other authorities have recommended and even practised the policy of cutting off really valuable specimens, so that the document may be produced without them. Certainly all the evidence before the recent Royal Commission 1 on Public Records tends to prove that handling, even the most careful, must be dangerous. On the other hand, the author of one of the most recent works on Seals 2 attacks fiercely a particular instance of this policy.

Probably the best plan to follow in the packing and produc- tion of documents with seals is to take all possible precautions short of cutting them off 3 and without excluding air, and to observe a rule that every seal of any value,4 as soon as it is discovered, shall have a careful mould made from it and a copy cast and set aside for preservation, as is done in France 5 and elsewhere. The procedure recommended by the Stockholm authorities is to oil the seal with olive oil and take a mould by means of liquid plaster applied with a brush. The mould is soaked with a drying mixture consisting mainly of linseed oil. From this mould casts may be taken in sulphur, again applied with a brush in a liquid state : the casts being ultimately backed with plaster. An incidental advantage of this procedure is that the collection of casts can be arranged as a separate entity. In the event of a seal becoming broken it may be mended, if it is not a double one, and if it is appended (not affixed), by being imbedded in a pat of wax of the same materials as itself ; and in any case mending should only be done with wax of this description. Where there is a simple fracture (without large pieces being lost) of a pendent seal, the Swedish

1 See this Commission's First Report and the evidence (e. g.) of Professor Tout (vol. iii, p. 103).

2 Dr. R. L. Poole, Seals and Documents, published by the British Academy, p. 1.

3 If they are cut off, at least the most careful photographic and other record should be kept of their original state.

4 Fortunately there are numerous works on Seals to act as criteria : for example, the British Museum Catalogue (ed. W. de Gray Birch) and that of the Archives Nationales by Douet d'Arcq ; also the French Provincial Catalogues.

5 See the remarks of the Commission on this subject. First Report, vol. ii, p. 133, and cp. Coulon, Le Service sigillographique (Paris, 1916).

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plan is to melt the wax at the back of the seal itself by means of a heated knife, so that it runs down into the crack between the two pieces.

A chemical analysis made not many years ago 1 gives useful data on the composition of early specimens in England, mainly a question of the proportions of beeswax and resin : an analysis carried to a later date would be welcome ; as would also a chemical investigation into the cause and nature of the loss of quality in wax, conducted on the same lines as the investigations made at various times into the deterioration of modern inks and papers, ?

(m) Special Dangers. Finally, special circumstances, climate and so forth, must always give rise to special dangers, and these the Archivist must meet as best he may, with the best help from the experience of others which he can obtain. South Africa,3 for instance, may naturally be expected to produce conditions different from those in England. On the other hand, it is quite certain that the essential qualities of South African Archives are the same as those of this or any other country ; and the Archivist's simple duty is the conservation of these.

(n) Archive Museums. As a rider we may perhaps add a note on the subject of Museums arranged in connexion with impor- tant Repositories of Archives. We have already deprecated the detachment of what should remain, as they were originally, objects annexed to Archives : a Museum, if it is instituted, should not be allowed to become a temptation to any such practices. In other respects, however, it has its uses.4 It enables archives of a spectacular nature to be exhibited to the curious who do not wish to come in as serious students : Domesday, for example (not nearly so important to students as the unpublished

1 Dobbie and J. J. Fox in Transitions of the Chemical Society, vol. 105 (1914), p. 797.

2 See below, Part IV, § 2.

3 The Chief Archivist to the Union of South Africa, Mr. C. Graham Botha, tells me that the use of ordinary flour paste in that country attracts the attention of a particularly voracious beetle. Doubtless he will contrive to discover some substitute and continue to keep his Archives in repair.

4 In other countries such Museums are generally approved : they were being organized in Belgium, for example, when war broke out.

1569-40 «

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Pipe Rolls) is naturally an object of more popular interest. The Museum also serves to house furniture or other specimens which may have been handed down in connexion with ancient Repositories. And it may help, where undiscriminating zeal has loaded an Archive Repository with objects which are not Archives (pictures, books, and so forth : it is understood that such a difficulty is not unknown in other countries), to extract the Archivist from a dilemma.

§ 6. Primary Duties of the Archivist : (ii) Moral Defence of Archives.

(a) Introductory. We have already dwelt at some length upon the importance of custody and have even gone so far as to suggest that the Archivist might go out of his way to secure the custody of Archives with which he is not primarily con- cerned. We need do no more here than to draw the obvious inference that once Archives are in his keeping the Archivist must allow no access, or possibility of access, to them in any circumstances, except under the personal supervision of himself or his deputy ; supervision including his or his deputy's personal presence without intermission. It is equally clear that under no circumstances may any marking or alteration of a document (alteration including any change whatever in its relation to other documents) be made by any one save an Archive Official.

This decided, the moral dangers to Archives against which we have to guard are clearly to be apprehended chiefly from the Archivist himself ; and since we may presumably acquit him of any intention to tamper deliberately with his Archives the wrong-doing will be unintentional. Elsewhere1 we have given a catholic series of examples of what an Archivist should not do. Here we may endeavour to set up for him some positive rules of conduct.

The most common fault is haste in dealing with Archives, due to anxiety to make them available for use : this, or any other

1 In Appendix V (i) : an illustration of the Archivist's duties, drawn from the history of the Exchequer of Receipt, to which the student of this section may turn with advantage.

§6 MORAL DEFENCE OF ARCHIVES 67

form of negligence carrying with it a lack of understanding, may lead the Archivist to incorporate in his Archives something foreign to them, as we see the ' Pells and Auditors ' arrangement forced on the Exchequer of Receipt ; I or alternatively may result in something essential being cut out of them, as the pieces of mutilated Receipt Rolls merely by being separated from each other lost perhaps the last evidence for their identifi- cation. Separation for one reason or another of documents that have been preserved together is so common an error, and so fatal, that we may perhaps give one or two more examples ; remarking by the way that as a general rule it is only some lucky chance, which has made it possible to put the error right, which reveals even the existence of these mistakes ; the vast majority of documents so mishandled are from the very circumstances of the mishandling lost to view.

Our first example is furnished by a letter, printed by Bain in his Calendar of Documents relating to Scotland. For the purposes of this publication Bain drew from some source now unknown a letter which he attributes to [George] Cely : 2 it has itself neither signature nor address. We might conjecture from the fact that he ascribed it so confidently to Cely that it was taken from the Cely Correspondence,3 though without confirma- tion it is difficult to attribute to the papers of that family a letter addressed to some one not of the family (probably Sir John Weston) then in Naples ; with whose muniments it would naturally be expected to have remained. We can get so far as to justify the ascription to George Cely on an inference from a letter 4 of George's brother Richard which happens to have survived elsewhere. The truth as to its provenance, with

1 Appendix V (i).

2 Vol. iv, p. 415 : the letter, formerly in Chancery Miscellanea, is now Ancien t Correspondence, vol. 60, no. 89.

3 A collection of private documents, largely of the fifteenth century, which became annexed in some way to the Archives of the Chancery and is now in the Public Record Office.

4 Ancient Correspondence, vol. 53, No. 102 : printed by H. E. Maiden in the Royal Historical Society's Cely Papers, p. 87. Mr. Maiden has not unnaturally missed the letter printed by Bain. I am indebted for this reference to my colleague Mr. Charles Johnson.

F2

68 RULES FOR ARCHIVE KEEPING PART n

any implications which might attach to that, remains, and will probably remain always, uncertain.

A parallel case to that of the Cely is furnished by the Stonor Papers? a private collection of the same kind at the Public Record Office ; the varying character of which, though in reality they form a perfectly regular whole, has led to their being so scattered that they are found now in classes as widely apart as the Ancient Correspondence, Chancery Miscellanea, Ancient Deeds, and Exchequer Accounts ; with the result that there has been a very considerable difficulty in some cases in identification and ascription. Here the mischief is due not so much to over anxiety to utilize for historical purposes as to adherence to a preconceived notion of classification from with- out. A precisely similar case (due perhaps to the ' methodizers ' of the State Paper Office) may be seen in two letters, one a testimonial from the Swedish Minister (now in State Papers Foreign, Foreign Ministers, vol. Ixv), and the other a letter from a certain Dr. Layard in 1775 (now in State Papers Domestic, George III, vol. xi, no. 28) : only the chance of a pencil note reveals the fact that the first of these is an enclosure to the second — regarded externally (on their individual merits) they seem to be quite correctly placed. Examples from both private and public Archives might be multiplied.

(b) Reception : old numeration and lists : order of arrival. We assume for the present that the Archivist is taking over formed Archives and has space in which to bestow them : questions which arise when this is not the case may be post- poned for a later section. He has, then, no responsibilities before the moment of reception and every responsibility, that no genuine evidence be lost nor false one manufactured, that neither suppressio veri take place nor suggestio falsi, after that moment.

There are four chief possibilities. Either he is informed that the documents are arranged and is furnished with a List ; or he has reason to expect arrangement but has no list : in both these cases his first duty is obviously to check. Alternatively

1 Printed by C. L. Kingaford in the Historical Society's Stonor Papers.

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he has no information other than the appearance of the docu- ments ; in which case his first duty is an investigation which will show either that they are or are not arranged, together with the checking, if arrangement does appear, of the numbers. The question may be raised — what should the Archivist do in the case where he is taking over not from an active administra- tive body but from another Archivist who has already dealt with the documents ? If the Archivist has made up his mind (as had to be done in the case of the Exchequer of Receipt) that the whole arrangement of a class by his predecessor requires revision he will obviously be in exactly the same position as if the documents had come from an active administrative office : i. e. his responsibility will begin from the moment he takes over and the rules for his conduct will be the same as are laid down below. In the matter of subsequent arrangement some difference may be caused by the fact that documents have been arranged before, but that is a matter for later treatment.

The most obvious rules, then, since the Archivist has in any case no first-hand knowledge of the documents, are that no old lists may be destroyed and that his preliminary checking and investigation must not interfere with the order in which the documents are received or any old numeration. This is not to say that if five clearly labelled volumes are delivered in the order 3, 5, 1, 4, 2, he may not set them in sequence on the floor. But apart from such clear cases nothing must be done to destroy the possible evidence offered by the order of their coming.

(c) s Accession Numbers. The next thing to do is to safeguard for the future any evidence which may be offered by this order of arrival. There are two possibilities —

(i) If the preliminary examination has shown that their former owners had numbered the documents and that they are complete, the order in which they arrived is clearly of no further importance : they may be put at once into the order of their old numbering, (ii) If there is no old numbering, or if there is one but a quantity of the documents are missing, there is only one

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safe course — to number the documents consecutively through- out with Accession Numbers.

Before we go on to some Rules for this numbering and for stamping there are one or two connected points to mention. In the first place there are obviously certain common- sense cases lying between (i) and (ii) above : for example, if the Archivist has, say, a complete collection of volumes or papers numbered from 1 to 1,000, and one paper unnumbered, it would be absurd to upset the numbering of the thousand for the sake of the one ; let the single document, if it is apart, be numbered 1,001 with a note added to describe the circumstances under which it was found ; or if attached to another let it be treated in the manner provided below for enclosures and the like. The Archivist, in fact, must be left to decide, on the merits of individual cases, how many such strays would necessitate a re-numbering of the whole in the order of accession as 4 unarranged documents '.

Then there is the case of regularly accruing archives. For example, ' Chancery ' Archives from the High Court in England are transferred to the Public Record Office at regular intervals ; and probably most County Archivists find themselves in a similar position in respect of certain classes of their Archives. In such cases there is opportunity for liaison between the Archivist and Administrative Compiler of the Archives ; for the latter can make the task of the former much lighter by adopting his suggestions as to packing and numeration.

(d) Original Files, Bindings, &c. A third point it may be well to emphasize here by a separate heading. The numbering we are at present describing is undertaken with the sole object of safeguarding the evidence offered by the documents' position and mutual relations at the time they are taken over. But there is one point which it cannot cover. The Archivist, dealing with loose papers, may presently file or in other ways fasten them together or he may leave them loose : but whichever he does future generations will require a distinction between these papers and those which were found filed or fastened together ; because the fact that not the Archivist but the original adminis-

§ 6 MORAL DEFENCE OF ARCHIVES 71

tration bracketed documents together in this way may be of extreme significance. It follows that there should be an absolute Rule that no original filing or binding may be interfered with in any way.1 Of course, all Rules have exceptions. In the exceptional case where something (necessary repair, for example) makes the breaking up of a file or volume imperative, a dated and authenticated note giving full particulars of the destroyed arrangement should be attached to the documents before they are again fastened together, which should be done as soon as possible.2

(e) Stamping and Numbering: Methods and Rules. For numbering it will be wise to use an automatic numerating stamp : there are several patterns but one should be chosen which can be adjusted easily, when required, to stamp the same number several times over instead of continuing the automatic 1, 2, 3 ... They are all metal stamps using a suitable ink. A coloured ink should be used or some other means of distinguishing this accession numeration from any other, previous or subsequent. It will be wise to undertake at the same tune, if possible, the ordinary stamping with the name of the office. As has been already indicated 3 only metal stamps and permanent inks should be used. Where a collec- tion has been taken over every document in which is already

1 A particularly good example of the way in which by such interference evidence may be falsified is furnished by some late seventeenth-century Colonial State Papers which came to the nineteenth century in an undoubtedly contemporary arrangement and contemporary vellum bindings ; these last were the typical bindings of the period, the sewing being on pairs of vellum slips, the ends of which are drawn through the covers — the ancestors of the modern hollow-back binding. By merely cutting through the slips inside the boards a whole volume might be taken out of its cover and the 'methodizer* then proceeded to cut it up and rearrange the contents. When these were sewn and glued up again ready for binding the natural tendency would be to put them back in the original cover, which was still quite good ; and we have as a result what appears to be an original binding with the papers in their original order ; which nothing but a second breaking up would show to be a modern rearrangement.

2 See the Rules given in App. IV. The point is a small one, but in the case of membranes or pages stitched together which have to be re-sewed it is desirable to use the same needleholes. Such holes are frequently valuable as evidence and should not therefore be multiplied or confused. See also the remarks on bound volumes below (g).

s Above, § 5 (h).

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numbered it is obviously not necessary to number again : in spite of this it will be well, if possible, to make an invariable rule of this first numbering so that all documents may have an accession number distinguished in the same way (e. g. by colouring as suggested above) from every other numeration.

(/) Stamping and Numbering : the Accession Register. The Accession Numbering has, it should be noted, nothing to do with the subject or character of the documents. It merely records the state in which they were received and should work into a summary Register of Accessions. The arrangement of this will vary with circumstances such as the size of the Collec- tion : the Archivist may number all accessions in any year consecutively giving a superior number for the year ; or give a superior number to each collection received or each recep- tacle ; or adopt what plan he pleases so long as every document received has an accession number wrhich is enough to distinguish it from any other received at any time and so long as the Accession Register shows that on a given date, such and such numbers were received from such and such a source. Probably Archivists would find it convenient to combine the Year Number referred to with the Office Stamp.

(g) Stamping and Numbering : the Single Document ; the File or Volume ; the Enclosure, Schedule or Insertion.* We have said that every document is to receive an Accession Number. It is usual, however, to make a distinction between the classes mentioned above : a volume, for example, is treated as a single document ; a file not always. It will be well to examine these classes.

The distinction sometimes attempted between documents written on a ready-made roll or volume and documents written singly and subsequently bound or sewn up need not detain us long. Many medieval English enrolments were made up long after writing, sometimes out of heterogeneous materials (as for instance the Carte Antique Rolls of the Chancery) ; 2 and even

1 For some examples of detailed rules as to numbering see App. IV.

2 The origin of these rolls is a matter of speculation and controversy. They are composed, sometimes, of membranes widely differing in date ; but at the same time

§ 6 MORAL DEFENCE OF ARCHIVES 73

in the case of the later books (such as the Registers of the Privy Council) there is sometimes room for doubt : the same remark would apply to many Cartularies.

But there is a distinction between the book or roll contain- ing, for example, a continuous series of accounts on the one hand and on the other a series of single documents made on separate pieces of parchment or paper ; and there is a distinc- tion again between either of these and the file (the original file, made by the Office which compiled them) of separate but related documents. Moreover, whatever numbering treatment is extended to these, it does not generally touch our third class — enclosures, schedules, and insertions. The only question is how far should these distinctions affect our Accession Numeration ?

Now this Numeration has only one object — the perpetual preservation of a record of the state of the documents as they came to the Archivist ; and it must be obvious that the single documents on a file, the odd sheets inserted in a book,1

go back undoubtedly (as enrolments) to a very early time. They were calendared by Sir Joseph Ayloffe in the eighteenth century. Membranes seem often to have been made up into rolls long after they were written, as in the case of the Plea Rolls. But indeed it is probable that all enrolments were subject to such treatment, at any rate at certain periods. In the case of Cartularies, Bishops' Registers, and the like, the procedure was common ; if only for the convenience of having more than one scribe at work copying at a time. The procedure of an age when ready-made books were more common has not been much investigated, but there is no doubt that here, too (in the seventeenth century for instance), examples of binding after writing occur. Professor Pollard has raised the point in connexion with the Journals of the House of Lords (Royal Hist. Soo. Transactions, 3rd Series, viii, pp. 17 et seq.). It is to be noted that in such a case the smallest details may be of value as evidence : for example the presence or absence of pounce (which was liberally used by the seven- teenth-century scribe) at the back of the leaves, where they are sewn in binding, might seriously affect our opinion as to whether a book was bound before or after writing — a reflection which emphasizes the need for great care in repairing original files or volumes. Another point in connexion with early bindings is noted above (d).

1 A good example of the possibilities of loose sheets inserted in books is furnished by Sir John Laughton's evidence as to inserted papers in Admiralty Logs (Royal Commission, First Report, iii. 180). Certain classes of Departmental Records in England (especially personal Registers in the War Office and the like) are very liable to have insertions of this kind, and unless they are treated as is here suggested it is never possible to say whether traces of a missing one are to be put down to adminis- trative action in the past or to subsequent accident or theft.

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