PUBLIC A.D. 1841. Public Records. HISTORY OF THE PUBLIC RECORDS. (Written in 1841, and published in the "Penny Cyclopædia.") A I. UTHENTIC memorials of all kinds, as well public as private, may be considered in one sense as records. Thus the Metopes of the Parthenon are indisputable records of Grecian art; the Definition of journal stamp on a letter is a record that it has passed through the post-office; a merchant's ledger is a record of his business; and every lord of a manor may keep written records of his courts, as the chancery, the exchequer, and other courts do of their proceedings. But our present purpose is to give some general account of the public records, properly so called, understanding by the term the contents of our public record offices. II. Records, in the legal sense of the term, are contemporaneous statements of the proceedings in those higher courts of law which are distinguished as courts of record, written upon rolls of parchment. (Britton, c. 27.) Matters enrolled amongst the proceedings of a court, but not connected with those proceedings, as deeds enrolled, &c., are not records, though they are sometimes in a loose sense said to be "things recorded." (2 Sell., Abe., 421.) In a popular sense the term is applied to all public documents preserved in a recognized repository; and as such documents cannot conveniently be removed, or may be wanted in several places at the same time, the courts of law receive in evidence examined copies of the contents of public documents so preserved, as well as of real records. III. The course we propose to take, is to treat that as a record which is thus received in the courts of justice. The act, for instance, which abolished Henry VIII.'s court of augmentation (of the revenues obtained from the suppression of the religious houses), declared that its records, rolls, books, papers, and docu RECORDS. Selections. ments, should thenceforth be held to be records of the court of PUBLIC exchequer; and accordingly we have seen many a document, originally a mere private memorandum, elevated to the dignity of Part II. a public record, on the sole ground of its official custody, and received in evidence as a record of the Augmentation-office. On the other hand, numbers of documents which were originally compiled as public records, having strayed from their legal repository to the British Museum, have thereby lost their character of authenticity. ("Proceedings of the Privy Council," vol. v., p. 4, edited by Sir Harris Nicolas.) IV. "Our stores of public records," says Bishop Nicolson, and, we believe, with perfect accuracy, "are justly reckoned to excel in age, beauty, correctness, and authority, whatever the choicest archives abroad can boast of the like sort." (Preface to the "English Historical Library.") Yet rich as our own country is beyond all others of modern Europe in the possession of ancient written memorials of all branches of its government, constitutional, judicial, parliamentary, and fiscal, memorials authenticated by all the solemn sanctions of authority, telling truly though incidentally the history of our progress as a people, and handed down in unbroken series through the period of nearly seven centuries-the subject of its public records now appears, we believe, for the first time in a work like the present. The amount of public care given to this subject during the last forty years, is shown by the appointment of successive commissions and parliamentary committees of inquiry, by a cost in one shape or another amounting to little less than a million of pounds sterling, and by the passing of an Act of Parliament designed to effect a thorough change in the system of keeping and using the public records. V. By far the greater part of records are kept as rolls written on skins of parchment and vellum, averaging from nine to fourteen inches wide,' and about three feet in length. Two modes of fastening the skins or membranes were employed, that of attaching all the tops of the membranes together book-wise, as is employed in the exchequer and courts of common law, whilst that of sewing each membrane consecutively, like the rolls of the Jews, was adopted in the chancery and wardrobe. A series of seven cen turies un broken. VI. The solution of the reasons for employing two different Different 1 The rolls of the Great Wardrobe exceed eighteen inches in width. sorts of Rolls. PUBLIC Forms of modes has been thought difficult by writers on the subject. It appears to have been simply a matter of convenience in both cases. The difference in the circumstances under which these rolls were formed, accounts, we think, satisfactorily for the variation of make. In the first case, each enrolment was often begun at one time and completed at another. Space for the completion of the entry must have been left at hazard. Besides, several scribes were certainly engaged in enrolling the proceedings of the courts, and the roll was liable to be unbound, and to receive additional membranes after it had been once made up. In the other case, the business of the chancery being simply registration, the scribe could register the documents before him, with certainty that nothing in future would at all affect their length, and he was enabled to fill every membrane, and perfect the roll as he proceeded. VII. In the volumina, or scapi, of the ancients, the writing was carried in equal columns, as in the pages of a book, along the RECORDS. A.D. 1841. Selections. length of the skin, whilst the enrolment in both sorts of our rolls PUBLIC was written across the width of the membrane. Both these kinds of rolls are still used. The rolls of the common law, after the time Part II. of Henry VIII., contain so many skins that they cease to be rolls, but become simply oblong books, and, unlike the early rolls of the same series, are exceedingly ill-adapted for preservation and inconvenient for use. There are many of these miscalled rolls of the reign of Charles II., which in shape, size, and weight resemble the largest of Cheshire cheeses, often requiring two men to lift them from the rack. Membranes may be fastened together after the chancery fashion in any numbers, and yet remain a legitimate roll, though imposing much bodily labour in the consultation. The Land-tax Commissioners' Act of 1 Geo. IV. extends, it is said, 900 feet when unrolled, and employs a man three hours to unroll the volume. Other records have the shape of books. Doomsday Book, called both "Rotulus" and "Liber," the oldest and most precious of our records, counting eight centuries as its age, and still in the finest order, is a book; and as occasions presented themselves for adopting this shape without infringing on ancient precedent, the far more accessible shape which we now call a "book" seems to have been employed. A considerable part of the records of the courts of surveyor-general and augmentations, in the reign of Henry VIII., of wards and liveries, and requests, are made up as books. Other documents, those relating to Fines, the "Pedes Finium, or Finales Concordiæ," the writs of "Dedimus Potestatem," and acknowledgments and certificates, writs of the several courts and returns, writs of summons and returns to parliament, inquisitiones post mortem, &c., &c., by tens and hundreds of thousands are filed, that is, each document is pierced through with a string or gut, and thus fastened together in a bundle. and paper. VIII. The material on which the record is written is generally Parchment parchment, which, until the reign of Elizabeth, is extremely clear and well prepared. From that period until the present, the parchment gradually deteriorates, and the worst specimens are furnished in the reigns of George IV. and William IV. The earliest record written on paper, known to the writer, is of the time of Edward II. It is one of a series entitled "Papirus magistri Johannis Guicardi contra-rotulatoris Magnæ Costumæ in Castro Burdegaliæ, anno PUBLIC Latin and domini M. ccco. viii." These records are in the office of the queen's remembrancer of the exchequer. Tallies were records of wood. IX. The handwriting of the courts, commonly called court-hand, which had reached its perfection about the reign of our second Edward, differs materially from that employed in chartularies and monastic writings. As printing extended, it relaxed into all the opposites of uniformity, clearness, legibility, and beauty which it once possessed. The ink, too, lost its ancient indelibility; and, like the parchment, both handwriting and ink are the lowest in character in the latest times: with equal care venerable Doomsday will outlive its degenerate descendants. X. All the great series of our records, except those of parliament, are written in Latin, the spelling of which is much abbreviated, and in contractions, there can be little doubt, derived from Latin manuscripts. The reader who desires to be further informed on the subject may consult the collection which Mr. Hardy (afterwards Sir Thomas) has inserted in the preface to his "Close Rolls of King John," and Mr. Hunter, in his preface to the "Fines of Richard I. and John." During the Commonwealth, English was substituted; but soon after the Restoration, Latin was restored, and the records of the courts continued to be kept in Latin until abolished by act of parliament in the reign of George II. In certain branches of the Exchequer, Latin continued in use until the abolition of the offices in very recent times. Many of our statutes from Edward I. to Henry V., and the principal part of the rolls of parliament, are written in Norman French. Petitions to parliament continued to be presented in Norman French until the reign of Richard II., whose renunciation of the crown is said to have been read before the estates of the realm at Westminster, first in Latin and then in English. After this period we find English, which had doubtless always remained in use among the lower classes, often used in transactions between the people and government—a sure sign that the distinctions of Norman origin were nearly absorbed among the people at large. XI. Sir Francis Palgrave's edition of the "Calendars and Inventories of the Treasury of the Exchequer," some of which were compiled as early as the fourteenth century, are extremely interesting in exhibiting the ancient modes in which records were |