Talk to the Quadrivium postgraduate conference, 'Boundaries of the Archive', University of Glasgow, 10 November 2018

1. WORKING WITH ARCHIVES
Andrew Prescott, Quadrivium, University of Glasgow, 10 November 2018

2. Part of the entries for Yorkshire in The Great Domesday, 1086, The National
Archives, E 31/2/1. Domesday Book is actually in two volumes, ‘Great’ and ‘Little’
Domesday. Domesday Book is regarded as the earliest English public record.

3. Exon Domesday, preserved in the library of Exeter Cathedral. Note the
imprint of the spearhead. This is one of the documents created in the
course of compiling Domesday Book, but it is not regarded as a public
record. Why?

4. The earliest surviving English royal charter. King Hlothhere of
Kent grants land to Abbot Berhtwald and his monastery at
Reculver in 679: British Library, Cotton MS Augustus II.18
This royal document is more than 400 years older than
Domesday Book but is not regarded as a public record. Why?

5. Love tokens (including a piece of thread and the shell of a nut) left by
mothers with their babies at the Foundling Hospital in London in the
eighteenth century, so that mothers could be identified if they ever
reclaimed their children. These artefacts are a foundational part of the
Hospital’s archive

6. Collection Area: Western Manuscripts
Reference: Add MS 40007
Creation Date: c 1195
A parchment codex
Language: Latin
Contents:
This manuscript consists of letters and historical works
written by Ralph of Diceto (d. 1199/1200), chronicler,
ecclesiastic and dean of St Paul's Cathedral, London. This
volume was probably produced in the scriptorium of St Paul's.
The prefatory letter to William de Longchamp (d. 1197),
chancellor of England and bishop of Ely, is found only in this
manuscript, suggesting that it might have been the original
copy presented to William de Longchamp (see Sharpe and
Willoughby, Medieval Libraries (2015)). The list of writers on f.
35v that ends with Ralph de Diceto states that he finished his
historical work in 1195 (see Watson, Catalogue of Dated and
Datable Manuscripts (1979)).
Cotton MS Faustina A VIII (from the Augustinian priory of St
Mary Overy) and Cotton MS Tiberius A IX (from the
Augustinian abbey of Osney) have the same contents, except
the prefatory letter to William de Longchamp.
Decoration:
Puzzle initials in red and blue with pen-flourishing in green
and brown, throughout (e. g., ff. 2r, 7r); simple initials in red
or blue, with green and brown pen-flourishing and penwork
decoration (e. g., ff. 12v, 21r, 23v); small initials in red or blue.
Rubrics in red. A human figure added in the margin of the text
(f. 21r). Maniculae in the margin (f. 22r).
Physical characteristics:
Materials: Parchment.
Dimensions: 415 x 285 mm (text space: 300/20 x 200/230
mm, in 2 or 3 columns).
Foliation: ff. 43 (+ 1 unfoliated paper flyleaf at the beginning +
2 unfoliated paper flyleaves at the end); ff. 1, 43 are former
medieval pastedowns.
Script: Protogothic.
Binding: Pre-1600 binding. 14th-century binding with wooden
boards, originally covered with white parchment. The
parchment cover is now fragmentary; marks of a chain and
clasp: a small part of the iron chain remains on the back
cover; a 14th-century book-label in horn (inscribed: 'Cronica
Ricardi de Diceto') remains on the back cover. The manuscript
was rebacked in 1922; the spine inscribed in gold at the
British Museum: 'R. DE DICETO OPERA MINORA'.

7. Pipe Roll, 1129-1130: The National Archives, E 372/1 open at m. 9 (side view)
[Is the concept of recto relevant here?]

11. • We refer indiscriminately to literary manuscripts, administrative
documents, printed books, computer records and even artefacts as
belonging to the archive
• Yet distinctions are made between different types of material. How
and why?
• Do these distinctions remain valid?
• Why are some types of material treated in one way and some in
another?
• How does this affect us as users of archives?
• What are the practical implications for the way in which we work
with archives?

12. • The archive has been closely associated with administrative documents. It is
therefore closely associated with the exercise of power – an instrument of
power.
• The Latin archivum derives from the Greek arkheion, which was ‘a house, a
domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons,
those who commanded’
• Edward Chamberlayne (1669) describes the Tower of London as not only a
fort and royal palace, but also an arsenal, a treasury, a mint, a prison and ‘the
great Archive where are conserved all the Records of the Courts of
Westminster’
• Ranke: ‘the historical sources themselves are more beautiful and in any case
more interesting than romantic fiction’
• Sayles (1979): archives ‘the only way by which we can escape from the
uninformed guesses of chroniclers’
• Steedman (2001): ‘the religious and state archives of Europe and North
America and their more local records of government and administration were
(and still are) evoked in order to describe what it is a historian does’

13. • Hilary Jenkinson (1922): An archival document is ‘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 information by the person or persons
responsible for that transaction and their legitimate successors’.
Importance of official custody.
• Theodore Schellenberg (1956): all books, papers, maps, photographs, or
other documentary materials, regardless of physical form or characteristics,
made or received by any public or private institution in pursuance of its
legal obligations or in connection with the transaction of its proper
business and preserved or appropriate for preservation by that institution
or its legitimate successor as evidence of its functions, policies, decisions,
procedures, operations, or other activities or because of the informational
value of the data contained therein.
• We drive openness, cultivate public participation, and strengthen our
nation's democracy through public access to high-value government
records (NARA)

14. • The consensus evident in the 1950s about the nature of the archive
has broken down under a variety of pressures including:-
• The effects of the emergence of new media, including sound, moving
image and electronic records
• New historical methods eg oral history, photographic history and
growth of interdisciplinary research
• Complicity of the archive with immoral and corrupt governments eg
apartheid South Africa
• Concern to introduce new voices into the archive and to break down
its relationship with existing power structures
• Ability of new digital platforms to allow communities and individuals
to generate their own archives

15. • The term archive is today applied not only to administrative archives but also
to:
• Sound recordings (National Sound Archive in the British Library)
• Film (British Film Institute National Sound Archive)
• Television (BBC Archive)
• Newspapers (British Newspaper Archive)
• Web archives
• Archive functions within e-mail and other digital packages
• Archive of endangered languages (SOAS)
• Seed archive
• Medical Research Council Frozen Sperm and Embryo Archive
• Animal DNA Archive (University of Liverpool)

16. Muro de la Memoria, Parque de los Reyes, Santiago. A collective
archive recording those who disappeared during the dictatorship of
General Pinochet in Chile

17. Patchwork documenting the experience of Chilean exiles in South Yorkshire:
www.chilescda.orgPatchwork recording the experiences of Chilean exiles who settled in South
Yorkshire
www.chilescda.org

18. • Is the term ‘archive’ nowadays simply a catch-all for anything recording memory?
• If so, why do we continue to have separate galleries, libraries, archives and
museums (GLAM)? Merely for historic reasons?
• What is the difference between working with archives and working with (say)
Special Collections in a library?
• There may not be many differences in terms of content between archives and the
Special Collections in a library, but there are major distinctions in terms of:
• Acquisition
• Appraisal and selection
• Processing and cataloguing
• This has implications for us as researchers. The way we work with archives is very
different to the way we work with (say) manuscripts in Special Collections
• However, the boundaries between archives and other collections are more fluid
and interconnected than Jenkinson would have admitted
• Some of our most common search and discovery techniques are of limited value
with archives and we need to consider other methods

19. A major issue in
working with
archives is their
VAST SCALE
While manuscript volumes can be individually
counted, the size of archival series is often
expressed in the kilometres of shelf they occupy.
The National Archives has over 167 kilometres of
records. “Unsettling and colossal…stacked on
shelves, measured in kilometres like roads, the
archive seems infinite, perhaps even
indecipherable. Can you read a highway, even if it is
made of paper?” (Arlette Farge)

20. Roger Ellis as a young Assistant Keeper in the Public
Record Office: ‘the majesty of the records
themselves fired my imagination from the start.
There they lay in their silent caves, great stalactites
of history, some left complete, some truncated, as
the imperceptible currents of life had turned to run
elsewhere, some year by year still growing’.
The Cotton Manuscripts in the British Library comprise approx. 1,400 manuscripts and over 1,500 charters and rolls.
The rolls of just two courts in The National Archives (King’s Bench and Common Pleas) comprise over 10,000 formal rolls
produced between 1273 and 1500 containing more than four million individual membranes, dwarfing the Cotton Library.
When the National Archives were evacuated during World War II, ‘it was first necessary to shift 300 tons of records from the
basement to the upper floors, and after that, 600 lorry loads were brought back in the following eight months at the rate of
about 17 loads a week’. By comparison, the British Library manuscripts collection ‘would hardly fill the back of a baby Austin’.
Overwhelmingly, the roll and the charter are the characteristic scribal productions of medieval England.

21. • The methods of the archivist reflect the scale of the archive
• Archivists are just as much concerned with the managed destruction
of records as with their preservation. Appraisal a key activity (in 1989,
only 3% of Home Office papers reached TNA)
• Records boxed
• Numbering systems are short, flexible and reflect administrative
hierarchies eg C 54/221 or KB 145/3/6/1
• Records are listed rather than catalogued
• Greater concern with record groups than with individual items
• Archivists seek to preserve the original administrative structure and
arrangement of their records – the principal of ‘respect des fonds’ i.e.
grouping documents according to the administration, organization,
individual, or entity by which they were created or from which they
were received.

25. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381:
Richard II attempts to address
the rebels at Rotherhithe. From
a 15th-century copy of
Froissart’s Chronicles: Paris,
Bibliothèque Nationale de
France, MS Français 2644, f.
154v

26. Indictment against the Suffolk rebel leader, John Wraw, taken in Suffolk by a
commission under the Earl of Suffolk in July 1381. Summoned into Chancery
in May 1382, and afterwards transferred to King’s Bench: The National
Archives, KB 9/166/1 m. 39.

27. Proceedings on the appeal of John Wraw in the Court of King’s Bench in 1383: The National
Archives, KB 27/484 rex m. 26

28. Record in the King’s Bench roll of proceedings on John Wraw’s appeal, which
indicates where many of the supporting documents are filed: The National Archives,
KB 27/484 rex m. 27

29. King’s Bench Recorda file for 4 Richard II which contains fuller copies of many of the
documents relating to Wraw’s appeal, The National Archives, KB 9/145/3/4/1

30. Chart of the development of the King’s Bench files by C. A. F. Meekings. Note how the different file
series branch off and how archival work on recovering them proceeded like an archaeological
excavation.

31. Why the principle of ‘respect des fonds’ is
vital
• The hierarchical relationships (both vertical and horizontal) between
different record series preserves evidence of administrative processes
and the context of documents
• Attempts at ‘rationalization’ in past have destroyed lot of information
• V. H. Galbraith’s vision of ‘archival history’: “to the archivist, the past
presents itself as a vast collection of ‘original documents’ ... To name
a century to the archivist is to call up a mental picture of the relevant
records, the progress of history appearing to him as a slow pageant of
slowly changing records, marked from time to time by the occasional
disappearance of one class and the gradual emergence of another”.

32. Petition by Adam Pinkhurst (supposedly Chaucer’s scribe) to Henry IV, requesting confirmation of grants to him
by Edward III and Richard II in Surrey and Sussex, 1400: The National Archives, SC 8/134/6655
SC stands for ‘Special Collection’, an artificial collection created in the nineteenth century. The arbitrary
rearrangement of documents such as this destroyed evidence as to how petitions were handled by the royal
government

33. Thinking about ‘respect des fonds’
• Keyword searching has limited value in structures which emphasise
administrative context and interconnections
• ‘Respect des fonds’ does not necessarily imply continuous official
custody – far from it
• ‘Respect des fonds’ has in the past been used to create hard
boundaries, but a more fluid view of the interconnections of the
archive seems more appropriate
• Does archival thinking provides a different perspective to the
approaches of the library and museum. Should we be developing a
new blend of these approaches?

34. Search results for ‘Geoffrey Chaucer’ in TNA Discovery. There are over
400 life records of Chaucer in the National Archives. Discovery retrieves
just three of them.

35. Trial of William Huntyngfield, accused of robbing Geoffrey Chaucer of £10 at ‘Le Kage in Holbourne’, 24
November 1391. Huntyngfield was found guilty, although there is no record of his execution: The
National Archives, KB 27/521 rex m. 18

36. Grant on behalf of John of Northampton, formerly mayor of London, relating to lands in Edmonton,
Tottenham and Shoreditch in Middlesex, 1393, also in hand of Adam Pinkhurst. London, British Library,
Additional Charter 40542. Illustration from L. Warner, Chaucer’s Scribes (2018)
Jenkinson felt that such charters were the ‘wreck of archives’. However, it forms part of a small ‘fond’ in
the BL, apparently abstracted from the records of the Middlesex manors held by Northampton

37. Receipts and issues of the
Exchequer passing through the
hands of Sir William Herrick, one of
the four tellers of the Exchequer of
Receipt, 1621-1622. Note how each
transaction is signed by the
recipient or depositor of the money.
London, British Library, Additional
MS 41578

38. London, British Library,
Additional MS 61947: Teller's
view of Account from the
Exchequer of Receipt for the
half year beginning
Michaelmas 1587. Fills a gap
in this series of records in
the National Archives,
between E 405/433 and E
405/434.
Purchased at Sotheby's, 20
July 1981, lot 9.

41. Linking archival records: The Digital Panopticon: www.digitalpanopticon.org

42. Linking archives to reconstruct forgotten lives in the Digital Panopticon Life Archive

46. Morning Chronicle, 7
December 1771, from
Burney Newspaper
collection

47. Plaster cast prepared for William Hunter of the
échorché figure, apparently the dissected corpse of
Solomon Porter, 1771, for use in the Royal Academy
Research by Frances Osis, a PhD student in the
Hunterian Museum, indicates that Hunter’s
anatomy collection may include specimens from
Porter’s body

48. I admit that these accounts, which
have suddenly leapt across two and
a half centuries of silence, have
resonated with something deep
inside me, more than what we
ordinarily call literature […] if I have
drawn on them it is most likely
because of the resonance I feel
when I encounter these small lives
that have become ashes, revealed in
the few sentences that cut them
down.
Michel Foucault

49. Record of trial of John
Rykener, a cross-dressing
male prostitute, in London,
1395