Chapter VI: Part 6

And consider the collateral advantages that would ensue. Consider the immense gain of keeping a band of young architects out of mischief for five years; of inducing them during that time to confine themselves to the severe study of an important branch of their art; of compelling them to become acquainted with the history of its growth and development, and familiarizing them with the minutest detail of Gothic architecture, not in books but _in situ_; and above all of giving them a direct interest in keeping up and preserving some hundreds of ancient buildings which, as things are now, they have actually a pecuniary interest in tempting people to pull down.

But, desirable as it would be--nay, necessary though it be--that some such undertaking as this should be carried through, the other question must come first. Again and again we find ourselves driven back upon that when we attempt to stem the current of vandalism that may happen to be setting in this direction or in that. The ownership of our ecclesiastical edifices must be placed upon a different footing from that which we have acquiesced in too long. Sooner or later this must come; the sooner it comes the better for the interests we have at heart.

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At this point prudence suggests that I should pause. The time has not come for putting forward more than an outline of a proposal which is sure to be denounced as revolutionary. It will be a great point gained if we can find acceptance for the principle advocated. We all do dearly love our own old ways of looking at things; we all do cling tenaciously to the prejudices which we inherited or which were stamped upon our minds in the nursery; we all do honestly detest being worried into changes which interfere with our habits of thought and action and compel us to enter upon some new course. Yet if it be once brought home to us that a great national heritage is being rapidly sacrificed, allowed to perish, or, worse, being wantonly destroyed for lack of that small measure of protection which life and property have a right to expect in every civilized community, I believe that the sense of a common danger will unite men in a generous forgetfulness of their favourite maxims and a shame at their own supineness, and awaken them to see the necessity for concerted action; and then the thing that needs doing will be done.

There was a time in our history when the cry of “the Church in danger” provoked a strange frenzy among the people. The panic did not last very long, and not much came of it. But if another cry should be raised by gentle and simple and men of all creeds and parties, the cry of “the churches in danger!” I do not think little or nothing would come of _that_. That would be not the mere expression of a passing sentiment, but it would be a call to action; and when that cry does come to be raised, the public at large will not be satisfied with anything less than drastic measures, because the nation will have been roused to a consciousness of the value of their heritage; and when a great people begins to assert itself, it is not often that it is content with demanding only what it is morally justified in claiming.

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NOTE.

The following appeared in _The Pall Mall Gazette_ of August 15, 1889. If a more dreadful comment upon the above essay can be produced, I have not yet met with it:--

DISESTABLISHMENT BY DEMOLITION.

Mr. Thackeray Turner, the secretary of the Society for the
Protection of Ancient Buildings, requests us to publish the
following appeal for an ancient church which is in imminent danger
of destruction:--

The parish of Sotterley, in the county of Suffolk, lies about
five miles from the town of Beccles, and is one of those _close_
parishes which they who live in the _opens_ are wont to look upon
with a suspicion of envy. It is the property of a single owner;
not a field or meadow, not a yard of ground by the roadside, not
a stake in the hedgerow, not a brick or a gate is to be seen in
Sotterley that is not part and parcel of the possessions of the
squire and lord of the manor. The estate was for some 400 years
held by a family named Playters, which was counted among the great
Suffolk houses, and which came to grief at last, partly by taking
the wrong side in the troublesome times, and partly by the profuse
hospitality which the overgrown size of Sotterley Hall tempted its
owners to indulge in. But for four centuries they lived here, and
here generation after generation they died and were laid in their
graves. In the little church which in life they loved, their bones
rest now, and there are their monuments in brass and marble. The
walls are studded with their effigies.

Moreover, these Playters--and indeed their predecessors the
Sotterleys--spent money and pains upon the sacred building. There
to this day stands the fourteenth-century screen in wonderfully
good preservation, four at least of the figures in its panels still
retaining a great deal of the old brilliancy of colour, though at
least 500 years have passed since they were first set up in the
position they now occupy. There, too, _in situ_ may be seen many of
the old oak benches with their handsome “poppy-heads,” doubtless
carved by Sotterley craftsmen, and carved out of the oaks that were
growing in Sotterley wood before the Wars of the Roses had begun.
The same roof, which might be easily repaired at an insignificant
cost, covers the chancel which covered it before people had dreamed
of a Tudor king, the panels but little injured, and of the bosses
not one missing.

A man may visit fifty churches in East Anglia, and not meet with
one so entirely adapted to the needs of the small population who
delude themselves with the preposterous belief that they have a
right to worship there.

Moreover, Sotterley Church stands in a churchyard of unusually
large dimensions. It must cover at least an acre of ground, and
not half of this space shows the smallest sign of interments
having been made in it during the present century. But, unhappily,
Sotterley Church and churchyard lie in the middle of Sotterley
Park--not that it was always so, for the park has come to the
church, not the church to the park--and people will insist in going
to church, even farmers and farm labourers will, and worshipping
the Most High where their forefathers worshipped before them. The
Hall of the Playters was pulled down during the last century, and
the new hall--an ugly white-brick mansion of no pretension--was set
up much nearer to the ancient church; and when Sotterley people
died nothing could prevent their relatives from carrying their dead
to the old graveyard and laying them where they themselves hoped to
lie some day. But was not this a little too bad, to have a funeral
procession of tearful clodhoppers passing through your park gates
and under your very windows, asking no leave, but taking it in
quite a brutal fashion?

Therefore, about ten years ago, a vestry meeting, or something
of the sort, was held in Sotterley. The landlord’s pleasure was
signified, certain formalities were gone through, the tenantry,
small and great, were told that it was desirable that Sotterley
churchyard should be closed, and, the legal document being duly
drawn up, an order was obtained from the Privy Council, and the
churchyard was closed accordingly. Outside the park gates, in a
place where four ways meet, a square patch of ground, scrubby
and soppy, has been fenced off by a mean and ill-kept hedge,
and in the middle of it stares rather than stands, a forbidding
protuberance, an octagonal construction of cheap Sotterley bricks,
covered with cheap Sotterley tiles, looking like a ginger beer
stall in a cricket ground where there is no play going on. This
thing is called a chapel, I believe, and here the Sotterley people
must needs bring their dead. Will they all be brought here? High
and low--rich and poor one with another? Well, to get rid of the
funerals passing through the park was one point scored; but it was
but a beginning. On Easter Monday last a meeting of the parish in
vestry assembled was held as usual in Sotterley church. I am told
that the parishioners, knowing what was coming, very discreetly
kept away, all except the unhappy parson, who was bound to be
there, the landlord and one, two, or three others, who, it is
suspected, were told to be there. Forthwith a resolution drawn up
beforehand was proposed, seconded, and carried unanimously--for the
parson had nothing to do but to “put it to the meeting”--to the
effect that it was desirable to pull down or shut up the church of
Sotterley, and build another somewhere else. I am told that this
resolution has been actually forwarded to the Bishop of Norwich and
that a faculty has been actually applied for to close or destroy
a church which has been standing in its present site for the best
part of a thousand years, and that it only remains for the Bishop
to give his assent to this iniquitous proposition, and one more
of those monstrous outrages will have become an accomplished fact
which we English submit to with just a little snarling after they
have been committed, and which we allow to be perpetrated under our
eyes without ever lifting a finger to prevent. Whether the Bishop
of Norwich is the man to connive at so shameful a job as this, and
to give his episcopal sanction to the proposed desecration, is a
question that is a humiliating one to ask, for is it less than
infamous that such things are so possible that we begin to inquire
about their probability?

V.

_CATHEDRAL SPACE FOR NEGLECTED RECORDS._

The most delightful place of resort on the face of the globe is to be found within a bow-shot of Temple Bar. Not on the south side of Fleet Street, whatever enthusiastic gentlemen of the law may say, nor on the west, nor on the east, for there too there is little to attract us except in the shop windows, and there is noise and turmoil and the roar of a restless multitude bewildering and disturbing us whether we move or halt on our way. No! my happy valley lies to the north of the great thoroughfare; its courts and halls and corridors, its restful solitudes, its mines of gold that are waiting to be worked, its storehouses of precious things that are practically inexhaustible, all are to be found in a favoured region that lies between Chancery and Fetter Lanes.

“Record Office, Fetter Lane!” I said to the driver of a Hansom some months ago. “Do you mean _Chancery_ Lane, sir?” asked the voice through the hole over my head. “No, I mean Fetter Lane.” The man actually did not know the situation of the earthly Paradise.

Pone me pigris ubi nulla vicis
Arbor æstiva recreatur aura,

I murmured to myself--I could not waste my Horace upon Cabby.

I am in the habit of assuring my lowly congregation upon Sundays that for all their talk about heaven they would find themselves very much out of place there without some previous preparation for that desirable abode. The same warning is equally true when applied to other blissful resting-places besides the celestial mansions. You must have a taste for them; you must have qualified yourself to enjoy them and to mix with the company you find there. Surely Valhalla could only have suited the few. But this place of resort of which I am thinking is a pleasure-house whose resources are actually limitless, however well you may have learnt to use your opportunities. “Life piled on life were all too little” to get even so much knowledge of this prodigious and enormous accumulation of treasures as to be able to answer with certainty what may be found there and what not. For eight-and-forty years there has appeared annually a _Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records_, presenting us with an elaborate summary of work carried on by the functionaries employed in examining our national archives; and so far are we from getting to the end of the work of men cataloguing and calendaring that it may reasonably be estimated another fifty years will be required to complete this vast preliminary labour; and when that time comes it will be necessary to begin again at summarizing and supplying indices to the reports issued. What next will follow it is difficult to conjecture or imagine.

The forty-eighth Report, issued in 1887, happens to be lying at my elbow as I write, and there, ready for consultation, I find a brief calendar of the Patent Rolls of the seventh year of Edward the First, drawn up by one of the many accomplished archivists of the Office. It fills 216 closely printed pages. It summarizes at least 3,000 documents, some of them of considerable length; they all belong to a single class, and they are all concerned with the life of our forefathers--yours and mine, my estimable reader--during the single year ending the 20th of November, 1279. Six centuries ago. Think of that! Yet this collection is but one among thousands. The third Report, issued in 1842, first drew attention to the existence of a huge mass of ancient letters of the reigns of King John, Henry the Third, and Edward the First, the most modern of them, observe, coming down no nearer to our own time than the year 1307 A.D. “This important mass,” we are told, “appears to contain 1,942 bundles, each containing on the average about 200 documents, or about 388,400 on the whole.” Scared by such figures as these, the imagination, a trifle jaded, refuses to dwell upon 913 Papal Bulls of various dates, or to take the trouble to speculate upon the probable bulk of seven or eight thousand documents which reveal unknown secrets about the ancient forests and their boundaries. But we are fairly aghast at the news that there are hundreds of rolls averaging 200 feet in length, and at least one extending to the enormous dimensions of 800 feet, written within and without with lamentation and mourning and woe. There could be no eating such a roll as that!

The documents deposited in the Record Office, and which, as we have seen, are likely to have taken a hundred years to catalogue before they become readily accessible to students and explorers, count by millions. They are of all sorts, conditions, and classes, but they may be roughly described as concerned with the civil and political history of the nation; that is, they deal with the development of our institutions, with the government of our sovereigns through their ministers, with the changes in our laws and their administration, with the complex questions of the tenure of land and the changes in its ownership, with the rise and growth of our commerce, with our wars by land and by sea, with a hundred other matters which never can cease to have a profound and undying interest for the citizens of a great empire. Let us, for convenience’ sake, call the Record Office the storehouse of authorities on England’s _constitutional_ history.

This vast _tabularium_, as the Romans called their Public Record Office, is situated, as I have said, within a bow-shot of Temple Bar, and to the northeast of that vanished structure. About double the same distance on the south-west there exists another huge depository of records, which may be said to be a great storehouse of authorities concerned with our _family_ history. The wills which are stored in Somerset House, though beginning at a date centuries later than the early records in Fetter Lane, go back quite far enough to make the reading of the great mass of them not always easy for the uninitiated. They, too, probably count by millions, and I have known one gentleman who estimated the number which he himself had looked at and examined with more or less attention at not less than a hundred thousand. This collection is more easily accessible to students than the other, inasmuch as here we are dealing with a single class of documents, which present no difficulties of arrangement, and which have been carefully preserved and habitually consulted for generations, and are as a rule bound up in big volumes of transcripts, or offices copies, made for the most part within a short time of the original wills having been proved before the accredited officials. So far as they go the wills in Somerset House contain to a very great extent the _genealogical_ history of England. It is necessary to guard this statement by qualifying words, for the wills in Somerset House are the wills of men and women who died in the southern province only.

If we lengthen our radius, keeping to Temple Bar as our centre and sweeping a circle say of five miles in diameter, we shall include within this circumference a vast collection of records of a very miscellaneous character. There are the muniments of the City of London; there is an unknown mass of curious “evidences” in the secret chambers of the London companies; there are the mysterious and probably very large stores of recondite lore hidden away somewhere in the great Inns of Court, and perhaps in forgotten garrets of some of the minor dependencies of those august institutions. There are the sessional records of the county of Middlesex, which a very moderate estimate has assured us contain more than half a million documents; and, in addition to all these, there are probably many other important collections subsidiary to these larger ones, the very existence of which is unknown and unsuspected except by some few reticent creatures, who with the grip of the miser cling secretively to the hoarded treasures that they cannot spend and will not let any one else look at. It must be evident to any one who reflects upon the measureless bulk--the mere bulk--of these various assemblages of ancient documents to be found within the metropolitan area alone, that any heroic policy which should contemplate gathering them all under a single roof, and unifying them in a centralized national _tabularium_, is inpracticable. A Public Record Office which should not only be a monster warehouse for the safe custody of our ancient muniments, but should be a library of reference open to all duly qualified persons desirous of pursuing historical research among our unprinted sources, would be a building that would more than fill Trafalgar Square. Obviously such a collection, to be practically accessible, would require to be methodized, arranged, catalogued, and to some extent indexed. An army of trained officials would be needed to deal with the materials under their hands. It would take a lifetime to set the house in order. The very geography of such a world would require a guide-book as perplexing as a Bradshaw.

The magnificent collection now at the Record Office is, as has been seen, only in course of being examined and calendared. Even after fifty years of unremitting labour bestowed upon it we have a very imperfect knowledge of what it contains; and this, be it remembered, though no department of the public service can compare with this in the ability, industry, enthusiasm, and profound learning which have been for generations the characteristic of the officials, one and all, high and low. From the days of that cross-grained, combative, and overwhelmingly learned miracle of erudition William Prynne down to our own day there has been a kind of apostolical succession among the keepers of the national archives and their coadjutors. The Record Office almost deserves to have a dictionary of biography of its own. To widen the field of labour here would be to destroy all hope of its ever being brought into order. Centralization of our muniments has well-nigh reached its utmost limits in the unwieldy proportions of the collection now under the charge of the Deputy Keeper. To extend those limits and to bring together additional millions of MSS. from distant depositories would be to convert the great _tabulariumn_ into a colossal _cæmeterium_, in which they would be not so much preserved as buried for all time.

Let it be conceded, then, that, as far as the Record Office is concerned, it will be best to leave well alone. The custodians of our archives in Fetter Lane have quite enough to occupy their time for many a long day. They are not the men to need urging or to embarrass by loading them with new accessions of work which they can never hope to get through. On the other hand, the muniments of such bodies as the great Inns, the chartered companies, or the Corporation of London can hardly--at any rate hardly _yet_--be looked upon and dealt with as public property. These corporations very naturally cling to their own possessions; they are jealous of throwing open their muniments to be scrutinized and peeped into by prying eyes by no means always looking with a kindly or benevolent gaze. Why should the benchers of the Middle Temple, for instance, lay out their early charters to be copied by every chance grievance-monger, to be printed with appropriate comments in the columns of the _Wapping Watchman_, and enriched by learned notes and illustrations full of love and sweetness? Why should the ancient Guild of the Girdlers court publicity when there is a host of Grub Street ragamuffins only too glad to make merchandise of their “Curious Revelations” and to ferret out inconvenient scraps of information to be used for the destruction of the things that are? “Confound that shabby old Dryasdust!” we might hear the warden growl out to his brethren of the craft. “If the fellow goes on like that we shall have to ask him to dinner, give him a bad one, and protest we could not afford a better in the lamentable condition of our finances.” No! Diligent explorers and omnivorous antiquaries like my friend Mr. Cadaverous must be patient and submissive. “The rights of property, sir--the rights of property must be respected. Make your approaches in a spirit of courtesy and with becoming respect for the august body to which we belong, and you may find us gracious and condescending; but come to us as a footpad grabbing at our fobs, and you may find the consequences disastrous. We have been known to give pence to beggars, but to submit to be plundered--never!”

There is, however, one class of documents to be found within the area that I have been dealing with which may fairly be regarded as public property in a different sense from that in which the civic and corporate muniments can be considered such. I refer to the registers and churchwardens’ books, which constitute an important collection of records from which a great deal of our parochial and family history may be gleaned. I know how contemptuously some good folks affect to treat pedigree-hunting and genealogy. I know how much ridicule has been heaped upon the pompous pettiness of beadles and vestrymen. Mr. Bumble in a Punch and Judy show or in a Christmas pantomime is always greeted with a welcome of convulsive merriment. And yet somehow we all do feel some sly hankering to know how they managed it in the parochial councils, say, two or three hundred years ago; and few men are so indifferent as some dull men pretend to be about the mere bare births, deaths, and marriages of their forefathers. It may be very profitless, very silly, but so is playing at chess, and smoking, and many another harmless diversion. And is that all?

I am not going to enter into the question of what larger and wider fields of enquiry the humbler by-paths of research may help us to pass through without going helplessly astray; but this is certain, that there never has been a civilized nation since nations grew into organized life--never has been, never will be--in which something like a passion for finding out the smaller secrets of the past has not been strong, and in some minds absorbing. Be that as it may, there are, it may be estimated, some hundreds of volumes scattered about in all sorts of odd places, in the custody of all sorts of odd people, within the metropolitan area which contain the entries of the three most important events in the lives of millions of people who have been born, wedded, and died within five miles of Temple Bar during the last three centuries and a half. These volumes are being consulted every week. Copies of the entries made in them are produced as evidence in courts of justice every month, and vast sums of money change hands every year on the testimony which those books afford, and almost upon that alone. On that testimony again and again the title to large estates, the right to seats in the House of Lords, the legitimacy of son or daughter, has depended. Fiction and fact have vied with each other in emphasizing the romantic incidents that our parish registers have chronicled or concealed. All the existing parish registers within the metropolitan area, from the year 1538 (when parish registers first began to be kept in England) to the beginning of the present century, and all the churchwardens’ books besides, might easily be kept in a single room of Somerset House, and be easily supplied with perfect personal indices in five years.

* * * * *

One more class of ancient records remains to be dealt with before we leave London and its purlieus. Nothing has yet been said of that immense mass of precious muniments which constitute the apparatus from which the _ecclesiastical_ history of England may be compiled; that is, the history of the part which the Church has played in the political, religious, and, I may add, the moral and intellectual training and education of the nation.

There are within little more than a mile of our old friend Temple Bar three great depositories of ecclesiastical records of inestimable value and of unknown richness--one at the Archiepiscopal Palace of Lambeth, one at St. Paul’s, one in the precincts of Westminster Abbey. (1) The collection of MSS. at Lambeth was very ably catalogued nearly eighty years ago, and is readily accessible to all who are desirous and competent to make an intelligent use of the treasures it contains. (2) The archives of St. Paul’s comprehend not only the muniments of the great Metropolitan Chapter, but those also of the bishopric of London. The Chapter records have been examined and reported upon by the present Deputy Keeper in the _Ninth Report of the Historic MSS. Commission_. Of course Mr. Lyte has done his work in a masterly way, and to the wonder and despair of smaller men who have tried their ’prentice hands at such employment; but he warns us that “the greater part of the collection _has never yet been examined for literary or historical purposes_;” and so far from this important assemblage of original documents being accessible to research, Mr. Lyte, when he began his examination, found it stowed away in boxes “in an octagonal chamber above the Dean’s vestry,” and one box full of ancient documents had been discovered by the Bishop of Oxford “in a loft over the Chapter House.” The extent, interest, and importance of the capitular records to historical students is in the present condition of our knowledge quite incalculable.

But the archives of the _diocese_ of London are also said to be kept in St. Paul’s. Thirty years ago, when I was very young at this kind of work, I obtained permission to make a search among the muniments of the Bishop of London for certain small fragments of information which, in the glorious hopefulness of youth, I was bent on discovering. During three short December days I was privileged to climb to a certain chamber in a certain tower of St. Paul’s, and there to immure myself for five or six hours at a time. There is a region where beings who succeed in retaining their personality must needs be the sport of the vortices that whirl and eddy through the “vast inform,” where “Chaos umpire sits” and “next him high arbiter Chance governs all.” But in such a region none may hope to find anything that he can carry away. I emerged from that three-days’ audacious voyage of discovery with my intellect only a little disordered and my constitution only a trifle shattered, and I survive to speak of that bewildering and horrible experience as men speak of their confused recollection of an escape from drowning. From that day to this I have never met with a human being who had ever been bold enough to search among the archives of the bishopric of London or who could tell me anything about them, good or bad.

(3) Somewhere--somewhere--within the precincts of the great Abbey of Westminster there are said to be imprisoned in grim and forbidding seclusion unknown multitudes of witnesses, voiceless, tongueless, forgotten, whose testimony, if it could be extorted, would strangely and powerfully affect our views upon hundreds of incidents and movements, hundreds of crimes and errors and sacrifices and grand endeavours that now are very imperfectly understood, often wholly misrepresented, and some of them passed out of remembrance. Let us take an example.

We have all of us heard of the _Star Chamber_. Pray may I ask my accomplished readers if they know anything about the Stars? Nay! Be not rash with thy lips. The name Star Chamber has not the remotest connection with astronomy. The name carries us back to a time when the children of Israel were swarming in England and when they were the great bankers or money-lenders--almost the only bankers and money-lenders--within the four seas. Impecunious scoundrels up and down the land mortgaged their lands or pawned their valuables, and the Jews advanced them money upon their securities. The promises to pay, the agreements to surrender property on non-payment, the bonds, the bills, the orders of court, and the documentary evidence bearing upon all these transactions between the creditors and the debtors, the borrowers and the lenders, were drawn up in the Hebrew language, and the records of these multifarious transactions between the Jews and the Christians, dating back to an unknown antiquity (possibly to a time very little after the Conquest) and _ending_ about the year 1290, when all Jews were banished from England with unspeakable acts of cruelty and wrong--these records, I say, are to be found in the archives of Westminster Abbey. These Hebrew records are believed to count by thousands, and are known by the name of _stars_ among the few who even know that there are such things in existence. As to the exact meaning or derivation of the word, I dare not venture upon an explanation of it; nor as to the correct spelling of it am I qualified to express an opinion. It is sufficient for me that the court in which these suits between the Jews and their victims, or their defrauders, were tried and decided was in ancient times called the _Star_ Chamber, because the records of the proceedings which were there adjudicated upon were popularly known as _stars_. Perhaps not six men in Britain have ever looked _intelligently_ at this mass of Hebrew MSS. I believe only one man living--Mr. Davies--has devoted any time to the study of them. And yet with this immense and unique apparatus absolutely untouched, with this virgin soil that has been neglected and unknown for six centuries, literary empirics have more than once set themselves to write the history of the Jews to the Middle Ages, “resorting to their imagination for their facts” when the facts were there at their elbows if they had only known it. The history of the Jews in England down to the time of their expulsion by Edward the First remains to be written, because the materials for that history have remained to the present hour unread.

Take another instance. There have been many very interesting books printed about Westminster Abbey; about the sovereigns that were crowned there, about sovereigns that were buried there, about dramatic incidents that occurred within the glorious church, about its architecture, about its school, about its single bishop and its many illustrious deans. The magnificent and venerable institution is so spangled with golden memories that the dryest handbook must needs prove attractive to the dullest of readers. The whole place in its every stone and nook and corner is wrapped in an atmosphere of romance and wonder and mystery; but anything that deserves to be called by so grand a name as a History of Westminster Abbey, or anything approaching to it, can no more be said to exist than can the History of Carthage or Damascus. There may be, there is, some excuse for our ignorance in the one case, but in the other case there is none. There, within the very walls where the history was a-making through the ages, in the very handwriting of the men whose lives were passed within the precincts and who were actors in the drama of which they left their fragments of notes or scraps of illustrations or briefest mementoes, there, huddled together in bunks and trunks and sacks and boxes--no one can tell you exactly where--there is such a wealth of materials that when it comes to be methodized and utilized, digested and studied, as it _must_ be some day, the result will inevitably be to make the men of the future look with larger, other eyes than ours upon the action of those forces and the character of those movements, and the statesmanship of those leaders and commanders of the people which have worked together in the evolution of a great nation from its inchoate condition of a mere gathering of peoples. Nevertheless, for any facilities that exist for studying the records of Westminster Abbey they might almost as well be kept in glass cases in the moon as be where they are. Am I, then, going to propose...? My good sir, I am going to propose nothing, nothing at any rate with regard to the London records, lay or clerical. Only this I venture to remark, that before we have taken stock of our metropolitan muniments and got them into order, before we have provided suitable receptacles for them and put them under the charge of qualified custodians, we shall be wiser if we learn a little modesty in talking about other people and other places, and what they ought to do and what ought to be done for them.

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Once upon a time there was a grizzly monster who sat himself down in the neighbourhood of the ancient city of Thebes. He was a ravenous monster with an insatiable appetite, and he demanded for his meals large supplies of Theban youths and maidens. The monster conducted himself in a very exacting and insolent manner, and somehow he contrived to make the unhappy Thebans acquiesce in his bold assumption that the gods had created Thebes and all that belonged to it for no other purpose under heaven than for the support and glorification of his own unwieldy self, growing daily more corpulent, voracious, and overbearing. At last one fine day the monster in a sportive humour asked the Thebans a riddle, and a sagacious gentleman guessed the riddle. The answer was “Man.” It was a very curious conundrum, and when the answer came it brought with it an important and startling suggestion. “Ye burghers of Thebes,” one cried, “look to it! Man was _not_ created for the monster! That be far from us! Monsters peradventure there must be--some beneficent, some malign, some to be proud of, some to loathe. But be they what they may, let it be ours to proclaim, Not man for the monsters, but monsters for the behoof of man!” That wholly novel and unexpected resolution, having been carried unanimously and by acclamation, wrought quite a revolution among the Theban folk. I am sorry to say its effect upon the voracious creature aforesaid was disastrous. They say he did not wait to perish of famine, but died violently of a ruptured heart.

There is among us a school of pundits, who live and always have lived within the sound of Bow Bells, whose Dagon and Baal and Moloch and Juggernaut combined is London, whose Gospel is “Blessed are they whom the great city vouchsafes to devour.” Outside the five-miles circle, or the ten-miles circle, these men think there are indeed certain insignificant atoms, minute, nebulous, meteoric, held in solution in that impalpable medium which for convenience has been called by idealists the realm of England, but that these purposeless particles have no sort of cohesion, and their continuance even as atoms can only be assured in so far as they are destined to become integral portions of that vast pleroma the all-embracing and all-devouring London. No! Let it be proclaimed upon the housetops, let the protest go forth and awake the echoes, “England does not exist for London, but London for England!” Let men ponder that profound and pregnant utterance of the greatest of our historians--“From the beginning of its political importance London acts constantly as the pulse, sometimes as the brain, _never perhaps in its whole history as the heart of England_.” Is that so? Then let us beware how we give our monster more than its due and more than it can manage, lest it develop into a hydrocephalous monster with a pulse that beats but feebly by reason of its life’s blood being scantily supplied.

Indeed, it is easy to exaggerate the value and importance even of the metropolitan archives. To begin with, the records of the City of London will be found of little or no use for investigating the history of English agriculture. What will they teach us about the complex questions of land tenure, the life of the peasantry, the relations between the lords and the tenants of the soil, about the condition of the people, high and low, about those local courts and franchises and customs, and disciplinary and formative machinery, which “through oppression prepared the way for order and by routine educated men for the dominion of law”? You must go a long way out of London to get anything like a grasp of the constitution of a county palatine, and to understand the working, if I may use the expression, of such forms of local government as were once active in the manor, the honour, or the hundred. You must study such matters not only in the rolls and charters that survive, but you must study them too in the geographical areas with which they are concerned. What! gather together all the parish registers, and all the wills and all the sessional papers within the four seas and toss them all together into a vast heap “somewhere” in London! What for? That a score or two of cockney dryasdusts may have the opportunity of getting at them by a short ride outside a “penny bus”? Why, you might just as well propose that all the parish churches should be carted away bodily and set up “somewhere” in battle array as a kind of ecclesiastical wall round the metropolis, in order to give adequate facilities of study to the Institute of British Architects in Conduit Street.

The fact is that within the last few years more has been done in the way of arranging, cataloguing, and providing for the safe custody of ancient documents in the provinces than has been even attempted (outside the Record Office) by London and the Londoners. We poor creatures in the wilds, _we_ don’t go whining for subsidies from the Government, _we_ don’t clamour for grants from the national exchequer; and there are some of us that can give a very much better account of our muniments than you Londoners can give of yours. Thirty years ago the corporation of Norwich had a catalogue of its records drawn up by a local antiquary, which for convenience of reference and the intimate and wide knowledge it displays could bear comparison with any similar undertaking then existing in the country. The records of the borough of Ipswich, says Mr. J. Cordy Jeaffreson, “are at present so perfectly arranged that with the help of the new catalogue and index ... the custodian can produce without difficulty any charter, roll, or paper account that it may be needful to examine.” The records of the corporation of Leicester, says the same learned antiquary, “will endure comparison with the muniments of any provincial borough in Great Britain.” The magnificent enthusiasm of two citizens of that same borough has brought this immense assemblage of MSS. into a condition which may well arouse envy and ought to stimulate rivalry; while the example set by the mayor and corporation in making their treasures accessible to all comers proves that enthusiasm is contagious.

These instances are taken at random; there is no need to multiply them. It is well known to experts, and to some who are much less than experts, that the condition of our corporation records throughout the land is very far more satisfactory than was suspected a few years ago, and that every year more and more attention is being bestowed upon them, more vigilance displayed in their preservation, and more zeal and earnestness exhibited in the patient study of their contents. Every year the number of intelligent explorers of our municipal and other local archives is steadily increasing, which means that every year the study of our history is being more laboriously pursued by specialists. For the rest, the whole field is felt to be too vast to travel through in the present state of our knowledge. But just as great laws and great generalizations in physical science have been made, and could only have been made, by the devotion of students concentrating their attention upon a single branch of physiology, chemistry, or astronomy, and registering the conclusions--that is, the certainties--which their several researches have arrived at, so must it be with history; there, too, research must be carried on by men who will be content to labour in a limited area and to deal with problems which cease to be insignificant when their bearing upon larger questions is recognized and the results of one man’s toil are affiliated to those of another’s.

But if this be so, if indeed the history of England of the future will be the outcome of what may be called the experimental and departmental method of research, it is obvious that the examination of the enormous body of evidence now at our command must be carried on by _local inquiries_. Only so can slight hints and faint clues be apprehended, the local customs and dialects understood, and the very names of places and persons detected in their various disguises. But what we have found ourselves led to suspect when we were dealing with the various collections of records now dispersed in the great hiding-places of London--namely, that sooner or later we shall have to group those records in departmental archives--this we are irresistibly compelled to believe we shall sooner or later have to do with the large masses of historic MSS. which are scattered broadcast over the island from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s House.

In the smaller world of London--yes, Mr. Gigadibs, the _smaller_ world--observe, it is a concession to your stubborn prejudices to call it a world at all, but if a world I protest that the qualifying epithet must be resorted to--in the smaller world of London we have seen that the existing collections of records may be roughly associated in certain groups or classes according as they are regarded as belonging to the evidences bearing upon (1) the history of the monarchy and the development of the constitution; (2) the history of English law and all that concerns such matters as procedure, judicature, and the like; (3) the history of the City of London--of its great guilds, its customs, privileges, and commerce; (4) personal and family history, and (5) lastly, ecclesiastical history, including in that the history of the religious houses. In the wider area we should have to make a similar classification, but in doing so we should have to add one class of documents very inadequately represented in the London collections; I mean those which supply an apparatus for studying the history of the land.

And here we are face to face with a serious difficulty. The evidences, which until the present century were so intimately associated with a landed estate that they passed with the estate as an almost necessary proof that possession had been conveyed, had in the lapse of ages grown in many instances to an aggregate of documents whose bulk was prodigious and its mere stowage embarrassing. Where the capital mansion of an extensive property was proportionate to the acreage it was easy to set apart one room as a muniment-room, in which thousands of charters, court rolls, bailiffs’ accounts, and other records were deposited and sometimes arranged with great care and precision; but where a great estate was broken up, or there was no longer any important residence upon it, the evidences often found their way into very strange depositories. The family solicitor had to find a home for them, and to do so was often extremely inconvenient; or the capital mansion became a farm-house, and the evidences were packed in boxes and sent up to the garrets under the roof, in some cases were bundled into the hayloft. By the legislation which simplified the conveyance of land and rendered it no longer necessary to go back to the beginning of time in order to prove a title, the ancient “evidences” became at once valueless for all practical purposes. They became not only useless but odious lumber, and a process of quietly getting rid of them set in and has been steadily carried on to the present moment. The rolls of manor courts and courts leet, which give an insight into the daily life of our forefathers, and which may still be met with in large numbers, dating back to the days of Henry the Third, were destroyed by tens of thousands. Documents which could have thrown light upon some of the most interesting problems which are now being worked at by the profoundest jurists and the most acute students of constitutional history have perished in unknown multitudes. Others which contained invaluable illustrations of local customs--of tyrannous overstraining of feudal authority on the one hand or of crafty evasions of feudal services on the other, of the rapacity of lords and stewards of manors here and of successful appropriations of strips of land or rights of commonage or pasture there--vanished from the face of the earth, none would tell how. The extent to which this destruction of ancient muniments has been carried on cannot yet be even approximately estimated. Nevertheless much remains. The interest which such writers as Mr. Seebohm, Mr. Maitland, Mr. Thorold Rogers, and others have aroused in the many important inquiries which they have severally pursued is increasing day by day, and there can be no doubt that a desire to become better acquainted with the contents of those documents which still survive and may still be rescued and preserved is spreading rapidly and widely. But “where are they to be kept when we have got them?” is the question that presses. It is more than can be expected of the civic authorities that they should charge the rates of the town with providing house room for collections of MSS. which are but remotely concerned with the history of the boroughs themselves. The local museums as a rule are overcrowded and can barely keep their heads above water. The boxes and bundles of rolls and parchments in the lawyers’ offices are provokingly in the way; the country houses are changing hands week by week, and Philistines prefer dressing-rooms to muniment rooms. Will no one suggest a way out of our difficulties?

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I have passed very lightly over the condition of affairs at Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s, and that for more reasons than one, the chief reason, but by no means the only one, being that I know nothing about the Abbey muniments or of those of the bishopric of London, and nobody seems able to tell me anything. I have not even alluded to the archdeaconries of the diocese of London.

Those lofty souls whose habit it is to dogmatize most airily when they declaim most ignorantly, are never more jocose than when they take a turn at the archdeacons and their visitations. Well, it is very funny to think of there being any grotesque survivals of such an institution as an archdeacon’s court still existing among us. What a droll prelate Bishop Remigius must have been that he actually divided his overgrown and unwieldy diocese of Lincoln into seven archdeaconries about twelve years after the Conquest! How very odd that the successors of those seven functionaries have been going on merrily archdeaconizing down to the present day! How did they amuse themselves all this long time? How did they keep up their little game? “Exercising archidiaconal functions, of course.” And of course we are expected to receive that novel explanation with shouts of laughter. Well, but wouldn’t you like to know how they really _did_ employ themselves? Suppose you were by chance to hear that the action of the archdeacons’ courts had _something_ to do with the emigration of the Pilgrim Fathers and many hundreds of their friends to New England, say, in the seventeenth century; something perhaps to do with the death of Arch-bishop Laud and the twenty years’ imprisonment of Bishop Wren. Wouldn’t you like to know something about it all? What have become of the records of the archdeaconries? I know where a few of them are: but where the great mass of them are to be found I know not, and it would take a great deal of trouble to discover. Those that I know of are in closets in lawyers’ offices. A blessing on those lawyers, say I, for they have at any rate preserved some fragments of ancient evidences which but for them would have gone to make _glue_ long ago. But if you want to find out what the ecclesiastical discipline exercised by the archdeacons upon gentle and simple in the old days was like, you will have to fish up the records of the archdeacons’ courts out of their hiding-places, and you will find them to contain some very, very funny items of information, almost as droll as the buffoonery of those lofty souls.

If we are ever to arrive at clearer and truer views of the history of the slow growth of certain moral, religious, and even political convictions among the great body of the people--by the help of, or in despite of, the inquisitorial, coercive, and repressive machinery of the local ecclesiastical courts, which for centuries were exercising a real and terrible power within a ride of every man’s door through the length and breadth of the land--we certainly must not neglect that large body of evidence which is to be found in the records of the archdeacons’ courts. But it is obvious that such records must be unified, must be made accessible to students, which means, in other words, that they must be collected into diocesan or provincial archives.