Records, PUBLIC (Lat. recordari, 'to remember'), contemporary authenticated statements of the proceedings of the legislature, and the judgments of those higher courts of law which are distinguished as Courts of Record. An act, 1 and 2 Vict. chap. 94, sets at rest the question what is legally to be held a record, by providing that the word records shall be taken to mean all rolls, records, writs, books, proceedings, decrees, bills, warrants, accounts, papers and documents whatsoever belonging to Her Majesty, or then deposited, or which ought to be deposited, in any of certain places of custody which are enumerated. This statute, together with the Act 40 and 41 Vict. chap. 55, and the Order in Council of 5th March 1852, has placed under the care of the Master of the Rolls the vast mass of documents stored in the Public Record Office.
Parchment is the material on which the greater portion of the records are written. The so-called 'rolls' of the Exchequer and Common Law Courts are comparatively short skins attached at the top after the manner of books, but the lines of the writing run parallel to the line of binding. In other cases they are sewed together consecutively, as in the case of the Patent and Close Rolls, and then form true 'rolls' of great length. Some records are in the form of books, as Domesday; others are filed—i.e. each document is pierced with a string or gut passed through it, the whole being fastened together in bundles. Many of the later records are written on paper.
The early parliamentary records and statutes are principally in Norman-French, which continued in partial use till the time of Henry V.; all the other great series of records, except those of parliament, are in Latin down to the reign of George II. or later, except during the Commonwealth, when English was substituted.
Public records, which can be traced in germ before the Conquest, gradually expanded under the Norman and Plantagenet kings. They enabled the subject to defend and maintain those feudal rights and privileges which were gradually trenching on royal prerogatives, and to protect himself from arbitrary exactions; while to the king they furnished precedents which could not be questioned for his calls of military service and taxation.
The various courts being the King's Courts, and following the sovereign from place to place, their earliest depositories were the royal palaces in different parts of England; but when the higher courts were permanently established at Westminster, 'treasuries,' or places of custody for the records of the different courts, were appointed there. A portion of the public records were, as far back as Henry III.'s reign, deposited in the Tower of London and the New Temple; and in the reign of Edward III. the Tower had become a permanent treasury. The parliamentary committee of 1837 enumerated among the places of deposit a room in the Tower over a gunpowder magazine, and close to a steam-engine in daily operation; a chapel at the Rolls, where divine service was performed; underground vaults at Somerset House; damp and dark cellars at Westminster Hall; the stables of the late Carlton Ride; and the Chapter-house, Westminster. From the reign of Edward II. downwards the attention of parliament had often been called to the safe custody and arrangement of the records as an object of solicitude. The fullest examination in recent times was made by a committee of the House of Commons in 1800, whose report presents the most comprehensive account of the records in existence. A commission was appointed to go on with the work which the committee had begun, and was renewed six times between 1800 and 1831. All the several record commissions directed the commissioners to cause the records to be methodised, regulated and digested, bound and secured, and to have calendars made, and original papers printed; and numerous valuable publications have been issued by the commissioners from time to time. The new edition of Rymer's Fœdera, the calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, and the editions with excellent indexes of the earlier Patent and Close Rolls and the Rolls of the Curia Regis are especially to be noted. An inquiry as to the materials for English history to be found in the Vatican and other foreign libraries was instituted about 1834 by the Record Commissioners, and the results were printed under the title 'Appendices to Report on the Fœdera,' but have never been formally published. Copies, however, were disseminated, and may be consulted in the British Museum Library and elsewhere, but the report itself has never appeared. Following this example, agents have been employed by the Public Record Office at Paris, Simancas, Venice, and Rome for many years, and the results of their labours have been partly published, while the remainder may be consulted at the Record Office.
A full investigation into the proceedings of the Record Commissioners was made by a committee of the House of Commons in 1835, and since 1840 annual reports have been issued by the Deputy-keeper of the Records. By the statutes referred to above the Master of the Rolls is empowered to appoint a deputy-keeper of the records, and, in conjunction with the Treasury, to do all that is requisite in the execution of this service. He makes rules for the management of the office, and fixes what fees may be demanded. He allows copies to be made, which, when certified by the deputy and assistant keepers, and authenticated with the seal of the office, are producible as evidence in courts of law. The Home Secretary directs from time to time such of the catalogues, calendars, and indexes, and such of the records as he thinks fit, to be printed, and sold at prices fixed by him. All Record publications may be procured directly from the Queen's Printers, East Harding Street, Fleet Street, and detailed catalogues of them may be obtained from the same source.
The present Public Record Office, a handsome fireproof building in Fetter Lane, was begun in 1851 on a plan which admits of extension as the records of the kingdom accumulate (for it must be remembered that modern documents as well as old form the subject of the deputy-keeper's care), and provision has been made for the transfer into his hands of the records which are growing from day to day in the great administrative and legal departments of the state, as soon as they have ceased to be needed for frequent reference.
The principal contents of the Record Office may be classified under seven principal groups. Records of (1) the Superior Courts of Law, including the Courts of Chancery, Queen's Bench, and Common Pleas, and the Exchequer, with its important fiscal as well as legal machinery; (2) Special and Abolished Jurisdictions, such as the Courts of Arches, Chivalry, Requests, and Star-chamber; (3) Duchy of Lancaster; (4) Palatinate of Durham; (5) Palatinate of Lancaster; (6) Principality of Wales; (7) State Papers and Departmental Records, including the archives of the Admiralty, Colonial Office, Foreign Office, Home Office, Treasury, and other departments.
Several handbooks to this enormous mass of materials have been published, of which the most useful are An Account of the most important Public Records of Great Britain, by C. Purton Cooper (2 vols. 8vo, 1832); Official Handbook to the Public Records, by F. S. Thomas (8vo, 1853); Our Public Records, by A. C. Ewald (8vo, 1873); and A Guide to the Principal Classes of Documents preserved in the Public Record Office, by S. R. Scargill-Bird (8vo, 1891). An introduction to the art of searching for materials, whether historical, topographical, genealogical, or legal, is afforded by the present writer's Records and Record-searching (8vo, 1888), while a person not acquainted with the ancient legal hands cannot do better than consult C. T. Martin's edition of Wright's Court Hand Restored. This contains useful glossaries, lists of abbreviations, ancient alphabets, and specimens of the old handwritings, which vary greatly from century to century. See PALEOGRAPHY.
The bulk of the national records may be imagined from the fact that, to cite only two classes of documents, there are more than 18,000 Close Rolls, and many thousands of Coram Rege and De Banco Rolls, each of the latter in the Tudor period containing from 500 to 1000 skins of parchment.
The supreme needs of such a depository are indexes, and indexes to indexes. The latter requirement is tolerably supplied by the 'List of Calendars, Indexes, &c.' in appendix ii. to the 41st Report of the Deputy-keeper (8vo, 1880); but the indexes themselves to which this list of 748 items is a directory are sadly deficient. They do not furnish guidance to a twentieth part of the mass of documents, and many of them are merely eclectic. A recent addition to this series is 'General' Plantagenet Harrison's voluminous MS. Index to the De Banco and other rolls, which has been acquired at the public expense.
Numerous charters of the greatest antiquity are to be found in the Public Record Office, and there of course is preserved Domesday Book; but, understanding by 'records' a fairly continuous series of official documents, we may say that the earliest are the Pipe Rolls or Great Roll of the Exchequer. That for 31 Henry I. stands alone, but is soon followed by an unbroken series of Pipe Rolls extending from 2 Henry II. down to modern days. These are accounts of the revenue of the kingdom both as regards receipt and expenditure, and they contain items of the greatest possible historical interest. The Pipe Roll Society (established 1884) is gradually printing them. Next in order of antiquity are the Patent Rolls, which begin with 3 John and come down to the present day, and the Close Rolls, which present a similarly unbroken series from 1204. The former contain matters patent or open to the public, such as grants of offices, crown-lands, liberties, confirmations of previous grants, grants to corporate bodies, patents of honour, licenses, pardons, ratifications of treaties, proclamations, safe-conducts, presentations to benefices, restitutions of temporalities to bishops, abbeys, &c.
The Close Rolls contain mandates, letters, and writs of a private nature which were closed or sealed up, and record the directions of the king as to domestic and public matters, orders to the sheriffs on all kinds of questions, and directions as to raising subsidies. The historical value of these two sets of Rolls is immense, as in the earlier years all the state correspondence, both foreign and domestic, is recorded in one or other of them.
Other records of great value which date either from the reign of Edward I. or from still earlier times are the Cartæ Antiquæ, early transcripts of charters ranging from Ethelbert, king of Kent, to Edward I.; Charter Rolls, containing the king's grants of land, dignities, &c.; Escheat Rolls, accounts of lands and property forfeited to the crown; Feet of Fines, records of the endings of fictitious suits as to land, which are in reality deeds of conveyance, ranging from 7 Richard I. to William IV.; Rotuli Curiae Regis, some of which are as early as Richard I., and are records of the cases decided in the King's Court up to the reign of Edward I., by whom the court was divided into the King's Bench, Common Pleas, and Exchequer; Coram Rege Rolls, or records of the crown side of the King's Bench, including Assize, Eyre, Coroners, and Gaol Delivery Rolls; De Banco Rolls, or records of the Court of Common Pleas; Inquisitions Post Mortem, a treble series (Chancery, Wards and Liveries, Exchequer) of inquiries as to the land held by tenants in capite at time of decease, and as to their heirs; Originalia Rolls of the Exchequer, containing entries of any service, rent, or salary reserved in grants or charters; Subsidy Rolls, also Exchequer documents, often containing the names of the taxpayers under villages and towns, and most valuable to the topographer; Pell Records, including the Liberate Rolls and Issue Rolls, consisting of entries of payments of salaries, pensions, &c.; Customs Rolls for various ports; Memoranda Rolls (Exchequer), enrolments of writs of Scire Facias, informations, outlawries, and a multitude of other matters; Pardon Rolls, enrolments of pardons up to 2 James I.; Quo Warranto Rolls, respecting usurpations of offices or franchises; Oblata or Fine Rolls, offerings to the king for renewals of charters, enjoyment of lands, offices, and privileges; Parliament Rolls, petitions to and proceedings in parliament, beginning from the reign of Edward I.; Statute Rolls, the Journals of the Lords and Commons from Henry VIII., and other parliamentary records.
The foregoing are more or less continuous records, but there are some of an occasional character or of limited annual duration, but still of great importance, such as the Hundred Rolls, presentations of unjust claims of privileges such as free warren frankpledge, and assizes of bread and ale; the Liber Niger, and Liber Rubeus Scaccarii, and Testa de Nevill, lists of tenants in capite and knight's fees; Taxatio Ecclesiastica, an account (1291) of the taxation of benefices; Inquisitiones Nonarum, which included a valuation of benefices in the fourteenth year of Edward III.; French Rolls, Norman Rolls, Gascon Rolls, copies of treaties, truces, orders, summonses, grants of safe-conduct, and other items respecting the affairs of those parts of France that were under the English crown; Valor Ecclesiasticus, a valuation of benefices in 26 Henry VIII.; Baga de Secretis, trials for state offences of a specially secret nature, from Anne Boleyn to the Stuart adherents of 1715 and 1745; Royalist Composition Papers (1649-60), containing statements as to estates and families of Royalists.
The state papers (Domestic, Foreign, Colonial, Irish, and Scotch) originally sprung from the Privy-council and Chancery, and include the correspondence of the Privy-council, secretaries of state, and other public departments, with miscellaneous domestic papers from the time of Henry VIII. These, being the correspondence of the highest political officers of the kingdom, relate to an infinite variety of matters. They have been carefully arranged, and more than 120 volumes of calendars, covering a large portion of the field, have now been published.
The activity of the authorities of the Public Record Office has, however, not been confined to the records stored in Fetter Lane, for since 1858 the Master of the Rolls has issued, under the authority of the Treasury, more than 200 volumes of the series known as Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland. These are carefully edited texts of the ancient chroniclers, such as William of Malmesbury, Gervase of Canterbury, William of Newburgh, and Matthew Paris, collated with MSS. in English and continental libraries, and prepared by specially selected editors.
The Historical Manuscripts Commission, though not in name a department of the Record Office, is in reality closely connected with it. In answer to requests from this body, private libraries and muniment rooms all over England, Ireland, and Scotland have, almost without exception, been thrown open to authorised inspectors, who have reported on their principal MS. contents. Since 1870 many volumes of reports on these collections have been published, embodying transcripts of documents of special interest, and giving brief abstracts of a host of others.
The Literary Search Room at the Public Record Office is open from 10 to 4 every day, except Saturday, when it closes at 2 o'clock, and a few public holidays, when the office is shut up. Any respectable person may, on entering his name and address in a book kept in the lobby, attend and consult almost any document he may desire to see. A few of course are subject to special reservation.
Scotland.—The public records of Scotland are undoubtedly numerous and multifarious as early as 1282, as appears from an inventory of muniments examined in that year by the order of Alexander III.; and another inventory of Scottish rolls and writs was compiled at the command of Edward I. of England in 1291. Few, if any, of the documents mentioned in these lists are now known to exist. In 1651 the records of the Scottish parliaments and courts of justice were removed by Cromwell to the Tower of London. The more important of these, to the number of 1609 volumes, were restored in 1657, and the remainder, after the restoration of Charles II., were packed in eighty-five hogsheads and shipped on board a frigate for Scotland; but in a violent storm they were transferred to a smaller vessel, which went down with its precious cargo. The control of the records has from very early times been entrusted to the Clerk of the Rolls and Registers, or Lord Clerk Register, one of the high officers of state, who had a seat in the Scottish parliament, and to whom, and his deputies and other officers appointed by him, it was assigned to superintend both the formation and custody of the public records. These were at first in the inconvenient form of rolls, but in the reign of David II. the practice was introduced of writing them in books. By an act of 1463 the king's rolls and registers were appointed to be put in books; but the accounts in the Exchequer continued, nevertheless, to be kept in rolls till the passing of another act in 1672, appointing them to be written in books. Originally the records were kept in the Castle of Edinburgh, but in later times they were deposited under care of the Clerk Register, in the Laigh Parliament House, now part of the Advocates' Library; and shortly before the Union the whole records were transferred to that depository, where they continued till the erection of the large building called the General Register House (1787). The Register House serves the purpose of preserving and making available the national muniments, as well as accommodating the whole offices of record connected with the supreme court. The Lord Clerk Register and his deputy have now merely the custody of the records, their preparation being entrusted to another class of officers.
Under the Scottish records are included the Acts of Parliament and of Privy-council, and the records of the supreme courts of justice; also the records of the Great Seal, Privy Seal, and Signet. An important class of records are the Retours of Services. A service is by the law of Scotland, in cases of intestacy, necessary to transmit a right to real property to the heir from his ancestor. At present this service consists of the decision of the sheriff of the county or the sheriff of Chancery; but the form in use till 1847 was by retour, a writing which contained the verdict of a jury returned in answer to a brieve from Chancery for finding the heir at the death of his ancestor. The register of retours contains services from 1545.
The registers connected with the transmission of heritable rights are even more important. After several unsuccessful attempts to introduce a system of registration, the Register of Sasines was established by Act 1617, chap. 16. By the system then introduced, since continued with modifications in detail, all instruments requisite to the transmission of real property must, in order to convert mere personal right into real right, be put on record for publication. Besides the general register in Edinburgh there were particular registers for the various counties kept at their respective county towns; but any instrument might be recorded either in the particular or the general register. Volumes were issued from the General Register House to the local recorders of sasines, which, when filled, were returned to the General Register House. This arrangement was changed by the Lands Registration Act of 1868, providing for the entire discontinuance of the particular registers before the last day of 1871, and enacting that all writs of this class be thenceforth recorded in the general register in Edinburgh, which register is so kept that the writs applicable to each county are recorded in separate series of volumes. By means of the Register of Sasines any title to real property can be ascertained with certainty and precision, and may, if necessary, be traced back nearly three centuries. It is also obligatory to record in separate registers all instruments necessary for the constitution, transmission, and extinction of voluntary encumbrances. See REGISTRATION. This system, while confirming the credit of the proprietor, also operates in favour of the security of creditors. There is a special Register of Entails, in which, in terms of Act 1685, chap. 22, deeds of entail must be recorded at the sight of the Court of Session. There are also the records of the various commissariats, which include testaments and other relative documents. The object of registration in all these cases is publication; but charters by subjects, dispositions, bonds, contracts, and other probative writs may, under Act 1698, chap. 4, be recorded in the Register of Deeds for preservation. A third object of registration is execution. Every deed constituting a personal claim of debt, or an obligation to perform some lawful prestation, if intended to be made the subject of personal diligence for payment or performance, must be registered previously to execution being issued on it. Calendars of state papers relating to Scotland preserved in the English Record Office have been recently published; while the publication of the Scottish records in the Register House has been going on at intervals since 1811. These include the Acts of Parliament, Register of the Great Seal, Register of the Privy-council, Exchequer Rolls, Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer, and other records.
See Ayloffe's Calendars of Ancient Charters (1774); Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, vol. i. appendix to preface; Reports of the Public Record Commissions; the Record Publications—preface to the earliest volume of each series.
Ireland.—Many of the records perished during the wars prior to the final reduction of Ireland, and those which survived these commotions were long exposed to mutilation and destruction from the unsatisfactory arrangements for their custody. A commission was appointed in 1810 for the preservation and arrangement of the Irish Records, whose labours, conducted with considerable success, were terminated by the revocation of the commission in 1830. In 1847 commissioners were again appointed to investigate the state of the records, in consequence of whose labours a bill for their safe custody was prepared, but afterwards abandoned. In 1867, however, the Public Records (Ireland) Act was passed, and from 1869 the Reports of the Deputy-keeper of the Irish Records have been annually published. These include some documents and calendars in their appendices, notably a calendar of 'Fiants' (fiant litere patentes) from Henry VIII.
Three volumes of a calendar of the Irish Patent and Close Rolls were published in 1861–63; and some other publications, including volumes of facsimiles of national MSS., have been issued by the Irish Record Office. This department since its formation in 1869 has done a great work in the way of collecting records from various depositories and arranging and cataloguing them. The records are open to searchers on payment of fees, but the deputy-keeper may dispense with fees if he thinks that literary profit will accrue to the public from the searchers' work. One important feature of the Irish Record Office is the collection of Parish Registers made under Acts 38 and 39 Vict. chap. 59, and 39 and 40 Vict. chap. 58. This is an example which should be followed in England.