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.
* * * * *
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.