1In January 2005, under the Freedom of Information Act (2000), everyone, irrespective of nationality, will be entitled to apply for information from archives and records held by public authorities in this country, irrespective of date, provided that it is not exempt on grounds of national, commercial or personal sensitivity, the normal 30-year closure period introduced in 1967 notwithstanding.

2The 30-year rule itself had replaced a 50-year rule introduced only in 1958. Before that, the question of what records were made accessible and when had been a matter largely at the discretion of departments,1 and a measure of how historians’ attitudes and expectations have changed can be found in F. J. Weaver’s remark in 1934 that, “it is obvious that current records of government departments cannot be made available to the ordinary student”.2

3In spite of notional closed periods, after each World War governments had allowed historians privileged access to records in order to compile official histories. And not long after the 30-year rule had been introduced there was more general accelerated opening of the records of the Second World War.

4The progressive removal of restrictions on access to modern departmental records has of course hugely influenced the development and scope of history as a discipline, and has greatly facilitated the study of contemporary history. But this is not the main focus of my paper today.

5It is striking how different the French and English approaches have been to the study and practice of both history and archives. At least as far as archives are concerned the French System, with its more centralised direction of both theory and practice, has often been the envy of English commentators, but has never found favour within government here. Indeed I would argue that our failure to do things more like the French with regard to our archives has had a major impact not only on the archives themselves but also significantly on the study, development and pace of change of history as a discipline.

6In 1897 York Powell, Regius Professor of History at Oxford, enthusiastically described for the Royal Historical Society the work of the École des chartes in Paris, remarking: "After all, they really do some things better in France".3 This was, I think, the real origin of a movement, fostered by the Royal Historical Society and then taken up by Albert Frederick Pollard and others in the early years of the 20^th century, for an advanced school of study.4 But it was to be 1921 before the Institute of Historical Research was founded to perform something like this role for historians, offering seminars, a research library, and a bulletin which highlighted newly available archival sources and raised concerns about issues such as the migration and export of archives. (As a footnote I should add that to this day there is still no advanced training school in the UK for archivists.)

7Looking back, we can say that archives and history needed each other if they were to flourish. But until quite late in the 19^th century neither was an independent academic discipline, and most of the practitioners of each had not fully recognised their inter-dependence.

8It was almost half a century after the Public Record Office Act (1838) before a historian was for the first time put in charge of the Public Record Office, in 1886. Henry Maxwell Lyte led a decisive move away from history based on chronicles and literary sources, towards history more sharply focused on archives, and (eventually) on archives better understood from an awareness of the administrative context in which they were created.5 One of his junior colleagues, Hubert Hall, who will be a regular companion in this paper, became a crusader in the cause of opening up the archives, but results were achieved only painfully slowly. Hall, whose work is too little remembered today by either archivists or historians, was an active member of the Royal Historical Society from the moment he was elected a fellow in 1885. He was its Literary Director for an astonishing forty-six years (1892-1938), and used the Society as a platform to promote wider understanding of the archives that were becoming newly available at the Record Office. In the late 1890s he became one of the first academic staff of the new London School of Economics, where he taught palaeography, diplomatic and economic history. There and at the Record Office he made wide contacts among historians from both sides of the Atlantic, for example advising Sidney and Beatrice Webb in their great study of the institutions and impact of local government,6 and later working with the School’s Head, Sir William Beveridge, on his study of prices. Among many other ventures, Hall engaged a team of his students at the London School of Economics to compile an ambitions Repertory of British Archives (1920) which, by offering a scheme of classification for archives of ail kinds, both inside and outside government, hoped to prepare the way for a nationwide System of repositories controlled from the centre. During and after the First World War he was also a passionate advocate of the need to save and make available modem records for the writing of contemporary history.7

9A new, archive-based approach to the study of history was to take root most particularly in the universities founded in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries,8 and of course was to grow exponentially as the opportunities for postgraduate research increased in the 20^th. It was greatly assisted right from the start by the active engagement of the Record Office’s staff, both with readers in the Public Record Office and through the writing of articles, text books and more popular works based on the records.9 But even by the end of the 19^th century the Public Record Office was not primarily catering for academie historians. Water Rye, writing in 1897, noted that “the present and past staff may be said to be teachers of a record school or university, to the very great advantage of the amateur student”,10 although the same was no doubt true in relation to academic researchers.

10As late as 1920, however, Hall would remark that although the facilities for access to English public records compared favourably with those of any continental State this fact was “often overlooked by historians”.11 The great legal historian, Frederick William Maitland had expressed a rather similar view: “We cannot say that any organised academic opinion demanded the work that was done by the Record Commission, by the Rolls Series, or by the Historical Manuscripts Commission, or that the universities cried aloud for the publication of State Papers and the opening of the national archives.”12 What the historians were missing was eloquently summed up by Vivian Hunter Galbraith, who found his time on the staff of the Public Record Office (before going on to a long and distinguished career as an historian in Oxford and London) a “revolutionary expérience”. “Little is left, at the end of it, of an ordinary academic education in history”.13

11Mention of Galbraith nicely leads me on to another Anglo-French theme, for Galbraith also regretted publicly (but perhaps a little harshly) what he saw as the wasted early years of the Public Record Office, with idle staff who were neither historians nor archivists, completely ignorant of archival principles such as respect de fonds.14 It is true that early guides to the records were structured, as we should now think, too thematically and not sufficiently in accordance with administrative provenance, and that some artificial classes of documents were created, which tended to obscure the full significance of these records by divorcing them from their context. The process began to be corrected, within the Record Office, towards the end of the 19^th century but more systematically from the publication of M. S. Giuseppi’s guide in 192415 and, in archivai theory, by Hilary Jenkinson’s Manual of Archive Administration (first edition 1922).

12Why did the creation of the Public Record Office in 1838 have virtually no immediate impact on the writing of history? First, of course, it was to be almost a further twenty years before the new building in Fetter Lane opened its doors to the public. Even then it catered mostly for the lawyers, antiquaries and professional record agents who had been the main customers of the many separate repositories of government archives that preceded the Public Record Office.16 Then we must remember that history was not recognised as a separate discipline at Oxford and Cambridge until the 1870s. Postgraduate historical research in the sense we know it today was unheard of, and as far as can be established few of those who did teach history in the universities in the nineteenth century were regular readers at the Record Office. The reasons are not far to seek. Opening hours were rather limited before the introduction of electric light. Journey times for anyone living outside London were considerable. Some scholars even made a virtue of staying away from the dust and what they saw as the hack work17 of studying original materials.18 Even had they made the pilgrimage, they would have encountered very significant problems:

• the bewildering bulk of what had newly become available to study
• a dearth of competent finding aids
• mountains of chaotic and uncatalogued records
• a lack of sufficient interpretative material to explain the language, scripts and administrative context of the records, and
• fundamental gaps in the chronological framework for English history.

13It would take several generations, and involve a number of false starts, before anything like a conspectus of the whole range of records became possible, and indeed the work is not complete to this day. Only as a few dedicated scholars – academics and professional documentary editors both inside and outside the Record Office – made it their life’s work to get to grips with the archives and the administrations that created them were the foundations laid for history and archives to feed off each other in the way we now take for granted. Galbraith was to remark of Austin Lane Poole that “he spent no less than 20 years of his life examining and digesting the original sources with a minuteness never before attempted”.19 T. E Tout began work on his Chapters in Administrative History in 1909. It occupied 6 huge volumes, published between 1920 and 1933, and was only completed after his death by his widow.20 J. S. Brewer and then James Gairdner between them spent almost half a century in collating and publishing the Letters and Papers of Henry VIII.

14Historians clearly did become more aware of the sources that were steadily being unlocked, but through the Public Record Office’s publications such as Deputy Keepers’ Reports, the “calendars” of State Papers and the Rolls series of edited texts of chronicles and other sources. It was only slowly, and critically in the decades from the 1880s to the 1920s, as the physical as well as the intellectual obstacles to access began to be eased, that the foundations were laid that would enable the records to be used more widely. Even then, as Pollard would note, it could easily take a generation for researchers to grasp the significance of a new source and harness it to their research.

15But what about archives that were not in the Record Office? York Powell’s paper in 1897 advocated a publicly funded and centrally coordinated network of repositories to care for local records. This was a cause taken up successively (but unsuccessfully) by the Committee on Local Records in 1902, and the Royal Commission on Public Records (1910-1919). It also found echoes in the Master of the Rolls’s Archive Committee in the 1940s.21

16However, Paul Meyer, the Director of the École des chartes, who was consulted by the Committee on Local Records, felt that “the methods we possess in France cannot be resorted to in England”,22 on account of the many privileged record-owning bodies and individuals. Evidence was presented to the Committee that, apart from selected records consulted for legal and antiquarian reasons, local archives were very little sought after or used by the public. As one respondent put it, “it is the few, the very few, who care for the historic past and its interesting details”.23

17Among those few who did persevere, however, were important trailblazers like the Webbs, and the staff of the newly founded Victoria County History, who from the very beginning of their great enterprise sought out private and semi-public sources as well as those in the Record Office in order to build up a comprehensive picture of local communities.24 But this English tardiness in building a comprehensive infrastructure for local records left many documents at risk of dispersal and destruction and kept many more beyond the cognisance of researchers until after the Second World War.25 The great English local historian W. G. Hoskins would recall his surprise at discovering, when writing The Midland Peasant in 1957, that almost no official 19^th century material had survived for the locality he was studying.26 So we might ask whether, if historians had been mobilised earlier to express an interest in such sources, the losses to our local archives would have been less severe.27

18By the early 1920s Hubert Hall, sighing that the French System was a model “for almost every country in Europe except our own”,28 made a point of drawing wide attention to the great range of archival resources open to study by a sufficiently determined researcher. But he concluded that “the origin, evolution and life history of English local institutions have not been studied with sufficient industry and, therefore, with proper understanding”.29

19From 1924, when the Master of the Rolls needed to find in each county a place for the safe custody of Manorial Documents, he looked mainly to county council muniment rooms, university libraries, archaeological and record publishing societies, municipal libraries and learned bodies. It was not the neat solution that the campaigners for a national network had hoped for, but it was a start, and it greatly facilitated and encouraged the deposit of private archives on loan in more public places for safe keeping and study.

20Historians’ attitudes and practices began to change as more postgraduate students came on stream, looking for subjects for their research. Joan Wake noted in the 1920s that whilst “the facilities are few” and that in diocesan registries, for example, the reader had to be prepared to cope with the “accumulated chill of centuries”, many custodians were actually keen to help researchers.30 But those proprietorial interests identified by Meyer did occasionally get in the way. Happily, since then, with the creation (1945) and growth of the National Register of Archives, rapid expansion of postgraduate research,31 and the extension of the network of local repositories to cover the whole country, the situation has dramatically improved.

21If there is one area where the English method may have proved superior to the French it is that of access to archives retained privately by individuals, families and institutions.

22Before the establishment of the Historical Manuscripts Commission in 1869, antiquaries researching county and local histories had in places (for better or worse) gained access to both private and semi-public muniments.32 They were only a small group, and there was as yet no expectation that private records would be made generally open for historical research, although this did happen in places.33 That is not to say, however, that research materials of private provenance were not available in the public domain. Many “lives and letters” and other memorials had already found their way into print. And throughout the country societies were springing up for the study of the past and the publication of records of local interest from both public and private sources.34 Some of these societies were to play a crucial role in establishing collections of local archives and raising local awareness of their interest and importance.

23The Historical Manuscripts Commission, created (1869) out of a conviction that there was material of significance to British history in private as well as in public hands, met with surprisingly little opposition, and most private owners willingly allowed its inspectors to report on their archives. Those reports, alongside the Public Record Office’s texts and calendars, made additional research resources available in print to historians, and suggested (and should still suggest) to thinking people that history written from the Public Records alone might be incomplete, and indeed that there could be some aspects of history for which the Public Records provided almost no evidence at all. Our mentor Hubert Hall noted that the distinction between public and private was not always helpful to researchers because many public documents had ended up in private hands.35 He might have added that papers of purely private origin might shed a very different light on events than the public records. Did he, I wonder, put off some potential readers when he warned that records held at home by their owners were “usually unarranged and undescribed” and “frequently inaccessible to students except under irksome conditions”? In both respects, the position is much improved today, and the major private archives are listed and known, through the work of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and the National Register of Archives.

24In the 19^th century neither the Historical Manuscripts Commission nor the owners saw the publishing of reports on private collections as a prelude to any direct access to the papers themselves. The published reports were the source, but also the limit, of the information that was made available to the public. Even in the reports, no documents of a personal nature were mentioned, nor anything that was dated later than 1800. The Historical Manuscripts Commission reports were well received, and the Committee on Local Records acknowledged that they served to draw the attention of private owners to the importance and public interest of their papers.36

25Seeing their papers in this new light, some owners chose to seek public repositories to house them. Initially even the Public Record Office itself, almost certainly because it housed the Historical Manuscripts Commission, was to fulfil this role to a limited extent.37 Other archives of course went to the British Museum, and some to the universities, municipal libraries, and archaeological, antiquarian and record publishing societies already mentioned.38 With the creation of local, university and specialist repositories, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, many more archives of private provenance have passed on loan, or by gift, sale or acceptance in lieu of tax, to public repositories, and of course this process continues. It would be unforgivable, too, even in a summary paper of this kind, not to mention the vital work of voluntary bodies such as the Business Archives Council and the British Records Association in raising awareness of the importance of private archives.

26The effect of the gradual opening up of the Public Records on the writing of history is plain for all to see. What is perhaps less immediately clear, because we now largely take access for granted, is the difference that has been made by the opening up of local, specialist and particularly privately-held archives.39 But it can readily be charted in the range of sources cited by individual historians at different dates and in almost every field of history, and in our great national historical reference works such as the Victoria County History, the Dictionary of National Biography and the History of Parliament. There is time to give only a few examples to bring this short paper to a close.

27Charles Gross, writing on the Gild Merchant in 1890, long before the establishment of local record offices, was able to visit civic muniment rooms, finding the precious “facts” he was seeking [his word] “scattered in profusion through the heaps of dusty records”. Dust or no, he urged that “investigators ... make more use of these rich veins of precious ore”.40

28Eileen Power and Maurice Postan in their Studies in English trade in the fifteenth century (1933), working from the London School of Economics and very much in the tradition of Hubert Hall whose pioneering work on the customs’ records they acknowledge, had been able to consult the archives of the corporations of Bristol, Ipswich, King’s Lynn, Hull, London and Southampton as well as those of the Grocers and Mercers Companies in London.41

29For the first edition of his The structure of politics at the accession of George III (1928), Sir Lewis Namier had already had access to some private muniments, notably the Bute and Sandwich papers, but some thirty years later for his second edition (1957) he was able to consult more than twenty large privately-held archivai collections from all over the United Kingdom, as well as material deposited in national and local repositories.42 “In the essay on Harwich,” he wrote, “material in the Devonshire Papers and the Townshend Manuscripts in the possession of the Duke of Buccleugh has supplied me with the other side of the story”.43

30Without the bringing to light, and in many cases the gathering into public repositories, of this vast array of source material, wide-ranging sweeps through our history such as Keith Thomas’s Religion and the decline of magic (1971),44 or Ronald Hutton’s The rise and fall of Merry England. The ritual year 1400-1700 (1994)45, would have been impossible. And, to bring the story right up to date, the electronic version of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has hot links (where applicable) to the National Register of Archives for descriptions of the archives of each entrant, whether in public or private hands.

31And so the story could go on, but it would perhaps be best to conclude with another quotation from F. J. Weaver (1938), with whom we began:

32“History is always being rewritten, not only because what interests one age does not necessarily appeal to its successor, but also because a wealth of new material is continually coming to light, or being made much more accessible in print”.46

33Perhaps today we would leave out those words “in print”, but in other respects this quotation nicely encapsulates some of the issues I have been trying to discuss in this short paper.