1While preparing this paper, I planned to examine the conditions of the entry in the English County Record Offices of the massive collections of private papers given during the twentieth century by the nobility and the landed gentry, in order to understand the change in the fabric of history that this huge flow of sources might have involved.2 In the end, however, I chose to start, not from the counties, but from the centre of the State and not from the fabric of history but from the fabric of archives. Thus I decided to devote my attention to the respective births of the Historical Manuscripts Commission (1869) and of the National Register of Archives (1945).

2Nowadays, the organisation of the archives in England and in France seems roughly comparable. In both countries, a national body is in charge of the archives of the central State: The National Archives in England, which is the former Public Record Office, and the Archives nationales in France.3 They coexist with a network of provincial record offices established in every département in France: les Archives départementales, and in the localities in England and Wales, usually as a County Record Office. This likeness, nevertheless, is only superficial because these structures are the products of very different histories.4 France created its Public Record Office and organised its network of local record repositories at the end of the eighteenth century during the French Revolution. It was a decision of the State enforced by different laws, which defined the internal organisation of the repositories, distributed the tasks between the central body and the peripheral ones, and also outlined the framework of the classification of the documents. The French bodies inherited ail the public papers of the administrations of the Ancient Regime and were prepared to take on the archives produced by the new administrations, but they were also endowed from the beginning with a huge amount of private papers, the family papers from the nobility, which became public property after the revolutionary seizures.5

3Great Britain was late in this domain. The Public Record Office was created in 1838 to take charge of the archives of government departments, but the claims for the foundation of a network of county offices were fruitless until the beginning of the twentieth century.6 The real stimulus to the creation of a network of county record offices was given directly by the local authorities during the twentieth century and not by the central State as in France. In 1913, G.H. Fowler was nominated to open the first county record office in Bedfordshire.7 The counties of the South and of the East of England followed slowly this lead before and at the time of the Second World War. With some delay, the counties of the Midlands, of the North and of Wales created their own county repository and the country was, more or less, equipped at the beginning of the seventies.

4During this long process, the fate of the huge amount of papers kept in private hands, and especially in the country houses of the families of the landed gentry, was a constant concern to archivists, to historians and, sometimes, to the political world. Two official organizations were formed, in two very different historical contexts, to do something about them: the Historical Manuscripts Commission, created by a warrant of Queen Victoria in 1869, and the National Register of Archives, created at the end of the Second World War, as a part of the former. The tasks of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and of the National Register of Archives were roughly the same: their members had to investigate the collections of papers in private hands in order to list them and to inform the scientific community of the very existence of these collections. The calendars of the Historical Manuscripts Commission were published and they constitute a collection still in use to-day, but the calendars of the National Register of Archives were kept as manuscripts in its office. These institutions also had to help the owners with advice to protect their archives and ensure that they be bequeathed to the next generation. To register and to protect have been indeed the two main objectives of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and of the National Register of Archives.

5Both these institutions have left a respectable set of archives kept in the National Archives, especially minutes of debates, statements, accounts or correspondence, which enables us to tell their story. As I am undertaking longer research, I simply wish in this paper to sketch the general context of the beginnings of these two institutions and to understand the stakes behind their creation. I will first briefly remind the reader of the circumstances of their foundations. Secondly, I will deal with three particular questions which have complicated these creations and which will link my research not only to the history of the archives but also to the history of the administration and of the State, to the history of the nobility and of the elites, and, lastly, to the history of a specific occupation whose professional identity became more and more closely linked to the archives, I mean, of course, historians. Thirdly, I will focus on the way the members of these two institutions have coped with the delicate problem of defining what was “public” and what was “private” in the collections they were investigating. The point is that the boundaries between “public” and “private” changed profoundly during the period from 1869 to 1945 and the main aim of this paper will be to present these changes.

I

6There is no general history of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and of the National Register of Archives although papers have been written and read for several occasions and especially for significant anniversaries like in 1969.8 But these accounts are usually devoted to a description of the work of these two bodies. They are satisfied with a presentation of their histories and they simply allude to the difficulties which were encountered. Beside the consultation of their first archives, they nevertheless enable us to reconstruct the main steps of their foundations easily.

7Strangely, the public impulse for the creation of the Historical Manuscripts Commission did not come from archivists or from historians or from the government, which at the time was already trying hard to improve the State of the British archives.9 The first project was drawn up by George Harris, a barrister-at-law who used some private family papers to write a biography of the First Lord Hardwicke which he published in 1847.10 He convinced himself of the utility of such private collections for the study of history at a time when historians built their work sometimes on the archives of the State but, especially, on printed sources like memoirs or accounts published by the main figures of the period they studied.11 He thus conceived the project to register such collections. He soon published a Memorial to the Prime Minister, which he presented to him in October 1858 and he sought the support of a group of sympathisers. The Memorial bore 141 signatures of distinguished persons from the nobility, the political world, the Church and, even, the University.12

8In 1860, the project was finally rejected by Lord Palmerston, Prime Minister and by Sir George Lewis, Chancellor of the Exchequer. The main origin of this failure is clearly revealed by a statement from Lord Romilly, then Master of the Rolls, which opens, nine years after, the minutes of the Historical Manuscripts Commission.13 The Master of the Rolls, who was responsible for the custody of the rolls of Chancery and of the courts of law, refused to sign the Memorial and fought against it for two reasons. The first was a suspicion against the very personality of George Harris who was not a civil servant and who had the reputation of making projects just in order to secure revenue for himself.14 It is true that George Harris had previously organised similar schemes in other fields and that, after his failure in this one, he pursued his muddleheaded activities in the field of the new psychological science. But the desire of keeping an amateur out of the complex world of the administration of the archives certainly also had a part in this rejection. The second reason, which is connected to the first, is the will of Lord Romilly to keep control of such a project as Master of the Rolls. This concern is also revealed by the care he took to avoid the intrusion of the Lord Clerk of the Register of Scotland and the Master of the Rolls of Ireland into the scheme.15

9Then, at the beginning of 1860, Lord Romilly drew up his own plan for a Commission which would supervise inquiries made in the private collections of the kingdom. It is difficult to understand from the internal documentation of the Commission why the project was held up. It was indeed only in 1869 that the Prime Minister, W.E. Gladstone, agreed to the project of Lord Romilly and a warrant, signed by Queen Victoria and establishing the Commission, was issued on April 2. Nine persons, including Lord Romilly himself, were appointed as Commissioners. A circular was soon issued and sent to all the private persons interested in the project : nobility, gentry, clergy and also to a group of semi-public bodies like Universities, colleges, ecclesiastical foundations, cathedral chapters and municipal corporations.16 The Commission recruited two, then four inspectors who began to visit the collections in the country and to issue reports of their contents often with the help of the owners who had frequently already organised their muniment rooms. The First Report of the Historical Manuscripts Commission was been published in 1870 with seventy-seven particular presentations of collections in all parts of the kingdom.17

10All those who peruse the Historical Manuscript Commissions publications know that the inspectors’ work had progressively changed by the end of the nineteenth century. They ceased to issue short presentations of the collections and began to publish detailed calendars and, more and more often, to publish formal, and very useful, analyses of the documents themselves. The work of the Commission slowed down and focused on the most important private collections at the expense of the smaller ones; there were too many of these and their level of preservation was declining because the social context of the inquiry was also changing. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the ancient world of the nobility and of the landed gentry had begun to vanish. Scores of country houses were sold and their archives disappeared in the process, as no official repositories – like the French Archives départementales – were willing to welcome these huge masses of papers. In a lot of places, such repositories were simply not available. The British Library, the libraries of the Universities or of major towns, and the muniment rooms of local historical or archaeological societies could not absorb them, even though some of them were willing to. With the archivists of the Public Record Office, new lobbies began to voice their fears about the “migration” of the archives especially when they made their way to the United States.18 Professional historians, who, unlike the great history writers of the nineteenth century, relied heavily on archives, were amongst the most vocal. In 1932, ail these groups collaborated to create the British Record Association, a private institution, but supported by the Master of the Rolls and staffed by national archivists such as Sir Hilary Jenkinson The new association was devoted to the preservation of the British Archives.19

11Indeed, the calls for action and the elaboration of schemes went on during the twenties and the thirties – inside and outside the Historical Manuscripts Commission20 – but it was only with the turmoil of the Second World War and with the prospect of the complete destruction of whole collections that practical realisations started. In 1943, the British Record Association appointed a committee to draw up a blueprint for the protection of local and private archives, the so-called Proposals for the Control of English Archives.21 One point of this scheme planned a National Register of Archives which was to take in charge the initial work of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, i.e. the listing of all the collections of archives in private hands in the country and the issuing of short calendars about them. The scheme passed before a brand new Master of the Rolls’ Archives Committee with representatives of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and of the British Record Association; this body was later opened to representatives of other institutions such as the County Council Association, or of lobbies. It was chaired by the Deputy Keeper of the Record, Sir Cyril Flower, and, in 1945, the National Register of Archives was established as a part of the Historical Manuscripts Commission. In July 1945, Lieutenant-Colonel Malet became the first Registrar ; he took the lead of a small team and immediately began his Herculean task.

12However, we must understand that the creation of the National Register of Archives was just the first stage of a more elaborate and more complex scheme: the Foundation of a National Council of Archives, which would have to take the control of English archives as a whole.22 An essential part of this scheme was the establishment of Regional Offices exercising a control on the archives of broad regions grouping several counties. The Proposals for the Control of English Archives were sent to seven bodies: the Bedford County Records Committee, as a tribute to the work of the late G.E. Fowler, the British Record Association, the Library Association, the County Councils Association, the Royal Historical Society, the University Professors meeting at the Institute of Historical Research, who acted in this case as a powerful and very interesting lobby, and the Yorkshire Archaeological Society. The comments received about the National Archives Council after this diffusion underlined reservations issued by historians and local authorities as well. The Regional Offices were widely contested, both in the name of “local patriotism” and in the name of the practical accessibility of the archives.23 The links between this National Archives Council and the Public Record Office were also questioned. I think that the National Archives Council was the real objective of the builders of the National Register of Archives, but they failed for reasons I shall now develop.

II

13In the first part of this paper, I have established the particulars of the creation of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and of the National Register of Archives. I shall now, in the second part of this paper, set out three common problems met by these projects: they can be seen as three directions for future research.

14The first one is linked to the establishment of a new administrative service in the context of a liberal State for the Historical Manuscripts Commission and, then, in the context of a world war for the National Register of Archives. Here, two themes are of interest: the recruitment and the qualifications of the members and the problem of the financial support of the two bodies. For the Historical Manuscripts Commission, we must of course distinguish between the Commissioners and the staff of secretaries and inspectors who were doing the real work. The first four inspectors were A.J. Horwood and H.T. Riley for England, Dr John Stuart for Scotland and Mr John T. Gilbert for Ireland. The qualifications of these inspectors changed curiously according to the countries. The two inspectors for England were barristers – that is amateurs. A.J. Horwood was, moreover, the son-in-law of the Deputy Keeper of the Records, Thomas Duffus Hardy, and that reminds us that the early world of archives was in some parts a Family business: John Romilly, a younger son to Lord Romilly, became Secretary of the Historical Manuscripts Commission at the end of the nineteenth century and Sir William Hardy (1807-1887), who became Deputy Keeper of the Records in 1878, after Sir Thomas Duffus Hardy, was his younger brother. The inspectors for Scotland and Ireland were, on the contrary, civil servants and professional archivists. Dr John Stuart worked on the General Register House of Scotland and Mr (later Sir) John Gilbert, author of a History of Dublin and of a History of the Viceroys of Ireland, worked in Dublin for the Irish Public Record Office. He had produced, in 1866, a Report of the Ancient Muniments of the Municipal Corporation of the City of Dublin which testifies a deep knowledge of the science of archives, especially on the question of classification.24 The staff of the National Register of Archives was also small. The Registrar, Lieutenant-Colonel Malet, was a disabled army officer and he was apparently a good choice for something which was close to a military campaign. In 1945, he was helped by an Assistant Registrar, a temporary assistant, two clerks and a typist.25 The bulk of the work of the National Register of Archives was done not by travelling inspectors but by obviously enthusiastic volunteers in the localities. Working committees were gradually set up in every county and the Registrar estimated at the end of the forties that hundreds of persons were involved in the scheme.

15The history of these two institutions – and, I suspect, of the archives departments as a whole – could also be the subject of a gender study. I have been struck by the role progressively assumed by some highly qualified women – generally spinsters if the civility “Miss” may be trusted in the statements – during the pre-war decades which allowed them to play a very important part in the creation of the National Register of Archives. We must however observe that there were no women involved in the beginning of the Historical Manuscripts Commission. Alongside well-known figures such as Sir Hilary Jenkinson or Lieutenant-Colonel Malet, worked many women whose action was often conclusive: Miss Joan Wake who drafted in 1943 the decisive comment for the Master of the Rolls’ Committee about the proposals issued by the British Record Associations, Miss W.D. Coates who received the visitors to the office of the National Register of Archives and succeeded Lieutenant-Colonel Malet in 1952, or Miss Ethel Stokes, who worked on the British Record Society – a private business founded by William Phillimore to publish the indexes of public archives – and who played an important role at the head of the Records Preservation Section of the British Records Association.26

16To work in the field of archives was seemingly a job that middle class women could assume without difficulties in the 1920s and 1930s. It was skilled intellectual work but the required qualifications could come from very different sources. Some of these women had received an academic degree in history ; others were librarians, a profession organised well before that of archivists ; others, more simply, had received a practical training in some local societies devoted to archaeology or to history or as secretary of archives owners. A Report of the Historical Manuscripts Commission in June 1940 mentions thus a Miss Scroge as a “Record Agent” working on the family papers of a Lieutenant-Colonel Palmer of Dorney Court (Berkshire) and collaborating occasionally with the Commission.27 The nature of their relations with their male colleagues – as for example between Hilary Jenkinson and Dr Irene Churchill who were, before the war, joint-secretaries of the British Record Association and, after the war, members of the Directorate of the National Register of Archives – could be deduced even from impersonal administrative archives.

17Both the Historical Manuscripts Commission and the National Register of Archives were plagued by the lack of money. Moreover we must remind the reader that the Historical Manuscripts Commission was, at the beginning, a temporary commission which was renewed every year by the government.28 Economic constraints were a tool for Lord Romilly in his attacks against George Harris – he insisted on the cost of the latter’s scheme29 – but they eventually applied to his own project. The Commissioners were of course expected to volunteer for such jobs according to the civic tradition of the British elite. As far as the inspectors were concerned, Lord Romilly had thought that members of the staff of the Public Record Office, or of the British Museum, could take charge of the inspections during their vacations. The expenses of the Commission would be reduced to the salaries of a secretary (one hundred and fifty pounds a year) and of a clerk (sixty pounds) whereas the two inspectors travelling from a collection to another would not be remunerated but would have a small fee, their expenses being paid on the basis of one hundred and twenty-five pounds a year each.

18Even this inexpensive scheme aroused the hostility of the Treasury and Lord Romilly had to ask repeatedly before he was allowed to hire a clerk.30 The professional situations of Dr Stuart and of Mr Gilbert raised also some complications with the Treasury which refused, for a while, to pay them as they were already civil servants and could not hold several offices in plurality. In the course of time, it seems that the inspectors were “paid at a certain rate per day during the time they are engaged in the reporting of a collection”.31 It could not be a full time work but just a part-time one and, some years later, the Commission seems to have selected for it mainly local antiquarians or penniless clergymen. The expenses of the Commission were at all times strictly controlled. In 1884, John Romilly thus received a leaflet from the Treasury with financial Instructions to Secretaries of Temporary Commissions which would delight every civil servant today as it asked for a quick reduction of the staff and for a control of travelling expenses.32 Several decades after, Lieutenant-Colonel Malet too packed his first reports with complaints about the difficulties of working without a clerk who would take on the menial job of answering the mail and, even if his situation improved later, money remained a constant problem.

19The second issue I would like to deal with concerns the relations between these two bodies, filled with archivists, and a strong, growing and demanding corporation: historians. When the Historical Manuscripts Commission was created, the professional historian, as we today know him, was not a common figure in the United Kingdom and in Europe. Academic chairs were rare, and the typical historian of the day was either an antiquarian integrated in local communities and dabbling in local history or a literary writer publishing general history or biographies who relied above all on printed sources. It is nevertheless striking that the first Commission involved people with an interest in history more than leading professional historians of this time.33 Three members were appointed as peers and owners of collections of manuscripts: Robert Arthur Talbot, Marquess of Salisbury, David Graham Drummond, Earl of Airlie, a Scot, and Philip Henry, fifth earl Stanhope. Moreover, Edmund George Petty-Fitzmaurice (1846-1935), called by his courtesy title of Lord Edmund George Fitzmaurice, was a younger son of Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, fourth Marquess of Lansdowne and a Member of Parliament. Philip Henry and Edmund George Petty-Fitzmaurice indeed continued research in history: the first was president of the Society of Antiquaries34 and wrote several books about the history of eighteenth century England ; the second later wrote a history of Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century35 and a life of the second Earl Granville.36 Two other members were professional archivists: Lord Romilly himself and Thomas Duffus Hardy, then Deputy Keeper of the Record. Other members were academics but they worked more in a field connected to history than in history itself: Sir William Stirling Maxwell was an authority on Spanish art and Spanish history but not on English History; Charles William Russell was professor of Ecclesiastical History and George Webb Dasent was a specialist in Scandinavian history. I think these marginal choices were not coincidental and, indeed, there are hints amongst the first documents of the Historical Manuscripts Commission which seem to point towards a kind of distrust, not really of historians as a whole, but particularly of Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800 – 1859) and his kind of history.

20With the evolution of historical methods during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the appearance of professional historians holding academic chairs and developing specific methods, such as the intensive use of archives, the relations between the archivists and historians became closer. They spoke the same language and they pursued a common interest in preserving and developing the exploitation of the bulk of records which slept in muniment rooms of every kind. Specialists of English History, such as S.R. Gardiner for example, joined the Historical Manuscripts Commission. But the project of the National Register of Archives apparently opened a new rift between archivists and historians. The Royal Historical Society apparently produced its own archives’ scheme called English Records in Local Custody and the historians called for a better representation among the members of the future National Council of Archives.37 A sharp debate even started in the newspapers between the authors of the scheme, especially Cyril Flower and Hilary Jenkinson, and some important historians such as Professor V.H. Galbraith and I think that this confrontation must be placed in the context of the development of the academic world after the Second World War.

21The third problem turns around the complex relations between the centre and the peripheries inside a kingdom, which was a multinational one. Lord Romilly was well aware of the problem of identifies in the British context since, in a letter of 1855, he alluded to the necessity to involve Ireland and Scotland in all initiatives about the archives.38 However, the first appointments to the Historical Manuscripts Commission were not really representative of the national sensibilities and of the religious feelings of the owners of private archives in the United Kingdom. This situation immediately raised problems. The main one was the conduct of the Anglo-Irish gentry. It appears that the lack of any figure of this community among the members of the commission and, on the contrary, the presence of Charles William Russell, president of St Patrick’s College, Maynooth – which was the first catholic college allowed to exist in Ireland at the end of the eighteenth century and which was the subject of a fierce debate in the Parliament during the forties – might close doors for the inspectors of the Commission.39 As early as August 1869, the Anglican bishop of Limerick and James Talbot, fourth Baron of Malahide (1805-1883), joined the Commission to prevent these kinds of oppositions. The latter was the heir of an old Anglo-Norman family of the Pale, which had turned protestant during the eighteenth century, and his presence seems to have mollified Anglo-Irish anxieties. In England, on the contrary, some Roman Catholic families required explicitly that their papers be seen by a scholar of their own community, Reverend Joseph Stevenson, who was not however an official inspector of the Commission.40 In 1945, the religious question remained also significant as Lieutenant-Colonel Malet realised as early as 1946 that he preferred that the relations with the Roman Catholic Church – “a body which has strong view on many subjects” – ought to be managed by one of its own members.41 But, for the National Register of Archives, the main problem was the nature of the relations between a centralised body acting from London and first the numerous local historical and archaeological societies which had blossomed in the country by the end of the nineteenth century and, secondly, the local authorities. Moreover, these would have to fund, at least in part, the whole scheme. It’s clearly this question which prevented the making of the National Council of Archives to which I referred earlier and to which I wish now to return.

III

22The third and last part of this paper will be devoted to the light that the history of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and of the National Register of Archives could throw on the definition of the boundaries between “public” and “private” archives. This question was at the heart of the preoccupation of all the members of these institutions, from the founders like Lord Romilly or Hilary Jenkinson to less important agents like the inspectors of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, who frequently raised this question in their correspondence. Two different problems were raised here, which represented a different shape of the “public” and “private” debate: the first one turned on the status of the owners of archives whereas the second one concerned the value of the documents. A third question is related to this: which constraints could be imposed upon the private owners who did not take the necessary measures to protect their archives ?

23Seen from a French perspective, there was from the beginning an ambiguity in the views about the missions of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and of its heir, the National Register of Archives. It concerns the precise status of the owners of the archives, which were subject to these inquiries. In 1869, it seems that, in some ways, all archives, which were not the products of a State department – and as such supposed to be under the supervision of the Master of the Rolls – were considered as “private” archives. Therefore, the focus of Historical Manuscripts Commissions inquiries was the collections which were in the hands of private persons but also those which were held by a number of “semi-public” or “semi-private” institutions42, such as the ecclesiastical bodies, the universities or the county councils themselves and the municipal corporations, which were also in charge of the archives of older institutions, such as the commissions of the peace and some other bodies related to them, like the turnpikes trusts or the guardians of the poor. These kinds of archives were of course considered in France and in other parts of Europe as “public archives”, but not in England. The Historical Manuscripts Commissions was intended to inspect the collections of all these bodies as well as those of private owners and the inspectors had to urge the official bodies especially to better organise the conservation of their archives. The task of the Historical Manuscripts Commission was thus devoted to the “local public records” as well as to archives in really “private” hands. It seems that the consequences of this double aim were not really understood by the agents since they lacked a simple definition of the delimitation between private and public archives, which the French National Archives had at the time.

24In the 1940s, the ambiguity was still there, even though Cyril Flower, the Chairman of the Archives Committee, gave up the words “private archives” for the more global expression of “local records”, which for him included the records of even less obviously public bodies like sporting clubs, cultural associations or business firms.43 It is true that the organisation and the conservation of the records of local public bodies had not really improved since the end of the nineteenth century and the situation the Registrar had to face was – also because the standards of conservation had improved considerably in Europe – the same as that encountered by the inspectors of the Historical Manuscripts Commission. All efforts to legislate on the local records failed, like the Departmental Commission on Local Records, created in 189944, or the Royal Commission on Public Records, which worked from 1910 to 1919, a really bad moment to think about archives. After the First World War, the local archives were, as before, in the hands of their institutional producers or located in some repositories belonging to historical societies or to municipal libraries and we have already seen that the record offices network came slowly into being from the twenties to the seventies.

25The creation of the National Register of Archives and the presentation of the Proposals took place precisely in the middle of this process of creation of county record offices by the local authorities. The Associations of County Councils and of Municipal Corporations were partners in the building of the scheme but, when the question of the National Archives Council was put on the table, the body itself and its powers became a stake in the definition of the links between the centre and the communities in a fast evolving kingdom. For example, some of the parties – the archivists and the historians – clearly supported the creation of a central authority with “more than advisory powers” when others – especially the County Council Associations and the Archaeological Societies, if we consider that the Yorkshire Archaeological Society spoke for the whole body – wanted a national body with only advisory functions.45 For the time being, local authorities were stronger and the National Council of Archives failed. When national laws were issued during the sixties to organise the local records offices, the project of a national authority was abandoned.46

26The answer to the question of what was of historical value evolved considerably from the Historical Manuscripts Commission to the National Register of Archives. In order to justify the creation of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, Lord Romilly took a striking example of his conception of an interesting archive. He alluded to the fortuitous finding in the collection of the Carew family in Wales of “the official diary of Secretary Walsingham in the reign of Elizabeth and a letter book containing most important correspondence between this country and Ireland during the same reign”.47 In his mind the documents linked with the history of the central State or with politics were of historical value48, and a close study of the examples presented in the First Report of 1870 confirmed this view. They emphasised official papers, which had strayed from the custody of the State because of the habit of early modem statesmen or officers of taking their archives with them when they left their charges. Another motive was that they were related to the principal figures – the “public” characters – of the history of the kingdom such as Mary of Scotland, William Shakespeare or Edward Gibbon.

27In theory, the inspectors were not allowed to examine the personal papers of the owner, neither the archives relating to his estates – such as title deeds, accounts or bills. In practice, it seems that the confusion of the archives in many places enabled the inspector to get a general view of the collection including the personal papers. But it is clear that these personal and estate papers had no real historical value for them. In 1878, J.A. Bennett, a Somerset clergyman who was also an inspecter of the Commission, thus examined the collection of a Mildmay family and he described it in these terms: “Mr. M. was evidently an active-minded man of business who looked after everything himself. His letters therefore give a good picture of the household and pursuits of a country gentleman but I have not thought that they are of sufficient value for publication...”.49 Thus, the Word “public” signified, at the same time, something which was issued by a public authority and concerned the general history of England, and something which was worth bringing to the knowledge of the public.

28In 1945, the evolution of historical knowledge had produced a larger definition of what was of historical value. The public interest of local documents, which were no longer related to the history of the central State or of the nation, had already been accepted by the end of the nineteenth century and the first huge mass of strictly private papers to be protected were manorial documents, which had a legal value and which were endangered by the abolition in 1922 of the manorial System.50 As far as private owners were concerned, the National Register of Archives was thus intended to take into account all the papers including family and estate papers. This led to the recording of the precise location of many private archives which were afterwards often donated to the new county record offices: the National Register of Archives improved the accessibility of a huge mass of public and private local records. We must not underestimate the consequences of this movement on the fabric of history. The historian Alan Macfarlane even spoke of an “archival revolution”: “The two main features of this change were the widespread establishment of local Record Offices in most counties and large towns, and a vastly improved System of listing and indexing the records which were deposited in them. The result was that many records which were previously in private hands have now become accessible and others which could not be found have now been listed”.51

29The last problem concerns the relations between those two bodies and the private owners of the archives, especially the nobility and the landed gentry. In some ways, both investigations could appear as an interference of the State with private property, a notion at the heart of the political and social conceptions of the world of the English landowners. Two concepts – with huge legal and practical consequences – could be of some use in these circumstances: compulsion or consent. The attitudes of the archivists of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and of the National Register of Archives vacillated between them. For the Historical Manuscripts Commission, the entire scheme was based upon consent. The respect of the rights of the owners was constantly emphasised and it was of permanent concern that they should not resent the work of the inspectors. The warrant of Queen Victoria itself and the circular issued by the Commission both make it clear that nothing of private character and, especially, nothing relating to the title of existing owners should be divulged by the work of the Commission. The nineteenth century saw several famous fights over successions in the landowners’ world and it was imperative for the Commission to avoid any mistrust in this field. The calendars had to have the rightful authorisation of the owners, who would have to see the proofs before publication and the conditions of access to the collections by researchers – historians or others – would entirely depend on the will of the owners.

30The Commissioners were surprised by the willingness of the owners of archives to collaborate with them. The first circular seems to have met with real success since 180 owners declared themselves ready to welcome an inspector. We must however remember that around 800 letters were sent across the United Kingdom and that the news papers around the country spread the news: the rate of positive answers was thus just below a quarter. Moreover, the reasons for this success were most ambiguous. Some families, and especially those of large collections’ owners, such as Lord Salisbury and others, were genuinely keen to give the nation better knowledge of its history. We must link this attitude with the evolution of the role assumed by the aristocracy in the kingdom less than thirty years after the Reform Act, which began the slow process of their withdrawal from political and administrative life.52 However, most of the families which expressed their interest did it because they expected to receive advice about their archives, either in order to classify or to protect them or, in some cases, in order to sell them, especially to public bodies like the British Library.53 In 1923, a Commissioner remarked that the very fact that the State displayed an interest for these collections gave them a marketable value.54 It seems too that a few owners seemed, in the words of the Commission, “to entertain the idea that their papers are to be printed at the public cost”.55 The attitude of the founders of the National Register of Archives was slightly different and the trend towards compulsion at the expense of consent was stronger. When a leak led, in April 1944, to the publication of the project in Estate Magazine, a review associated with the world of the landed gentry, their reactions were very embarrassed because they seemed to have in mind a kind of compulsion against private owners when “documents in historical value [were] in serious danger of decay or destruction and when access to them by accredited scholars [was] unconditionally refused”, that is a real infringement on the right to private property.56

31To conclude, I hope I have made clear in this paper that a closer study of the history of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and of the National Register of Archives would be of the utmost interest. I am aware that this research needs to be pursued, especially on the main protagonists of this history: archivists, civil servants, and historians, but it seems that we are here at the intersection of many related historical themes. Some are very important in the English context, such as the uneasy relations between the centre and the communities in a State where local units have maintained a strong commitment to self-government. Others are European ones, as the degree of inspiration that the earlier English archivists have found in the French example, even if they were sometimes critical about it.