1In November 1801, the independant candidate for the city of Oxford, John Lockhart, addressed the freemen of the city, encouraging them to throw off the shackles of corporation influence and to hold true to the traditions of freedom and independence. This was hardly an unusual stance to take at this juncture: corporation influence, oligarchy and corruption provided a platform for would-be reformers across the country.1 But Lockhart had some rather more unusual suggestions to make: first of all he encouraged the freemen to demand access to the charters and bye-laws by which they were governed. Furthermore, he suggested that an abstract be published as a Freeman’s manual. Such a publication would enable them to detect the extent to which their rights and privileges had been invaded.2

2Lockhart’s demands provoked something of a flurry amongst the corporation which was unwilling to accede to the request. In February 1802, two hundred of the freemen signed a petition, which was sent to the mayor, demanding that 200 copies of the charters and bye-laws be printed at the corporation’s expense, and deposited where the commons (the freemen) might have access to them. It was further requested that the town clerk and city soliciter should prepare a statement of the charitable foundations and bequests, with abstracts of the relevant wills, and that the soliciter should prepare a summary of all the queries that had been made in the course of the last century concerning the legality, effect and operation of any bye-laws made under the city charter. The town clerk, William Elias Taunton, was deputed to work through the archives and make the relevant extracts whilst a subcommittee of the common council was appointed to examine them. On the point of examining the charter, however, the mayor claimed that on consultation with the city’s lawyers, they could find nothing in the charters, laws or usages of the city to suggest that the freemen had any right to inspect the charters and the bye-laws – and challenged them to pursue the matter further at King’s Bench. The freemen responded with much indignation, arguing that as “integral members of the Corporation”, they should be entitled to inspect the charters, laws and muniments.3 The election took place in July 1802, and the controversy fizzled away following Lockhart’s defeat and died down without the corporation having been forced to divulge any records which they wished to keep to themselves.4

3Lockhart was essentially a political opportunist – sensing a grievance against the corporation he moved quickly to exploit it and make an issue of it – but this element of his political campaign highlights the intimate connection between the records or archives of towns, politics and the structures of power. The charters, bye-laws, and freemen’s bonds provided the documentation which upheld privileges in courts of law and perpetuated power and authority – or, in the “wrong” hands, could be used to subvert those very authorities. The importance of documentation for the business of urban government was hardly a new phenomenon: what is different about Lockhart’s campaign is the pressure for broader public access and the debate it provoked over to whom such documents belonged. Political and administrative developments in the eighteenth century contributed to an increasingly clear articulation of what constituted a public sphere and further, the distinction between such a sphere and the private affairs of personal or family interest. These were shifts in political culture which had profound implications for the way in which urban archives were kept and the importance attached to them.

4Despite the fact that urban history has been something of a growth area for eighteenth-century studies in the last two decades, historians have not directed much attention towards the keeping of urban archives. Rather their attention has focused on analysing the shifting currents and counter currents of extra-parliamentary politics or the social and cultural transformations associated with the “urban renaissance”. Interest in the growth of the “public sphere” has directed attention towards the sophisticated world of print culture and the coffee houses, and the interplay between print and politics; however the practice of record keeping, which underpinned the administrative, political and economic life of urban society, has yet to be subjected to any kind of sustained analysis.5 The picture for the early modern period, by contrast, is rather different: archival awareness and record keeping has been analysed in considerably more detail, not least because the emergence of formal administrative records in urban society has been associated with the development of a distinctive civic consciousness and sense of urban autonomy. Similarly, the nineteenth century – when the keeping and preservation of records was much more actively enforced from above – has generally been associated with the emergence of “modern” standards of archival practice.

5 In the absence of any external force such as the dislocations consequent upon the Reformation and the Civil War, or the culture of public accountability which gained general acceptance in the nineteenth century, it has, perhaps, been easy to assume that stagnation or backsliding was the order of the day in the eighteenth century. The lingering taint of “old corruption” still hangs over general perceptions of eighteenth-century administration. Yet recent studies of urban governance and “improvement” highlight how urban society was becoming more intensively and effectively governed and that administrative bodies generally had far greater powers of income generation and consequently fiscal responsibility than ever before.6 The dynamics of urban political life, shaped by the growth of the public sphere and a political nation beyond Westminster, generated a climate in which authority could be challenged and held to account. In a society in which precedent and common law played a key role in deciding disputes, and where identity was bound up with legally enshrined privileges, the preservation of the records of the past – the urban archives – had always been important. With new issues of public access and even publication in the eighteenth century, they acquired added cogency. All these were forces which rendered the ownership, ordering and representation of the past increasingly significant. We may expect to find, therefore, increasing concern amongst the urban elite for the preservation of urban records and a sharpened awareness of their practical value. At the same time the rapid changes consequent upon economic growth and urban expansion combined to generate increased awareness of the vulnerability of the remains of the past, which accompanied an enhanced sense of local and national history.7 Towns had an important role to play in the understanding of the development of British history, and the preservation of the material artefacts of the past –be they buildings, records or other antiquities – had acquired new importance by the end of the century as sources of information for the local and national histories which were appearing in increasing numbers.8 The subject of “eighteenth-century urban archives”, therefore, is not simply a matter of antiquarian interest, but has far-reaching implications for our understanding of urban political culture and contemporary attitudes to the past and its preservation.

6The development of urban government through the middle ages, with increasingly coherent and complex structures of authority, had been underpinned by documents granting and conferring rights and privileges, recording precedents and detailing financial transactions. By the later middle ages many towns had already amassed significant archival collections: in 1511, for example, the incoming mayor of Leicester received two boxes of commissions and charters and three books of town ordinances, including the “Locked Book”, the Vellum Book and the current Hall Book.9 Leicester was not unusual in attaching so much importance to its records: other towns had similar collections of cartularies, rentals, and copies of ordinances. The records themselves acquired an iconic significance as symbols of the town’s importance and autonomy; as such, they were generally stored in specially designed boxes or chests under lock and key. Particularly important volumes were carefully copied and expensively bound – as was the Vellum Book in Leicester, for example. The “archives” thus constituted, however, were far from being a comprehensive collection of documents pertaining to the town: the records in the corporation chest or hutch were only those which related to the activities and properties of the corporate body.10 Urban archives were dispersed in a range of repositories and in private hands, reflectingboth the complicated patterns of landownership and the frequently dispersed structures of power which existed even within an incorporated borough, where, for example, the church, the lord of the manor and the monarch, as well as an incorporated body, could hold property or exercise juridical authority.11 Moreover, the hazy distinction that existed between official documents, of which an individual had custody by virtue of their office or position, and private or family documents, increased the scope for confusion. Civic office holders often made copies of documents for their own use, or retained them amongst their own private papers for safe-keeping or for study. They were often not returned. The scattered nature of urban archives would be a perennial source of problems for urban authorities and for aspiring urban historians.12 It was a problem which only began to be addressed with any success in the twentieth century with the creation of county record offices.

7The survival, preservation and ordering of records was thus haphazard and largely dependent upon individual initiative. During the early modem period, however, historians have identified a significant shift towards more systematic patterns of record keeping, in London and provincial towns, with a correspondingly greater importance attached to the preservation, storage and ordering of records. Robert Tittler, for example, has drawn up a persuasive model explaining these developments in the sixteenth century, relating them to the changes to urban life consequent upon the Reformation and the spread of an increasingly complex legal culture emanating from the metropolis. The imminent threat of the destruction of urban property in a time of political and religious upheavals, plus the need for legal evidence in an increasingly litigious society, all encouraged the urge to record and preserve material relating to the privileges and authority of administrative bodies: court proceedings, apprenticeship indentures, freemen admissions, bye-laws, property transactions or local licenses.13 The Tudor state’s drive towards centralisation under Thomas Cromwell – with his injunction for the keeping of parish registers – went hand in hand with this practical need for information and records. But Tittler also relates these changes to the growth of a secular civic identity in which the symbols and structures of civic life – the mayor, the corporation, the guildhall and the rituals and regalia of civic ceremonial – filled the ceremonial space left vacant with the demise of the Catholic church, and effectively provided a new focus of loyalty and identity, and a structure through which deference could be exacted and preserved. A stronger collective civic memory – embodied in the preservation of records and the compilation of the first urban histories – was just one manifestation of this. The importance of records to the civic community was reflected in the ever more elaborate provisions laid down for their storage: leather-bound volumes stored in heavy locked chests, to which only certain office holders had the key. The fact that records so often went astray or were poorly recorded should not be allowed to obscure the undoubted symbolic significance of this corpus of materials for the civic community. Those who had charge of them were particularly aware of their importance. Thus it is in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that we find town clerks such as Thomas Damet and Henry Manship, both of Great Yarmouth, or Nathaniel Bacon of Ipswich arranging documents, copying them, compiling extracts and writing some of the earliest urban historiés.14 Bacon’s own prefatory explanation of what he was doing presents his enterprise as a new venture, with a very strong didactic purpose: that of educating the governors of the future by the example of the past. Taken together these individuals are representative of the more historically conscious urban culture which historians have identified in this period.15

8Despite these signs of precocious archivai awareness, however, it should be not be assumed that ail towns followed this pattern. Tittler’s thesis is, in any case, applicable only to incorporated boroughs: a corporation, a charter and a mayor provided the focus for the civic consciousness which he delineated. Other towns where administration remained in the hands of manorial courts or the parish cannot be comprehended within his analysis. Early modem records for these and many other towns remain patchy, either because of poor levels of survival, or because even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries record keeping in smaller urban communities continued to be erratic. In the eighteenth century urban historians would frequently lament the delayed appearance of regular record keeping. In eighteenth-century Liverpool, one of the local historians complained that no records were kept before 1555 and that it was only in 1676 that a bye-law was passed to prohibit pages being torn out or defaced from the record books.16 In 1821 William Lee of Lewes presented the borough with an elegantly bound history of the town, on condition that it was not to be allowed out of the record room. He had drawn the volume up himself, having discovered the “shameful extent” to which the borough’s records had gone missing over the previous fifty years.17 Similarly in Sunderland, in the early nineteenth century, the historian George Garbutt found that the records of the corporation were not even supposed to be in existence before the eighteenth century.18

9The story to be told for the eighteenth century one might assume, is simply one of increasingly regular and formal modes of record keeping across the country, building on practices that had been established in the early modem period. This was a century in which, notoriously, the English Parliament, tended to “let sleeping dogs lie” and was notably reluctant to interfere in matters of local administration or jurisdiction.19 By and large that is the case, but such a reductive summary is both defective in explanatory terms and blandly misleading. It obscures the conflicts and contests that took place over “ownership” of the past, and the issue of who was responsible for its custody; it fails to acknowledge the interaction between the need for information and pressure for uniformity which came from above, and the pragmatic need for information and demands for accountability which manifested themselves at grass roots. It also ignores the cultural shift taking place in educated society regarding issues of preservation and history: when considering the emergence of the preservation movement and an awareness of the importance of conservation, attention has generally been focused upon public buildings and antiquities. Records and documents, however, were if anything, even more vulnerable to destruction, but were equally a part of a national heritage and history. Changes in attitudes towards the keeping and preservation of urban records, and issues surrounding their access,havealso to be interpreted in the light of an emerging “antiquarian” interest in urban records as documents rich in historical significance.

10The remainder of this essay will investigate five areas which can be seen to have contributed towards shaping the culture of recording keeping in urban society in the eighteenth century. The first point to recognise is the connection between political instability and fears of litigation and the need to preserve records. The second is to consider the increasingly complex business of urban governance and administration and how this shaped the demands made upon records and recordkeeping. Thirdly we consider how the government’s need for information contributed to more regular and systematic methods of record keeping. This coincided with demands, very often generated from within the urban community at a local level, for greater accountability and access to urban records: the fourth area of investigation. Finally we will consider the development of interest in urban records and archives as objects of historical and antiquarian curiosity – over and above their legal, political or administrative value. The main focus of this essay, and most of the examples, are drawn from incorporated boroughs: it was generally in these towns that politics were most sharply contested and where historical consciousness was particularly strong.

11Political disruption and litigation in the early modem period have already been identified as key factors in stimulating the production of urban record keeping, whether it be charters or mayoral lists or legal judgements and evidences. In the late seventeenth century the political disruption caused both by Charles II and James II’s Wholesale intervention in borough politics during the period 1685-88, and the events of the Glorious Revolution, left a legacy of confusion and suspicion in many towns, where there was ambiguity as to which was the governing charter of the town, the composition of the governing elite and who was eligible for the franchise.20 This provided numerous opportunities for legal challenges within corporations – a tendency that was exacerbated by the “rage of party” of the early eighteenth century.21 The majority of these disputes were pursued through the courts by issuing a writ of mandamus or quo warranto at King’s Bench. Writs of mandamus were used by those seeking to challenge dismissal from or appointment to office, whilst quo warranta proceedings challenged the very basis of the authority through which a corporation exercised its powers and generally hinged upon the terms of the governing charter of the town. Both modes of proceeding demanded the production of evidence – charters, records of election, and previous judicial pronouncements – before King’s Bench.

12In the increasingly politicised world of the early eighteenth century, when triennial parliaments gave rise to frequent elections and vigorous contests in the “rage of party”, local divisions between whigs and tories were further pursued by challenging election results in Parliament, where the case would be brought before a special committee.22 Across the country town clerks and legal representatives were called upon to travel to London equipped with books and records relating to admissions to the freedom and the charter to give evidence before the Westminster committee of privileges and elections or before King’s Bench. In 1705, in the town of Leicester, a committee of nine was appointed from the corporation to take account of the charters delivered out when the town clerk was summoned to Westminster for just such an inquiry.23 The development of the eighteenth-century political System, which saw the value of the borough franchise rise exponentially as political patrons competed with each other to secure seats in the increasingly powerful House of Gommons, meant that the complex issues surrounding the peculiar limits of the franchise of each borough continued to be brought under close scrutiny even after the early virulence of party conflict diminished with the passing of the septennial act in 1716. Precedent proved essential in establishing where the rights of election lay, but so too did records of freeman admission, apprenticeship or burgage tenure. It was a matter of some urgency therefore, to have the records accessible, to know precisely what was held and to keep a record of the whereabouts of such documents. Not surprisingly we find that in the years after 1688 many corporations found it politic to put their records in order, and in particular to establish the validity of their charters. Thus the Lincolnshire antiquary, Abraham de la Pryme, was paid eight guineas in 1702 by the corporation of Hull to organize the records and to compile an index.24 The Gloucestershire antiquary, Richard Furney, was similarly employed by the corporation of Gloucester in 1720 to regulate and order the records, books and writings belonging to the city.25 The preservation of the past had become a matter of political and legal expediency.

13Litigation did not simply pertain to the political franchise or the composition of the corporation, however. As the regulated economy of the early modem period came under increasing pressure and the System of guilds and apprenticeship began to unravel, corporations found that the exclusive trading privileges, the market tolls and levies, which both financially and ideologically provided their raison d’être, were being challenged with increasing frequency.26 Again these rights were defended in the law courts. One of the last corporations to relinquish its control over trade was that of the city of Oxford – ever a bastion of conservatism. Well into the nineteenth century, even up to the Municipal Reform Act of 1835, the common council minute books continued to record that permission had been granted to the town clerk and the city solicitor to take materials, papers, copies of charters, Council books or other records, in order to defend the interests and privileges of the corporation from legal challenges. In 1789, for example, a committee was established to examine the city charters relative to non-freemen pursuing a trade in the city. When victory was secured in 1794, upholding the exclusive rights of the citizens to trade within the city, the common council directed that the verdict and judgement should be “exemplified” and that the exemplification was to be preserved in the strong chest containing the city’s archives. It was further directed that a summary of the proceedings should be recorded in the large vellum book, engraved copies of which would be made and given to every member of the common council. all this to perpetuate and keep alive in the mind of every citizen, as the minutes State, “an event so important to the franchise and the dearest rights and privileges of the city of Oxford”.27

14Legal challenges were rising in frequency simply because the business of urban governance was becoming more complex as urban society grew and became increasingly sophisticated. Demographie and economic growth posed new challenges to the structures of authority as well as offering new opportunities. The physical fabric of eighteenth-century towns underwent far-reaching changes as the medieval structures of city walls and gateways were removed to facilitate access by traffic; buildings were re-fronted or rebuilt in more durable and fire résistant materials; streets were broadened and paved; water pumps were erected and the edifices of polite society – theatres, assembly rooms and public walks – sprang up across the country.28 This had two effects that we should note: the first was that the governing bodies of towns – be they corporations, the parish vestry, the manorial court or the newly established improvement commissions – were undertaking more business.29 The volume of records being produced was increased: within corporations we find subcommittees being instituted, each keeping a set of records. A swathe of new administrative bodies, the “statutory bodies for special purposes” were established, again generating minute books, accounts and other records. A greater sphere of activity was inevitably productive of more administrative paperwork. Higher expenditure was funded by new rating powers which involved new assessments, which might also be accompanied by maps and plans and lists of householders; it was not just a matter of keeping financial accounts.30 Secondly, it also increased the potential for corporations – or other bodies – to come into conflict with competing interests, and hence again, the need for documentation in order to assert rights, privileges or prior possession. This was particularly the case with respect to the ownership of property as pressure of population and economic expansion necessitated potentially contentious developments such as the enclosure and development of common land. An increasing number of towns retained a surveyor to advise on new developments, to survey accurately their property and to ensure a better return of rental income. Loopholes in leasing policies were tightened up and the terms on which leases were granted were made much more specifie, all of which demanded greater accuracy in record keeping. It also had a centripetal force upon the location of records: town clerks became more rigorous in ensuring that documents were centrally stored with the other corporation archives and that fair copies were made of older, less legible items, which could be used for day-to-day purposes. In 1810, the Yorkshire town of Beverley moved to have the town’s charters translated, and copies made of these and other records as great inconvenience arose from their “being old and in a hand scarcely legible, and aiso from the circumstance of their being in Latin”.31

15The prolifération of paperwork highlighted the importance of ordering and indexing urban records. One consequence was to make the town clerk, who was generally responsible for keeping the records, an increasingly important and influential figure in urban administration. Indeed, in towns where corporate officers were elected annually, the town clerk was often the only figure of continuity and expérience and, as such, was himself an invaluable, and powerful, resource.32 With this increase in responsibility there was diminished tolerance for characters such as Thomas Ridding, the town clerk of Southampton, whose lax recordkeeping and erratic accounts provoked the council in 1801 to pass numerous resolutions to prevent such malpractice from ever happening again.33 It also became increasingly unacceptable for a private individual to take official archives into their own custody (although by no means impossible). As late as 1789, the family of the recently deceased town clerk of Swansea, Gabriel Powell, refused to relinquish the Hall Day Minute Books, which he had been responsible for keeping and which he had retained as security for a loan of, £1000 made to the corporation.34 Ultimately it was decided to start afresh with a new minute book and a resolution was passed that all the records of the corporation should be replaced in a chest under three locks.35 It is significant that amongst the resolutions passed in order to restrict the high-handed behaviour of Thomas Ridding was the proviso that in all letters which he wrote as town clerk he was to insert the request that any replies should be addressed to him in his official capacity or in his absence to the mayor; and in the case of his absence from his office for more than a day they were to be transmitted unopened to the mayor, ex-mayor or senior aldermen.36 The council was not prepared to risk the haemorrhaging of further documents into private hands.

16It is noticeable that when new administrative bodies – such as improvement commissions – were established, they were generally more systematic and more rigorous in their record keeping than had been many corporations. Indeed, it was generally written into the legislation establishing such statutory bodies that regular records should be taken. Parliamentary legislators – particularly in the latter part of the eighteenth century – were taking steps to ensure that the new rating bodies were in some measure accountable to those who were paying the rates and electing commissioners, and maintaining records was an essential part of this.37 This expectation could have a knock-on effect in areas where Parliament did not exercise such direct influence, but where there was overlap in membership between one of the “statutory bodies for spécial purposes” and the corporation, as was the case, for example, in Oxford. Such influences are impossible to identify definitively, but it is noticeable in Oxford that the common council minute books begin to be kept with greater detail around the same time that the improvement commission was established in 1771.38

17The ethos of accountability which was implicit in such legislation was also reinforced by central government. In 1786, Parliament launched an inquiry into the extent of charitable benefactions in local communities. Parishes and corporations were required to make a return as to the nature and value of charitable bequests and the uses to which they were currently put. Not surprisingly this occasioned much embarrassment in a number of communities where it became apparent that charities had been mismanaged, gone astray or embezzled. The town of Coventry was particularly notorious in this respect.39 But the inquiry also stimulated an awareness of the importance of preserving proper records. In Tiverton for example, a local wool merchant, Martin Dunsford, was inspired to compile a history of the town to preserve the memory of charitable benefactions in the interest of the poor, as a result of the inquires which he had made in his capacity as Church warden.40 It is notable from studying corporation minute books too, that accounting procedures, particularly with respect to the management of charities, improves from the late 1780s. In Oxford, the charity accounts were kept separately from those of the corporation from 1788, and in 1806 (following another parliamentary inquiry) a complete schedule of the charities was drawn up from the records and entered into the vellum book, whilst a separate committee for the auditing of charitable accounts was also appointed.41 Else where we find that, if nothing else, most urban histories published after 1786 were able to include a list of charities alongside other information relating to the town.

18More intrusive was the inquiry which preceded the Municipal Reform Act of 1835. Between 1833 and 1834, the Royal Commissioners travelled the country examining the administrative and political record of incorporated boroughs throughout Britain. At each town and city that they visited they expected to be presented with evidence of the corporations administrative record: copies of the charter in order to establish the extent to which the corporation was fulfilling its obligations; the financial accounts; and evidence for the admission of freemen and for the control of trade; the records of any courts held by the corporation. Across England and Wales town clerks found themselves in the position of having to produce the evidence which would uphold and corroborate the corporation’s accounts of its proceedings. In many towns this produced a scramble for documentation. Predictably the commissioners found such records wanting in many aspects. Time after time they commented upon the patchy documentation that they encountered. In Ipswich, they found that the office of claviger was held in little regard and never contested. The consequence was that its duties were wholly neglected with a “degree of carelessness about the keys”, with the result that two of the four chief charters had gone missing.42 In Oswestry, the town’s financial records had disappeared. The commissioners were told that they had not been seen since 1816, when they were borrowed and returned by a local historian.43 More particularly the commissioners were interested in the extent to which such records were publicly available. In the interests of accountable government they deemed that the public had a right to know of the privileges which had been conferred upon the town and the inhabitants by charter and to know how corporation income – ostensibly to be spent in the interests of the common good – was being disposed of. In only nine boroughs did they find that corporations had taken steps to make such accounts publicly available, and in a further three, abstracts were provided.44

19As so often central government was actually responding to and consolidating developments that had been gaining ground in many boroughs during the eighteenth century. The alphabetical register of benefactors to the city of Exeter, published in 1736, was prefaced with hope that putting such knowledge in the hands of the public would prevent their misapplication and help to restore them to their respective uses.45 Again, in Ipswich in 1748, a local schoolmaster, Richard Canning, published an account of the town charities, explaining that “by this we put the People upon their Guard, that whenever the Corporation should grow poor, and come into unworthy Hands, its leaders may not be suffered to finger anymore of it, under the pretence of borrowing and paying Interest for the sum they take”.46 John Lyon published a history of Dover in 1813 which included an extensive appendix of documents and a copy of the custumal – the intent, he said, was to show how the privileges of the freemen had been systematically encroached upon.47 Lyon was far from being a lone campaigner in this respect and the early nineteenth century saw the publication of copies of the charter in a number of towns – in many instances going against the wishes of the corporation. This was always connected to the nature of the franchise, the management of property and charities or the exercise of trading rights. Charters would be closely analysed in order to judge how far the corporation was meeting the terms laid down. As the author of the Newcastle Remembrancer or Freemen’s Pocket Companion explained, tradition could easily be changed when dependent upon the memory or integrity of a few individuals, and “insensible deviations” might gradually be multiplied until a very great change had been made in the State of the corporation. It was therefore in the public interest to publish documents such as charters of incorporation so that such deviations might be noted at once and those entrusted with power be held to account.48

20Access to the charter and other documents became an issue of political conflict in itself. In Liverpool, for example, a town where the legacy of confusion consequent upon James II’s interventions rumbled on through the eighteenth century, it was claimed that a new charter had been obtained clandestinely since the accession of William III, leaving the balance of power within the corporation between freemen and common council in ambiguity. A copy of what was deemed to be the true governing charter was published in 1757.49 This document loudly proclaimed the right of every member of every free society to know the laws by which that society was governed. In 1783 the author of another Correct Translation of the charter granted to the burgesses of Liverpool challenged the right of the common council to make bye-laws, claiming that the common council had refused to allow any person not of their body to inspect their records.50 And in 1810 again, the burgesses found that their attempts to defend their daims were stymied by the refusal of the town treasurer, Thomas Golightly, to allow the corporation books and papers to be inspected. In order to gain access they would have had to issue a writ at King’s Bench, which they lacked the means to prosecute. The common council retained its exclusivity and its control of the archives.51 Elsewhere demands were made for the publication of records, documents and accounts which pertained to what was deemed to be the “public interest” or the “common good”. In the increasingly radicalised politics of the early nineteenth century this proved a highly contentious issue and was often part of a local movement for reform.52 The campaign of John Lockhart, discussed at the start of this chapter, offers a case in point. Lockhart tried to attract support amongst the freemen of the city by arguing that the corporation, whom he represented as being the client of the Duke of Marlborough, was usurping their rights and mismanaging the communal resources: it was for this reason that he encouraged the freemen to demand the publication of their charters and of the bye-laws governing them.

21The contested issue ofprecisely who could have access to urban archives meant that the archives themselves acquired new value and importance. In the same way that many of the unreformed corporations argued that corporate property was essentially the “private” property of the corporation, which the corporation was free to use for whatever purpose it saw fit, it was claimed by some that urban archives – charters and financial documents in particular – were likewise private documents, which should be subject only to the scrutiny of the civic elite.53 There was an emerging consensus, however, that documents pertaining to the public interest or the “common good” should be accessible to the public; a consensus that was at odds with the hazy boundaries between public and private records which had characterised the medieval and early modem period. These issues could be particularly problematic for the aspirant local historian who sought to use the corporation archives. Most early urban histories were compiled by town clerks or other civic officials with access to records, such as Henry Manship or Nathaniel Bacon, or were based upon urban chronicles or annotated mayoral lists, which were themselves an important element of the archive in many towns.54 Although some histories were the product of a town clerk’s life-time experience working with the records, the writing of urban histories during the eighteenth century attracted an increasingly eclectic range of authors, not all of whom could assume that access to archival collections would be freely given. Some corporations were happy to subscribe generously to the publication of urban histories and to make the records available – particularly when the author was him self a civic official or related to the civic elite, but on other occasions it was deemed politically unwise to allow an outsider access.55 Thus the whig corporation of Bristol in the early eighteenth century was happy to allow Andrew Hooke, a newspaper proprietor of similarly whiggish sympathies, to consult the corporation records. In recognition of this he dedicated the first (and only) part of his history Bristollia (1748) to the mayor. The tory surgeon, William Barrett, however, was refused access and had to fall back upon the parochial records and his history was much delayed in consequence.56 Ironically, perhaps, in the long term, the fact that Barrett was forced to look elsewhere for materials may have contributed to a stronger sense of the range of sources, in addition to those of the corporation, that were relevant to the history of a town. In the early nineteenth century, Samuel Seyer similarly found his path to the urban archives blocked: not so much because the corporation was suspicious of his political sympathies, but because they were worried about the possible economic fallout from any publication.57 The corporation of Bristol was concerned that evidence published in a history might be used against it by those critical of the corporation’s economie power and political influence. Their fears were not without substance: John Brand’s publication of documents pertaining to the trading privileges of the corporation of Newcastle in his history of 1789 had led to a series of legal challenges and a substantial diminution of corporation revenue. Bristol was determined not to follow suit.58

22Whilst some of those who undertook to write a history of the town in the eighteenth century clearly did have a political axe to grind, there were others who did so purely out of historical or antiquarian interest. And this is the final area to be considered in this survey: in the eighteenth century, we encounter a much more broadly based awareness of the historical value of urban archives and an impulse to preserve such documents simply because of their antiquarian or historical interest, irrespective of any immediate political or legal value. The increase in historical activity and consciousness amongst provincial towns meant that in many places archives were being investigated, often for the first time; and efforts were being made to collect and collate all documents and manuscripts which had a bearing upon the history of a town, not just those in the custody of the corporation. Where towns had acquired monastic lands, the medieval documents had often found their way in private hands. Those of the former abbeys of St John and St Botolph in Colchester, for example, belonged in the eighteenth century to the Yorke family, from whom Philip Morant secured the loan for his own history of the town.59 Parochial and diocesan records were always an important source (and many antiquaries were clergy and therefore well placed to secure this kind of information) and material from the records of central government was also becoming more accessible. The major overhaul of national archives which was to take place in the nineteenth century did not mean that they were completely neglected prior to 1800 when the first of the Record Commissions was appointed to inquire into the State of the national records. In the eighteenth century in particular, efforts were made to rationalise and improve their storage and to make them casier of access, particularly for those who wished to carry out research.60 The combined efforts of local historians and antiquaries meant that more and more local collections had copies of documents from the Tower and other national repositories.61

23William Rastall Dickenson, historian of Newark, described how he had come across valuable material in a box labelled “useless papers” and explained to the reader that he saw his history as a means of preserving archival antiquities which would otherwise have been lost to posterity.62 “Preservation”, when applied to antiquities of any description in the eighteenth century, often simply meant the preservation of a memory of the artefact or structure – be it manuscript, painting or building.63 Engraving an image or publishing a text was in itself a form of preservation. Although large scale publication of texts and calendars did not begin until the nineteenth century, one should not overlook the eighteenth-century and even seventeenth-century precedents, such as Rymer’s Foedera; the series of monastic chronicles published by Thomas Hearne; the facsimile edition of Domesday Book (1783) and the Rotuli parliamentorum (completed in 1777) undertaken by Parliament.64 Thus we find that a number of urban historians included lengthy appendices which were simply transcriptions of the more important documents relating to the history of the corporation: copies of the charter, extracts from the account books, copies of the bye-laws, as much for their antiquarian value and a sense of their historical importance as for any political or legal purpose. Here we find the precursor to the nineteenth-century publication programmes of borough documents and calendars of archival deposits.

24Philip Morant, author of a history of Colchester as well as the county history of Essex, had his antiquarian sensibilities very much to the fore as he wrote his preface, deploring the lack of care with which town records had been kept, protesting against the dishonesty of the mayors who had taken records into their own possession and the callous philistinism of those who had eut the seals from many documents, “a loss never to be retrieved” as he put it.65 Morant was an enthusiastic antiquary, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and heavily involved in other publication projects, such as the Rotuli parliamentorum, to which his palaeographical skills were well-suited. His interest in Colchester arose less from any sense of affinity or identification with the town – he was a native of Jersey and for a long time yearned for a living in London – than from a need to find some kind of useful intellectual occupation.66 The study of history and antiquities had, for him, an important didactic function, and it was this which gave him a high appreciation of the importance of maintaining the integrity of the corporation records.

25From the antiquary’s perspective urban archives were not just of local interest, but had general illustrative value, whether it was of the evolution of Britain’s contemporary commercial and manufacturing success or the development of the balanced constitution and the emergence of the English polity from the constraints offeudalism. Morant, for example, was particularly interested in the evidence that borough archives, and in particular their charters, could provide in the historical controversy over the extent to which the Norman Conquest had represented a usurpation of the rights offreeborn Englishmen.67 Similarly the political reformers Merewether and Stephens drew heavily on the evidence of published urban histories and urban archival sources in their case for a fondamental reform of municipal government.68 If nothing else, such documents were illustrative of the “manners and customs” of the time, that great standby of eighteenth-century history. Thus local historians found new value in documents which illustrated the price of bread, past mortality, or the wage rates of an earlier society. Thomas Phillips, author of a history of Shrewsbury, expressed the hope that the inclusion of extracts from the orders and bye-laws of the corporation would “afford some information and amusement, as in several respects they shew the difference between past and present times”.69 By the early nineteenth century, the consensus on the need to preserve historical documents had become well established and Samuel Seyer was able to note with satisfaction the progress being made by provincial towns to in publishing important documents such as charters.70

26What practical effect did ail this have on the way in which corporation records were kept? As suggested at the beginning of this paper, there was a general move towards more systematic record keeping and better ordering, although it should be remembered that this development was far from universal, as the inquiries of the royal commissioners in 1833-34 made clear. Standards across the country were variable and largely dependent on individual initiative. Moreover, patterns of record keeping in unincorporated towns, such as Birmingham or Manchester, were even more dispersed and erratic, without the same nexus of charters and privileges to provide the focus and raison d’être. The combined efforts of town clerks and solicitors to defend legal and political rights and privileges before the courts had brought about greater centralisation of dispersed records and clearer recognition of the value of such records. Meanwhile the practical need to draw upon them in legal and public debate had also substantially undermined the assumption that such records were private possessions, to be kept by a family or individual. We also find a broader interest in urban archives as historical sources – as manifested in the publication of urban histories and the collections of local antiquaries. There was a growing interest in the history of towns and the development of urban society, particularly in the second half of the eighteenth century, which owed much to contemporary awareness of the rapid pace of urbanisation and socio-economic change. This was a change which concerned all towns, the unincorporated as much as the incorporated. The most notable change in the status of urban archives over the long eighteenth century then, lay not so much in the political or legal uses to which they were put – that much was nothing new – but in the broader appreciation of their value as historical sources, and as documents which were of inherent historical interest and worthy of being preserved, regardless of any immediate practical value that they might have. It does not do to overstate this change: plenty of materials have been lost since this period due to overzealous housekeeping in many town halls, yet the preservation of the records of the past had become, by the early nineteenth century, another indicator of civilized and responsible urban society. A well produced urban history was an important piece of civic image creation; well-ordered urban archives too could be a matter of pride and an indicator of a proper appreciation of the past.