OLD DOCUMENTS

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 124, 18 February 1933, Page 9

OLD DOCUMENTS

Preservation Efforts ! ENGLISH COLLECTIONS: Wealth of Material Exists ■ The gift made to the Bodleian Library ' in November by the Pilgrim Trust of the valuable collection of North papers from ; Wroxton Abbey, covering much of the i private and public life of a family of prominence from the time of Henry VIII. until the present day. lias drawn attention once more to the wealth of historical material in England which still remains untraced and unprotected, states the London "Observer.” The measures which, thanks to recent legislation, the Master of the Bolls cun now take to prevent the destruction or export of manorial records, have not as yet been applied (and indeed cannot easily be adapted) to the archives and correspondence of private families, which may contain as much public as domestic mar- } ters. j

The historian has reason for the deepest gratitude to the heirs of statesmen such as Mr. Gladstone and the fourth Lord Aberdeen, who have in • recent years presented tlie great men’s papers to the British Museum, to link up in the course with the Peel, the CampbellBannerman. and in an earlier generation the Newcastle papers. Where it is considered desirable either by the depositors or by the trustees of the Museum. a time-limit of, say, twenty ar fifty years is Imposed, within which students may not consult a group of papers. The material is meanwhile safeguarded and runs no danger of dispersal or destruction. The Real Dangers. It is a common but, on the whole, mistaken point of view that the worst

danger facing English historical manuscripts of this kind is that of being sold for some vast price and transported across the Atlantic. Such libraries as the Huntington Library in California, or the William L. Clements Library nt Anu Arbor have, it is true, taken au.l digested several valuable collections of this kind..and there are several American university libraries which have purchased bodies of historical papers from this country. They have, however, been as a rule documents principally relating to the American War of Independence, or to the period of colonisation and the Preach wars, and it would oe i niggardly to complain that the sources ; of the history of the United States 1 reached in this way the country which they most concerned, and in which they | were most ardently studied and pub- ] lished.

The real dangers are. first, destruction through ignorance or neglect, and. secondly, dispersal. Bonfires and cobwebs and rats, are more likely to be allowed to eat up bundles of "old letters” than pieces of manorial parchment kept hopefully for their legal crackle. The value of such a collection’s fragments, once they are scattered, without being studies, is intinitessimal. Some part of the barm done may be counteracted through the attempted check kept by the Institute of Historical Research at-London University upon the migrations of manuscripts. Owners and purchasers are given, through the booksellers and auctioneers, forms to fill up telling the institute (if necessary in confidence) of the destination to which known historical manuscripts have been transferred, so that application may, if necessary, be made for permission to study the documents. Work Since 1870. This scheme has not been working sufficiently long or sufficiently regularly to do its full service; its main disadvantage is that only a fraction of the collections which do exist are known for what they are. even to their owners. It is for this reason that the Master of the Rolls <ind others interested in this subject put forward a further suggestion not long ago for a census of historical manuscripts, to be conducted

perhaps with the help of county record societies and county archaeological societies, so that family or political archives in private possesson could be listed, if not examined. Of those which are known, a large i tmber have been seen, calleudared, and partly published by the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, whose reports and publications from 1870 onwards now fill many shelves in any important library. The index of owners and places, where MSS. have been reported on by the Royal Commission, already contains over 1200 entries. The most recent volumes include portions of tlie Duke of Hamilton’s papers, of the Cecil papers at Hatfield (incomparable for the reigns of Elizabeth and James I), of the Hastings MSS, of papers belonging to the Mar and Kellie, the De L’lsle and Dudley, the Laing, Fortescue, and I’olwarth families. If it is observed that the Marlborough papers at Blenheim have only been examined as yet so cursorily as to fill fifty-nine pages of a report, and Lord Mount Temple’s Palmerston papers, the Duke of Wellington’s papers of the “Iron Duke,” and the Disraeli papers at Hughenden (to take three obvious examples) have only been placed at the disposition of privileged biographers, and are not yet touched by the Commission, it will be seen how wide proportinr.tely must be the field to be explored among less known names. Lord Somers’s 300 Letters. To list the collections of family pai>ers even in the British Museum would lie endless, though the Liverpool, the Hardwicke. the Lauderdale, and the Hobhouse papers deserve obvious mention, as well as such family collections as the Paston and Gawdy letters. The Clarendon MSS. and the Carte MSS. in the Bodleian, the Buxton papers in the Cambridge University library, and several similar collections in the Record Office, the National Library of Scotland, and the National Library of Wales, show a tendency for such archives.' if they pass out of private possessslon. to centre in the greater libraries, but this is bv no means invariable.. For instance, a group of 300 letters written to Lord Somers, the Lord Chancellor in the William Ill’s

“Junto," rest in the library of the modern Borough of Reigate, the manor of which at one time belonged to his In Surrey and in the East Riding county censuses are at present in progress' to discover the extent of such collections locally. Many of the private owners are pious in preserving the letters of their ancestors, but over-modest concerning their value to students of history. It may be suggested that county record societies of students from the Institute of Historical Research would often be glad to know of such material and capable of roughly listing it in a week. Where an owner is willing to have it more thoroughly calendared, but does not wish to part permanently with the family archives, these may perhaps la) consulted temporarily in one of the Master of the Rolls’s approved repositories. in the same way that documents examined bv the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts are normally seen in the Public Record Office.