THE DOMESDAY BOOK

Evening Star, Issue 22274, 27 February 1936, Page 9

THE DOMESDAY BOOK

RECORD OFFICE TREASURES When Samuel Butler settled in Cliffords Inn in 1864, the Record Office was in process or erection, It was begun in 1856, and completed in 1870, and its architect was the Sir James Pennethorne who was responsible for the west wing of Somerset House, whence the Inland Revenue Department sends forth its buff-coloured missives. It is thus (writes Beresford Chancellor, F.S.A., in the Sydney ‘Morning Herald’) that that forgotten designer, Pennethorne, had a hand in the two buildings consecrated to the records of this country—past and present; where the history of the people can be read, as it stretches its long roll from the days of King William to those of King George. Before the Record Office existed, the Rolls House was the repository for our older documents, which had been segregated there since the, time of Edward 111., and attached to that building was the Rolls Chapel (once the chapel of the House of Converts (founded by Henry III.), which in course of time, became desecrated and ruinous, through the effects of theGreat Fire and the neglect of man, and from being a religious Centre, gradually took on the character of a muniment room, in which even the seats were converted into lockers. When, some 30 years ago, it was found necessary to enlarge the Record Office, it was decided to pull down the fragile walls of the old chapel, and to form a museum on its site, incorporating . in the new walls some of _ those monuments which had existed in the original building. And it is in this Record Office Museum, .so full of interest, so little known to most people, that I recently spent an afternoon not unprofitably occupied with the relics of a bygone day. THE ACTUAL DOMESDAY BOOK. Even without its treasures the place would be a haven of refuge from many noises; but were these noises as insistent within its walls as they are without, one would, I think, almost forget them, while poring over the venerable documents with which innumerable cases are filled. The greatest is undoubtedly the actual Domesday Book, the result of that great survey which the Conqueror ordered to be made for fiscal purposes in 1085, and which came to be called by its well-known name (it was originally entitled The Book of Winchester) as early as the twelfth century, because, in common with the Day of Judgment, there was no appeal from it. There it lies with its eight hundred long and pregnant years; and we can gaze at the ipsissima scripta of those scribes who, at the nod of the great Norman, set down the names and possessions of his new subjects. As one passes from case to case, great and historic names look up at you; writs and warrants bearing the seals of Normans and Plantaganets; the Bull of Innocent 111. directing the Irish to he faithful to John, he having ceded his realm to the Roman Church; the Roll of Pleas in the King’s Bench, of the time of Henry VIII., with a surprising portrait of that monarch as a young man before he took to straddling and corpulency: the treaty between Francis I. and Wolsey, “ Cardinal of St. Cecilias’s”; and a gold seal of the monarch—a lovely thing to the fashioning of which went, doubtless, the genius and expert fingers of Cellini. RARE AUTOGRAPHS. But, after all, it is perhaps the autographs which are the most attractive contents of the glass cases; Geoffrey Chaucer’s, concerning repairs in the Royal palaces, for was not the poet also cleric of the King’s works? and Richard ll.’s notable as the earliest signature of an English monarch extant (in early charters and so forth they merely put their mark—as Joan does in Mr Bernard Shaw’s play); and the eye-compelling flourishes of Queen Elizabeth—as elaborate and distinctive as her famous head-dress, in their manifold convolutions. And there, close to one another, are the names of three unhappy Royal ladies, “ Jane the Quene,” and Marye the Quene,” and “ Marie R.,” dated in 1570, when Mary Stuart was but a queen in name. Elsewhere there is that pathetic last letter from Sir Philip Sidney, after he had received the fatal wound at Zutphen, begging his servant to hasten to him: “Come, my Weier, come. I am in danger of my life, and I want you ”; and the famous anonymous letter sent to Lord Mounteagle, which brought about the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, together with, the 16 interrogatories prepared by the astute James, and the declarations, before and after torture, of Guido Fawkes himself; and there is one of the two or three authenticated signatures of William Shakespeare. THE “ SCRAP OF PAPER.” So we skip down the ages, until we come to that scrap of paper (so Beth-mann-Hollweg termed it to the late Sir Edward Goschen), by which the independence and integrity of Belgium was supposed to be secured. There are five signatures to that now famous document, which was signed on behalf of Belgium itself by Sylvain Van der Weyer; Palmerston for England; Senfft for Austria; Sebastian! for France; Pozzo di Borgo for Russia; and Bulow for Prussia. It is dated April 19th, 1839, and on August 4, 1914, it passed from being a guarantee to indeed that scrap of useless paper which the German Minister called it. One wonders what the ghosts of the statesmen whose names are appended to it had to _ say to one another in the Elysian Fields, when a breath from the nether world carried up to them the astounding intelligence that after three-quarters of a century their work was stultified, and red ruin let loose upon earth! There is much food for reflection as one gazes at all the eloquent reminders of past times in the Record Office Museum, with Torrigiano’s lovely monument of Dr King looking down on us from one of the walls, but hardly one so pregnant or so characteristic of the mutability of human affairs as that treaty which the ambition and greed of one of the parties to it made of no account. Samuel Butler once wrote; “ Just by the Record Office is one of the places where I am especially prone to get ideas.” He would have got a particularly significant one had he lived to see this evidence of perfidy.