From King John to King George

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 690, 15 June 1929, Page 18

From King John to King George

HNE of the least-known museums of London is that attacked to the Public Record Office, in Chancery Lane. The collection of historic documents there exhibited could probably not be rivalled in any other capital of Europe, except Rome. There is no place where the continuity of British national life is so borne in upon the mind. In one of the temporary showcases you may see one of the earliest entries on the Patent Roll of the Realm, in which King John summoned his nephew, Arthur (who should have been king if the right of primogeniture had at that time been acknowledged) to do him homage. By its side lies a later Patent Roll, open at the entry of King George V.’s proclamation dissolving Parliament in 1924. It is a continuation of the same document. Somewhere in the building is the whole long series of these Patent Rolls, uninterruptedly recording the business of State through the ] changes and chances of 700 years.

All round the hall are exhibits teach- ; ing the same lesson. In the middle ; is Domesday Book, open at the page dealing with the manor of Aylesbury, telling William the Conqueror how many hides of land there are, howmany freemen it supports, and how many villains, and what are his financial rights there. Across the room is the great Pipe Roll recording the moneys collected by Richard I.’s sheriffs for the Treasury. in another case are the wooden tallies constituting the receipts for sums passing betw-een the mediaeval exchequer and its debtors or creditors. And so we could trace out the complex story of the national finance from King William’s Danegeld to Mr. Churchill’s betting tax. It is all there —eight and a-half centuries of collection and expenditure: and the same Treasury has supervised it all. The same unity is everywhere. There are writs of summons to Par- , liament dated as far apart as 1275 and ! 191 S. The difference is a difference j of language, of paper or parchment, j of caligrapliy, of ink.

j Nearly all the great personages of | our history are represented here. A j despatch in the Duke of Wellington’s writing tells of the battle of Waterloo. The log of the Victory contains the account of the battle of Trafalgar, and a short casualty list tabulates within a few lines of one another “The Right Hon. the Lord Viscount Nelson, K. 8., Duke of Bronte, quality, Commander-in - Chief.” and “Thos. Thomas, quality, A. 8.” The shaky hand of Guy Fawkes, broken by torture, signs his confession. The fallen Wolsey writes to Henry 111. to plead (in vain) for "grace, mercy, remissyon, and pardon.” An almost illegible scrawl at the foot of a commonplace legal document is only recognised as one of the most precious of all autographs by the opening words of the document itself, which the unskilled eye can with difI Acuity make out as stating that this lis the deposition of one “William j Shakespeare, of Stratford-on-Avon, in ' the County of Warwickshire.”