A CASE FOR RECORDS
By HILARY JENKINSON
IT has long been a commonplace of depreciation to say that England possesses more valuable collections of historical documents than any other country, and displays more indifference to them. "En Angleterre tout est en désordre," says an eminent French critic: and the Times Literary Supplement quotes him.[32] Since the middle of last century the declared classes of public records in this country (those of the Central Government) have, it is true, had a settled habitation, a staff to look after them, and a good deal of attention from a small section of the public; also a considerable, though relatively small, number of publications has been devoted to them and some of the clamorous interests, the genealogist's, for example, fed if not sated. The same amount of good fortune, except by the hazard of their coming into the hands of an enthusiast, has not in many cases befallen the records belonging to local bodies; still less has it come to the enormous private collections originally accumulated in connection with the descent of real property, and now, since the invention of "short title," no longer in any demand for their primary purpose. If the public records of the past may in our day be considered to have found safety, it is still possible to witness in this country the unedifying spectacle of the museum or the rich collector buying up the pretty specimen from a collection of manorial records, while the remainder, of which it should form an integral part, after the lesser lights of the collecting world have taken gradual toll of it, goes without protest from any one to the tambourine-maker or the glue merchant. It is as though an anatomist, having exhumed his great-grandfather, should add to that injury the insult of preserving an interesting metacarpal in his cabinet, while he distributes the rest of the body to various colleagues, with remainder to the manufacturer of fertilisers: one is tempted to send science to blazes and wish the poor old gentleman might have been left intact, if useless, underground.
[32] November 27th, 1919.
I have spoken in this first paragraph of the unhappy state of the small collections in England because that state is an obvious and striking result of the same cause which has produced most of our mistakes in the preservation, sorting and editing of documents in the past; because the distinction at present existing between the public and the private collections is so symptomatic of our worst failure in this field: in effect, in all these years during which historical documents have met with a certain amount of appreciation, it has apparently never occurred to us to make definite search for the essential features common to all records, high or low, and to apply to all records a treatment based on the examination of those features. But the most interesting archive question of the present time seems to me to be the question of the records we ourselves are producing. If our shortcomings as owners of archives have affected adversely our treatment of what the past has left to us, are they not capable of doing quite as much harm to that which we ourselves are to bequeath to the future? And, further, if England, owing to its wealth of records, provides a particularly large number of examples of things to be avoided, is it not possible that the application of the warning derived from these may prove to be common to other countries? It is, indeed, no new criticism of the French School, the acknowledged leader of the world in this matter, to say that the circumstances under which the French national collections were put together have led it sometimes to consider the isolated document rather to the exclusion of that record which forms only a single link in a long chain.
We are led, therefore, to inquire how far certain generalisations, based on the character of our existing English records, maybe applied as criteria to the treatment of those records which are accumulating in our own time in England and perhaps in other countries.
A record, if we may venture here to give definition to a loosely-used word, is a document drawn up, or at any rate made use of, in the course of an administrative process, of which itself forms a part, and subsequently preserved in his own custody for his own reference by the administrator concerned or his successors. The process and the administration may be as important or unimportant as you please; the result may be the Rolls of Chancery or the deed-box of a manor: the essential features are the same in both cases—the administrative origin, the administrative reason for preservation, the preservation in administrative custody: so also are the results the same from the point of view of the subsequent 'ologist—the two priceless qualities of authenticity and impartiality; the first proceeding from the fact that the records have been always in custody,[33] and in a certain relationship one with another, the second derived from the fact that they were not drawn up for the information of posterity,[34] and, therefore, have no bias to one side or the other of posterity's problems. Any number of interesting instances[35] might be adduced from the records of the past, both of the value of these qualities and of the ease with which they may be flawed; but let us here leave for the time consideration of the records the past has bequeathed to us and inquire how far the qualities which, with all its historical faults, it gave us in most of its documents are going to be found by our descendants in those we leave to them. The unprecedented mass of documents which the various executive departments must have accumulated during the war may well frighten us into a serious consideration of this subject at the present moment.
[33] The licence of high officials has sometimes violated this, a practice much to be deprecated. I refer to this again below.
[34] This fact may, of course, lead in ignorant times, such as was the early nineteenth century, to destruction.
[35] A well-known case is the volume, belonging to the records of the Master of the Revels, which, if it is genuine, dates one of Shakespeare's plays: unfortunately it was for a considerable time out of official custody, and doubts have been cast on the authenticity of the most important page.
Now, the rules for safe preservation and custody are simple things, matters of proved experience, a number of which are set out in a small book recently published in England, and at more length in the well-known Continental treatise;[36] and though the standard of archive-keeping by local authorities is at present very uneven, we may, for the shortening of this article, dismiss that side of the question with pious hopes. Assuming, then, that the documents of our own time, when they come to the state of archives, will be preserved in suitable places and under proper rules of custody, assuming further that we are able to drill archivists into leaving their charges as far as possible in the physical order and state in which they find them (so as to preserve the old association of document with document), we have to face as our chief danger a threat not so much to the authenticity of the record as to its impartiality—the most important of all its qualities and one which, once damaged, cannot be restored. Interference with impartiality may occur at two points: in the first place it may occur, as indeed it has sometimes done in the past, at or near the time of the document's making; the administrator who makes it may himself have an eye on posterity. We shall have to recur to this again, but for the moment let us turn to the second, which is the more serious because it brings us up against the great modern record problem, bulk: impartiality may be—rather, is—impugned when we come to the selection of documents for preservation.
[36] C. Johnson: The Care of Documents (S.P.C.K. Helps for Students of History); and Muller, Feith, and Fruin: Manuel pour le Classement des Archives.
The obvious remedy for this is not to select—to preserve everything; but this is in practice an equally obvious impossibility: the instance already quoted of the accumulation of our war records[37] would no doubt supply apt illustration, but the custodian of county records is faced on his small scale with exactly the same difficulty: we are all confronted, in fact, with this main problem—how are we to reconcile our desire to preserve in our records certain qualities which have accompanied in the past an uncontrolled accumulation with the necessity of our own day for restriction? Up to now, in face of this problem, and in face of the system of selection, or destruction, which is actually in use, no one (not even the Royal Commission, which has obviously devoted much attention to the subject) has really gone further than to tell the selectors that they must be very careful. But can they? Let us take a case of public records, an imaginary class of, say, 200,000 pieces to be dealt with in a limited space of time by a limited number of people who have probably other work waiting to be done: how can they possibly say (since they have not the time to make a detailed comparison) that all the information contained in certain documents which they propose to condemn is to be found elsewhere? Or, taking another criterion, how can they say that certain documents are going to be without interest for the future? There are classes of documents in the Public Record Office now frequently used and highly valued which little more than fifty years ago might well have been destroyed as having no interest for any branch of human study then known.
[37] Records so vast that in its last report (1919) the Royal Commission has found it necessary to alter its original (1914) recommendations regarding the provision of new repository accommodation.
At this point the natural thing is to seek the advice of the historian, who is indeed, being an enthusiast, anxious to give it. Now, the historian may fairly claim to have done much for records in the past. He is mainly responsible for the recognition of public records as things valuable and to be kept carefully for other reasons than that of mere antiquity; and he has done something in England (one always hopes that he will do more presently) for local and private collections. But he cannot predict the needs of future research workers (who may not be historians at all) any more than he was able to predict in the time of the old Record Commission the needs of our own day: witness the indexes, quite useless to an economic historian, of the very important Chancery Rolls of King John, published about 1830. Even if we grant that he may make a better guess than other men, we are met by a still graver objection in the fact that we cannot rule out at least the possibility (since he is human and an historian) of his having a predilection for the evidence which will establish a certain view or emphasise a certain line of inquiry. The use of an historian, or of any other person who uses records for research purposes, as a selector seems to me incompatible with the preservation of their characteristic impartiality: there will be a possibility—and the mere possibility is enough—of suppressio veri, if not of suggestio falsi; and what should have been a record, preserved by circumstances which do not affect its value as evidence, will become no more than the narrative or at most the pièce justificative of a specialist; you might as well allow a botanist to produce a hybrid in order to prove not its possibility but its existence as a natural form.
But if we cannot use the historian for our purposes we may perhaps call in the trained archivist. I am afraid that here again we shall find no help. The archivist may take an interest in any of the subjects upon which his collections furnish evidence; but such interests have nothing to do with (indeed they sometimes impede) the duties that are his of safeguarding, arranging, and making accessible and of basing himself for all these duties on the internal structure of the classes of documents in his charge: with the possible exception of the last there is nothing in these qualifications to make him more fit than the historian for the work of selection—and destruction.
Is there, then, no possible way—we will not say of dealing with our present accumulations; they, it may be, on account of their sheer bulk must be dealt with by such ad hoc methods as the circumstances admit of; and into those methods it is not our province here to enter—but merely for our guidance in the future, is there no chance of reconciling the requirements of ourselves and posterity (so far as these can be foreseen) with the intrinsic interests of the records themselves—the external with the internal—or rather perhaps of finding some method of treatment which will give to our records a reasonable bulk while preserving their important characteristics, and at the same time will at least not sacrifice unduly the interests of the research-worker? Perhaps an indication of such a possibility is to be found in the words "our present accumulations" which we used above. How would it be if we set ourselves in the future to prevent accumulations?
A certain amount of contemporary destruction of the more obviously ephemeral papers—notes from one department of an office to another saying, "Passed to you, please," and perhaps documents of a more advanced type—does, of course, in our own days sometimes take place in large offices. And there are not wanting indications that a perception of the need of something more, especially in regard to public offices, has been growing since the Act of 1877, provided that the Master of the Rolls might make rules respecting the disposal by destruction or otherwise of documents which are deposited in or can be removed to the Public Record Office (note the lack of any distinction between the two classes) and which are not of sufficient public value to justify their preservation in the Public Record Office. Such an indication is seen in the desire expressed by the late Royal Commission on Public Records[38] for the substitution in Government offices of destruction and preservation of documents according to well-considered principles for destruction founded on arbitrary, varying opinions; and for the relief of the Public Record Office Repository from a cumbersome mass of useless or unnecessary documents. But no one, so far as I am aware, has yet summed up and balanced, for the benefit of all records and record-keepers, whether public or private, the merits and demerits of the various systems of destruction, either in the light of the intrinsic character of records themselves or in that of the experience gained from a study of our ancestors' methods. And the accumulations of documents, many of which are subsequently judged not to be material, continue.
[38] First report, p. 41; cp.: second report, p. 71, etc.
Now we may assume, indeed we know, that from the earliest times not only selections of subjects for representation in permanent records but also actual destruction of documents has been practised by the administrators who have left us their collections. Only—and here is the distinction—since the question of bulk did not trouble them as it does us, they were able to act solely on the ground that the record in question was not required for their current administrative purposes. Note that in this their impartiality was not affected by the external considerations of either this world or the next, neither by any interest in the history-writing of the future, nor by the exigencies of floor-space in the present. Any subsequent destruction, direct or indirect, by our ancestors was quite a different matter: such destruction has invariably been the subject ultimately of adverse criticism, though no doubt the person responsible saw no particular harm in it. For example, take the case of the burning of the Exchequer tallies in 1834. The position of contemporaries is probably represented tolerably by that of Charles Dickens, who criticised the proceeding on the ground not only that it burned down the Houses of Parliament, but also that it was a wanton waste of firewood which might have been given to the poor: yet already we, not a hundred years after, are regretting it. On the other hand, though historians are in the habit of saying vaguely that much which was of incalculable value must have been lost, they refer always to the losses due to various forms of carelessness. I have never heard anyone venture to criticise the Chancery, for example, because it did not preserve full copies of non-returnable writs or the Exchequer because certain draft accounts were destroyed.
What, in fact, are the principal gaps in old records which affect us moderns? If we take two of the documents which have thrown light on the personal history of Shakespeare (not a matter of much moment to his contemporaries) we shall arrive at a clear distinction between two different kinds of destruction, or shall we say failure to preserve? On the one hand, we have a document signed by Shakespeare as a witness: all that mattered to the court here was that certain evidence had been given by some indifferent person and accepted. Could we have blamed it if it had failed to preserve this signature which we find so intriguing, or had allowed it (as was sometimes done) to be written in by the scribe who took down the deposition? Or if it had preserved the whole document only in the form of a summary? Most certainly we could not: how was the court to know that we should be interested in Shakespeare's life and handwriting? On the other hand, take the case where Shakespeare himself was party to a fine: had the court of Common Pleas failed to preserve the "foot" of that fine, which was a recognised form of evidence of its own transactions, we should legitimately criticise its carelessness.
It appears, therefore, that the only criticism posterity will be able to pass on us, if we adhere to the practice of our ancestors, will be one based on the extent to which we leave record behind us of the work of the various administrations; and our further queries then resolve themselves into two:
(1) Can we train our administrator so to keep his records at the time they are made that they will give a fair picture of the activities of his office, and this without desiring him to do it for the benefit of posterity, without making an historian of him?
(2) Can this be done so economically as to get rid of the bulk difficulty in connection with preservation?
If the answer to each of these questions is "Yes," then our problem is solved.
It is not, of course, possible to answer them in detail here, because to do so would involve inserting a detailed scheme for the keeping of archives in a modern office; it would also involve going into such highly technical, and in some cases controversial, matters as the use and abuse of flimsies, the whole position of the typewriter in record-making (with an excursus on carbons and inks), the comparative merits of various filing systems, and, as regards this country at least, liaison between Government departments. But we may perhaps try in the most general terms to lay down a few first principles and see how far they indicate the possibility of an answer. We may premise that while no two accountants differ radically in their methods, the name of the various filing systems and practices is legion; while we have had double-entry for three or four hundred years, no one has yet hit on a system of filing correspondence and the like which commands general approval; from which we may draw the corollary that almost everywhere there are large redundancies.
If, then, we are to educate our administrator we should begin
(1) By explaining the trouble that has been caused by accumulations of records in the past and the impossibility of dealing with them reliably and satisfactorily in the present. This trouble we require him to prevent in the future by a system of personal attention and studied economy. (He would, of course, say at once that this could not be done; the reply is "Have you tried?")
(2) The next point is concerned also with authenticity, but it is in every way of primary importance.[39]
[39] How important may be judged from the perusal of more than one modern volume of more than one great statesman's "Private Papers"—many of them public records which have been taken out of custody. Perhaps the new diplomacy may do something to remedy this evil.
Every office, no matter how small, must have a registry;[40] i.e., must be divided up, qua records, into two branches, administrative and executive; it must have a small branch which keeps and controls, distinct from the large which makes and uses, documents. Registry, the keeper and controller of office papers, is to lay down the way in which letters are to be written and whether copies are to be made. When they are made (or received, if they come from without) all office documents are the property of registry, which is responsible for destruction or preservation (with, of course, the advantage of advice from the executive side in a large office) and for safeguarding and methods of arrangement.
[40] I hope I shall not be accused of ignorance of the fact that registries do exist in some offices. The point is, first, that their existence is not universal; second, that they have not yet been turned towards those functions which it is here suggested they should fulfil.
(3) The golden rule for administrators is: in preserving and arranging documents keep in view a single purpose, that of enabling an ignorant successor by their means to carry on if you and the whole of your staff were blotted out. We depend largely on this rule for an answer to the historian's objection that the administrator if left to himself will destroy all the valuable things—lose the Shakespeare fine, in fact. It is not, however, inserted here for that purpose, but because it is obviously sound.
(4) Apart from this rule the first principle should be economy; and economy, if registry is not to be overburdened with work, must consist largely in rules carefully thought out concerning not the documents which are to be destroyed, but the documents which are never to be made: for example, probably at least 50 per cent. of the copies of out-letters which are preserved in a big office record nothing more than despatch, which could be done in two words or less in a general register.
(5) The ideal subject index, it has been said, would have only one entry and any quantity of cross-references; similarly there is an ideal of a single master series in records: being an ideal, neither of these things is realisable, but it is possible to get near to them. For example, registry can and should have a record of its own, a single general register, and a properly made entry in this would be amply sufficient record of many transactions which are at present dignified with a dossier.
(6) In this connection we may refer to the necessity for the intelligent use of mechanical devices: many duplicates and unnecessary documents are habitually kept owing to a failure to appreciate the merits as distinguishing features of a red pencil and a blue, the opposition of left to right, the possibilities of the first and the second column, not to mention the third, fourth, and fifth....
(7) Registry should have a clear conception of the nature of records—that there are only three kinds: In-letters, out-letters, and memoranda (including accounts). A realisation of this and of the way in which records work into each other means economy in internal arrangement, and in the case of Government offices might, if liaison were close and a single system of record-keeping in general use, make new economies possible as between departments.
(8) So far we have been considering the possibilities of an economy which consists in not making documents; but we have, of course, to consider also actual destruction, of which there are three kinds: (a) First, there is what we may call posthumous destruction, the kind which is now most in vogue, and which we want to stop altogether: that is the destruction which deals with an accumulation formed perhaps years before—destruction for its own sake, because of over-great bulk. Then (b) there is immediate destruction, which gives effect to the judgment passed at the earliest possible moment on a document: you wait only until a letter (let us say perhaps a letter making an appointment) is acknowledged, and then, since its actual terms concern only the person addressed, and for your office's purposes you have sufficient evidence in your registry, you destroy. (c) Finally, there is deferred destruction, the kind which comes into operation where a document, already condemned, so far as concerns the purposes of the office, is temporarily preserved for some purely external reason; for example, in connection with the provisions of the Statute of Limitations.
(9) A primary rule of destruction is that no letter-in, copy of letter-out, or draft of office memoranda shall be kept which does not mean a stage in advance for the office's business. But it is particularly necessary that this destruction should take place at the earliest possible moment, while the business is fresh in the minds of those concerned; because there are documents which, though they have no direct result themselves, yet by that very fact mark an advance in the policy (let us say) of a department, and delay in the consideration of these might conceivably be dangerous.
(10) For the purposes of deferred destruction some system of automatic working will be necessary; for instance, if large masses of papers, valueless otherwise to the office, have to be kept, say, for six years for legal reasons, there should be a regular system by which every day the register of six years back should be examined and the papers there marked (let us say) D.D., for deferred destruction, should be at once drawn, disposed of, and marked off. It is possible that some system might be introduced to cover doubtful cases, which could be given a short lease of life—some statutory number of months, pending a decision by circumstances upon their value. This would be a good safeguard against careless destruction, though that should never occur.
(11) Finally, lest this compromise should let in abuses, there must be a short time of probation for documents fixed, perhaps not more than a year; and, as soon as any document has passed through that, it should automatically go to the record class, where no further destruction is permitted; it would probably in practice be subjected to a final scrutiny a few days before it reached this happy state. As many such documents might still be needed for reference, they would possibly remain with those still on probation or go only to some intermediate muniment-room, not to the final record repository, but they would be records, full-fledged.
The above suggestions are offered only as suggestions, susceptible of much revision and needing much more expansion. The only claim made for them is that they do face the real difficulty of the record situation, and do sketch lines along which the reasonable requirements of the historian, or any other worker who may be destined in the future to pursue strange learning along unthought-of paths, are adequately met; the question of bulk is met, and the present system of dealing in a hopeless kind of way with accumulations already formed and hardened is got rid of; and violence is not done to the structure of the records themselves.
Criticism of the proposed system will probably be divided between statements that it does too much and that it does too little. We may reply that there is no inherent impossibility in the via media, that all alternative systems are destructive of the most essential qualities of records, and that ours is, therefore, at least worth a trial.
Attempts are from time to time made in most large offices to secure the keeping of documents in a manner convenient to those who use them for official purposes. But why not something longer sighted, a little care for the records themselves? Why not a Manual of Record Making and Keeping for Clerks in Government and other Offices?