Some time after March 1490, Richard Cely the younger, landed proprietor, ship-owner and wool-merchant, sued the widow of his brother George for debt. Richard and George had been trading partners from 1476 until George's death in June 1489, and as evidence in the suit, which was subsequently prosecuted by Richard's widow, a mass of account books and other papers were delivered into the Court of Chancery. Commercial experts were appointed to investigate the respective claims, and clerks sorted through the material and drew up statements of account. But after this had been done, only some business ledgers were returned to the heirs, and everything else was retained by the court. When the Public Record Office was established the surviving documents, in varying states of decay, were rescued from storage in the Tower of London and eventually properly conserved and catalogued among the national collections.

George Cely had kept papers indiscriminately. There are now two volumes containing some 242 letters (a few more became separated and are bound up in other volumes of ‘Ancient Correspondence’) while nine files in the class of ‘Chancery Miscellanea’ now contain about 232 separate accounts and memoranda by or relating to the family. There are large chronological gaps in the surviving material, but these losses are partly compensated for the historian by the fact that George kept documents of the most personal or trivial kind, and the Chancery officials failed to return even those that had no conceivable bearing on the finances of the partnership.