Records

A classification of our national Records has already been to some extent attempted by the able officials who have from time to time described their nature and extent. This official classification, however, has been necessarily confined to a technical and artificial arrangement of the contents of the old Record repositories, and a purely scientific or “diplomatic” reconstruction of these Archives has not yet attracted the attention of English antiquaries. We are still content to take the Records as we find them. Rolls and Registers, Charters, Writs and Warrants, Inquisitions and Returns, Accounts, and all the rest, are what they have been since they were first written. There is no room for abstruse theory in the closely printed pages of the encyclopaedic handbook which forms such an admirable Guide to the existing arrangement of the Public Records. The relationship of one class to another, the construction of the subsidiary documents from which the formal Record is derived, the position of the derived documents which may be grouped around these, and the history of the mere excrescences, no longer nourished by the parent stock and clogging its avenues of light and air, none of these considerations has entered into the philosophy of the ancient or modern archivist.