Bettany
Domesday Book was really the beginning of governmental record keeping. It paved the way for Henry I in the 1100s to create the most effective system of accounting known in the middle ages. The Exchequer.

Dr Michael Clanchy
Public Record Office
The Exchequer is so called because it says in the Tower of London there is this table on which is a chequered cloth. That was used for doing the accounting. What was done on a table, then had to be recorded. What I've got here is the earliest of the pipe rolls of the Exchequer, the annual accounts, and they were called pipe rolls because they look like pipes. And when one begins to unroll it, this is the protective covering you unroll, this is the earliest record of taxation, written in big script on very wide pieces of parchment. The earliest record of what each of these named individuals owes or has paid into the Exchequer, here are the sums of money in Roman numerals. LXIX - sixty nine.

Bettany
It doesn't say Sasswallow, does it?

Michael
Is that a family you know? I've never heard of them before.

Bettany
They're still around. They're called Shirley now. But what did they owe then?

Michael
Seven marks of silver, which is paid and he has quit, he's paid the whole lot, quiatus means complete.

Bettany
And in a way this couldn't be further from the Domesday Book, but it's all part of the same system of record keeping, isn't it?

Michael
Yes and amazingly enough, they went on making pipe rolls like this in this form using this script right down to the beginning of the 19th century, to the 1830s. The government's information. But in addition to that, if you paid money into the Exchequer, what you were issued with, and this may seem hard to believe, is a piece of stick.

They're called tally sticks, meaning the accounting sticks, as used in the Exchequer. For example this is a stick for £20, £40. And the county is Bedford, Buckinghamshire, and here it has Willelmo de Turville, from William of Turville, Vic - Vice Comity, Sheriff, debitis pleurinis - concerning many debts. What's important about tallies is they were in two halves. This is the stock, the main portion, but you can see here it's been split. One section was kept by the Exchequer and the other section by the Sheriff to whom the receipt is being given. Even at the time the Bank of England, in the 1690s, is issuing for the first time public shares. They issued them in the form of tally sticks, that's why they're called stocks.

Bettany
This is an amazing box of tricks, isn't it. It's a very impressive seal.

Philip
It is rather a fine seal, there. It's a horse, something to do with Thomas de Shirley Knight.

Bettany
So, the Shirleys have their share of seals and tally sticks too. I caught up with Philip again at the County Record Office in Warwick. He'd found an 18th century map which showed that the Shirleys had decided to improve their farming by enclosing their fields.

Philip
This looks very much like the map which was used for the Enclosure Acts which were at the end of the 18th century.

Bettany
Yes, that's the Bill, the Enclosure Bill. 1796 I think. And so the changes, all these are new fields presumably. They would have been the narrow strip field system.

Bettany
Even more interesting was a census return which listed the entire Shirley household at Ettington Park in 1851.

Philip
Evelyn J Shirley. Head. Age 62, describing themselves as the landed proprietor.

Bettany
But presumably that would be how you'd be described right up until today, because we're just about to fill one out, aren't we?

Philip
I suppose I'll have to describe myself as a chartered accountant.

Bettany
But that's not half as interesting. Put chartered accountant stroke landed proprietor. That'll give your story much more meat to deal with in future years.It will be interesting to think that historians might well be turning over your whatever they are, tax records or, you know, land returns in a hundred years time.

Philip
Possibly. One never knows from the records whether the records that everybody keeps tend to be the most boring and it's the ones which they throw out as uninteresting tend to be the ones which people find more interesting later.

Bettany
I don't know, I think we can glean some pretty good things from this. I'm glad they survived. Good for the Shirleys.

Bettany
It's a rich history that Philip's uncovered. Not Saxons, as he'd thought, but Normans who amassed wealth through the centuries until they became Earls Ferrers. I'm pretty sure one of them was hanged for murder. We'll check that out in a later programme.

It is a remarkable thing that so many of our documents, often written in the course of day to day business, have survived the centuries. But I think that at the time their significance lay in the power that they gave to the people who were creating them.

Over the last thousand years, the very existence of records like these has come to be a statement of authority. Proof that the powers that be are modern, effective and in control. But what about the future? Will we continue to leave detailed written evidence of our lives for tomorrow's historians to pick over? We've got another national census coming up in 2001. They'll be asking all sorts of questions about us. But where does that information go?

Rod Massingham
Office for National Statistics
The technology has enabled us, for the first time, to consider the use of the destruction of the paper forms themselves once we've quality assured all the results that we're trying to get from the 2001 census. This has been achieved simply because we've converted the paper into electronic images and the images are stored on microfilm at the Public Records Office to be viewed in 100 years' time.

Bettany
So will other paper records be destroyed? The thought of that does bother me. Who's going to decide what is kept and how? So many records from the past have survived by accident. But perhaps there will be people in the future who decide that they want certain things wiped out forever.

Alan Macfarlane
Nowadays, all you need to do is press one button and you've destroyed a whole year's records. So that is one reason why I think in the future you may find that the recording is very bad. Another reason is a fear of the invasion of privacy. For example, I've been instructed that if I'm keeping official records in my department I must destroy them if they are no longer strictly necessary. I must check them for accuracy because if they're inaccurate in any way, I could be sued. So we're being basically told to burn our records. So the future may well be one where, for computer and other reasons, we don't have good records. But luckily up to the 20th century, we do.

Bettany
And that's where this series wins. Next week, we'll be looking at some of the fascinating records to do with the weird and wonderful history of tax.

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Content last updated: 29/03/2006

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