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to be lost or obliterated; that there would be considerable public advantage
in its being generally known where such papers were deposited, and that
many of the possessors of such manuscript would be willing to give access
to them and permit their contents to be made public provided that nothing
of a private character, or relating to the Title of existing owners, scould be
divulged".
The first Chairman of the newly estableshed Commission was the Master
of the Rolls, Lord Romilly, who was also the statutory Keeper of the Public
Records. The Master of the Rolls since January 1959 is no longer Keeper of
Public Records, as the P.R.O. has been put under the Lord Chancellor, but
the Master of the Rolls has always been and continues to be Chairman of
the H.M.C. The Deputy Keeper until 1958, and now the Keeper, has acted
as Executive Commissioner. There are at present some 15 Commissioners;
they include two Peers of the realm, one of them being Lord Salisbury, owner
of the great collection of Cecil Papers at Hatfield, the papers of his famous
ancestors, William and Robert Cecil, Secretaries of State to Elizabeth I and
James I. There are five dons or professors of History, and one woman, Miss
Veronica Wedgwood, who is not unknown to you, I am sure. The Secretary
of the Commission was for many decades an Assistant Keeper of the Records
who gave some of his time to the work of the Commission. The present
Secretary, Mr. Roger Ellis, gives all his time to the Commission and its
off-shoot, the National Register of Archives, which I will describe to you
later. For the first 90 years of its existence the H.M.C. was housed at the
Public Record Office. The need of more Office accommodation for the staff
of the Public Record Office and of the Commission and National Register
compelled us to find rooms for the Commission in nearby premises in Chancery
Lane in 1959.
And now let us take a brief look at the work of the Commission during the
past 90 years before we describe its present activities.
The inspectors and editors employed by the first Commission set to work
with a zest, and with the co-operation of many owners of manuscripts. Many
collections, the existence of which was until then unknown, came to light in
the 70s of the 19th century (and, I might add, the age of discovery is not
yet over). The First Report of the Commissioners appeared in 1870 as a
Parliamentary Blue Book, a folio in double columns. It was not an attractive
format, but it had one very great advantage. For sometime about 1832, the
House of Commons passed a resolution, I am told, that Parliamentary Papers,
known as Blue Books, in addition to being available free to members of both
Houses of Parliament, should be available to the public at large at a very
cheap price, the members of Parliament being convinced that their constituents
were very anxious to buy and read Blue Books if only they could afford to
buy them. The price worked out at about 3d. for 64 pages. The result was
that the Reports of the H.M.C. were published and continued for two
generations to be published very cheaply; and of course it was a period of
cheap printing generally, a condition never I think to return again.
I mentioned the Carleton Papers earlier this morning. They were presented
to the Royal Institution in 1804, and were the subject of a full Report by
the Historical Manuscripts Commission between the years 1904 and 1909.
The Report was published in 4 volumes totalling 2,000 pages and sold at
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an average of half-a-crown a volume ten shillings, say 5 florins, for the
four. They can be bought from the Stationery Office today for less than
a pound.
But 1 am giving you two false impressions if you think that these four
long Reports on the Carleton Papers, published at the beginning of this
century, are typical of the earlier reports of the Commission, or that the
recent Reports are cheap to buy.
The First Report contained appendices dealing with the archives of 36
private owners and 44 institutions. In the first seven years of the Commission
more than 420 collections had been examined. The early reports could not
be other than incomplete and in many cases perfunctory; but is was a definite
advantage to have evidence that these collections existed, to know where they
were and to have an inkling of what they contained. Later, the work of the
Commission's inspectors became less extensive and more intensive. Several
collections, noticed shortly in the earlier reports, were dealt with in detail later:
such as the Cecil Mss. at Hatfield, which have had 19 volumes devoted to
them, beginning in 1883 and yet to be completed. The reports of the inspec
tors and editors of the various collections were at first issued as appendices
to the annual Reports of the Commissioners; but after ten years or so, the
Commission's Reports ceased to be compiled annually, and the Reports of
the Inspectors and Editors were issued separately. In fact the latest Report
of the Commission itself, recently presented, is only the 23rd Report in
100 years; but from now on there will be annual Reports to the Crown and
they will include, in an Appendix, summaries of all the reports on MS col
lections received during the year (received mainly through the National Register
of Archives, about which I will speak later)
I do not know whether any member of this audience has in his researches
tried to find which report of the Commission or appendix contains an account
of the MS. collection in which he is interested. I can only sympathize with
him, for the numbering of these reports is, I must confess, bewildering. The
Stationery Office in their published list of the Reports provide at the end
a Summary of Short Titles of Reports in order of Library numeration and
a Chronological Summary of Publications. It was last issued in 1956, and
a new edition is in the press, and will be available shortly. Over 200 volumes
have been published by the Commission, and you will be relieved to know
that an Index of Places mentioned in the reports from 1870 to 1911 was
issued in 1914. It is now out of print and a revised edition covering later
publications is being prepared. An index of Persons (A-L) was published in
1935, but the stock of the second part (L-Z), published in 1938, was
destroyed by enemy action in 1940.
The later publications of the Commission have been in the form of Calendars
om major Collections. I take it that you what I mean by a Calendar. At the
risk of telling you something you already know, I mean mention that in
England official publications of records have taken one of three forms.
The first is the Transcript, consisting of a verbatim text of the original record,
with its abbreviations extended: normally reserved for medieval records.
The second is the Calendar, which is an abstract, in English, of the original
record, arranged as far as possible chronologically and intended to be full
enough to make it unnecessary for the reader to refer to the original.
