The Archivist and His Records
Maurice Bond analyses the changing landscape of primary source historical research in Britain.
The British Museum, the Public Record Office and the Bodleian Library:—for long these great sources of historical information have been acknowledged in the prefaces and footnotes of works on British history. But in the last generation, and more particularly in the last decade, their pre-eminence in this field has been challenged. Many, hitherto non-existent, institutions are being used by historians on an ever-increasing scale.
Thus, Dr. Mary Finch shed new light on the vexed question of die Rise of the Gentry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in her book, Five Northamptonshire Families, very largely as a result of intensive work in the Northamptonshire Record Office, and more recently Dr. G. E. Aylmer’s study of the Stuart Civil service, The King’s Servants, depended for a considerable amount of its material on the collections of private papers now to be found in some ten County Record Offices scattered across the country from Berkshire to Essex and Lancashire, all of which were founded in the last thirty years,1 and most of them since 1946.
The New Record Offices
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