Letters (ed. Gairdner) begin a stream which never fails thereafter
and soon becomes a torrent. The most important series of
official correspondence is the Papal Letters, calendared from 1198
to 1404 in 4 vols. (ed. Bliss, Johnson and Twemlow). Subsidiary
sources are the Political Songs (ed. Wright), treatises like those
of John of Salisbury, Gerald of Wales, and, later, Wycliffe’s
works, Netter’s Fasciculi Zizaniorum, Gascoigne’s Loci e libro
veritatum, Pecock’s Repressor, and the literary writings of
Chaucer, Langland, Gower, Richard Rolle and others.
During the 15th century the transition, which marks the change from medieval to modern history, affects also the character of historical sources and historical writing. In the first place, history ceases to be the exclusive province of the church; monastic chronicles shrink to a trickle and then dry up; the last of their kind in England is the Greyfriars Chronicle (Camden Society), which ends in 1554. Their place is taken by the city chronicle compiled by middle-class laymen, just as the Renaissance was not a revival of clerical learning, but the expression of new intellectual demands on the part of the laity. Secondly, the definite disappearance of the medieval ideas of a cosmopolitan world and the emergence of national states begat diplomacy, and with it an ever-swelling mass of diplomatic material. Diplomacy had hitherto been occasional and intermittent, and embassies rare; now we get resident ambassadors carrying on a regular correspondence (see Diplomacy). The mercantile interests of Venice made it the pioneer in this direction, though its representatives abroad were at first commercial rather than diplomatic agents. The Calendar of Venetian State Papers goes back to the 14th century, but does not become copious till the reign of Henry VII., when also the Spanish Calendar begins. Resident French ambassadors in England only begin in the 16th century, and later still those from the emperor, the German and Italian states other than Venice. In the third place, the development of the new monarchy involved an enormous extension of the activity of the central government, and therefore a corresponding expansion in the records of its energy.
The political records of this energy are the State Papers, a class of document which soon dwarfs all others, and renders chroniclers, historians and the like almost negligible quantities as sources of history; but in another way their value is enhanced, for these hundreds of thousands of documents provide a test of the accuracy of modern historians which is imperfect in the case of medieval chroniclers and almost non-existent in that of ancient writers. These state papers are either “foreign” or “domestic,” that is to say, the correspondence of the English government with its agents abroad, or at home. There is also the correspondence of foreign ambassadors resident in England with their governments. This last class of documents exists in England mainly in the form of transcripts from the originals in foreign archives, which have been made for the purpose of the Venetian and Spanish Calendars of state papers. The Venetian Calendar had by 1909 been carried well into the 17th century; the Spanish (which includes transcripts from the Habsburg archives at Vienna, Brussels and Simancas) covered only the reigns of Henry VII. and VIII. and Queen Elizabeth. No attempt had yet been made to calendar the French correspondence in a similar way, though the French Foreign Office published some fragmentary collections, such as the Correspondance de MM. de Castillon et de Marillac and that of Odet de Selve. There are other collections too numerous to enumerate, such as Lettenhove’s edition of Philip II.’s correspondence relating to the Netherlands, Diegerick and Müller’s, Teulet’s and Albéri’s collections, the French Documents inédits and the Spanish Documentos ineditos, all containing state papers relating to England’s foreign policy in the 16th century. The Scottish and Irish state papers are calendared in separate series and without much system. Thus for Scottish affairs there are four series, the Border Papers, the Hamilton Papers, Thorp’s Calendar, and, more recent and complete, Bain’s Calendar. For Ireland, besides the regular Irish state papers, there are the Carew Papers, almost as important. Anarchy, indeed, pervades the whole method of publication. For the reign of Henry VII. we have, besides the Venetian and Spanish Calendars, only three volumes—Gairdner’s Letters and Papers of Richard III. and Henry VII. and Campbell’s Materials (2 vols., Rolls series). Then with the reign of Henry VIII. begins the magnificent and monumental Letters and Papers of Henry VIII., the one modern series for which the Record Office deserves unstinted praise. This is not limited to state papers, domestic and foreign, nor to documents in the Record Office; it calendars private letters, grants, &c., extant in the British Museum and elsewhere. It extends to 21 volumes, each volume consisting of two or more parts, and some parts (as in vol. iv.) containing over a thousand pages; it comprises at least fifty thousand documents. Its value, however, varies; the earlier volumes are not so full as the later, the documents are not so well calendared, and some classes are excluded from earlier, which appear in the later, volumes.
After 1547 a different plan is adopted, though not consistently followed. Only state papers are calendared, and as a rule only those in the Record Office; and the domestic are separated from the foreign. The great fault is the neglect of the vast quantities of state papers in the British Museum. The Domestic Calendar (the first volume of which is very inadequate) extended in 1909 in a series of more than seventy volumes nearly to the end of the 17th century; the mass of MSS. calendared therein may be gathered from the fact that for the reign of Elizabeth the Domestic state papers fill over three hundred MS. volumes. The Foreign Calendar had only got to 1582, but it occupied sixteen printed volumes against one of the Domestic Calendar. For the masses of MSS. uncalendared in the British Museum there is no guide except the imperfect indexes to the Cotton, Harleian, Lansdowne, Additional and other collections. Hardly less important than the calendars are the reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and the appendices thereto, which extend to over a hundred volumes; twelve are occupied by Lord Salisbury’s 16th-century MSS. at Hatfield House. The dispersion of these state papers is due to the fact that they were in those days treated not as the property of the state, but as the private property of individual secretaries.
State papers represent only one side of the activity of the central government. The register of the privy council, extending with some lacunae from 1539 to 1604, has been printed in thirty-two volumes. The Rotuli parliamentorum end with Henry VII., but in 1509 begin the journals of the House of Lords, and in 1547 the journals of the House of Commons. These are supplemented by private diaries of members of parliament, several of which were used in D’Ewes’s Journals. Legal history can now be followed in a continuous series of law reports, beginning with Keilway, Staunford and Dyer, and going on with Coke and many others; documentary records of various courts are exemplified in the Select Cases from the star chamber, the court of requests and admiralty courts, published by the Selden Society; and there are voluminous records of the courts of augmentations, first-fruits, wards and liveries in the Record Office. For Ireland, besides the state papers, there are the Calendars of Patents and of Fiants, and for Scotland the Exchequer Rolls and Registers of the Privy Council and of the Great Seal, both extending to many volumes.
Unofficial sources multiply with equal rapidity, but it is impossible to enumerate the collections of private letters, &c., only a few of which have been published. The chronicles, which in the 15th century are usually meagre productions like Warkworth’s (Camden Society), get fuller, especially those emanating from London. Fabyan is succeeded by Hall, an indispensable authority for Henry VIII., and Hall by Grafton. Other useful books are Wriothesley’s Chronicle and Machyn’s Diary, and they have numerous successors; some of their works have been edited for the Camden Society, which now takes the place of the Rolls series. The most important are Holinshed, Stow and Camden; and gradually, with Speed and Bacon, the chronicle develops into the history, and early in the 17th century we get such works as Lord Herbert’s Reign of Henry VIII., Hayward’s Edward VI., and, on the ecclesiastical side, Heylyn, Fuller, Burnet and Collier’s histories of the church and
