Royal Commission On Historical Manuscripts - Publications

Publications

Until 1945, the principal medium through which the Commission disseminated its findings was publication: thereafter, it developed other channels of communication (notably the National Register of Archives: see below), but publication always remained important.

Throughout its existence, the Commission published periodical reports to the Crown in the form of command papers. The reports themselves were relatively brief and conventional, but in the early years they were accompanied by lengthy appendixes comprising detailed descriptions of the archival collections that had been inspected, in a combination of lists, calendars and transcripts of selected documents. The first such report was published, as a folio volume, in 1870: the appendix included reports on the manuscript collections of 44 corporate bodies and 36 private owners in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and one located overseas (English manuscripts at Heidelberg University). Eight further reports, with increasingly detailed appendixes, were issued over the following years, the ninth and last in folio format appearing in 1883–4. Although the contents of many of the appendixes have been superseded by more comprehensive publications and finding aids, this is not invariably the case, and a number of the early reports continue to be used by researchers.

From its 10th report (1885) onwards the Commission switched to an octavo format, although it continued to include significant material in appendixes down to the 15th report (1899). In the same period, however, it began to publish its more detailed reports on collections as separate octavo volumes (or, in many cases, multi-volume series), with the material predominantly presented in calendar form. Over the next century it published some 200 such volumes before the series was discontinued: the final volume (the fifth in a series on the papers of the Finch family) appeared in 2004.

In 1968 the Commission published a general survey of the papers of 19th-century United Kingdom Prime Ministers; and this was followed (between 1971 and 1985) by six volumes of editions of selected papers of Gladstone, Wellington and Palmerston.

Between 1982 and 2003, the Commission published twelve thematic volumes in its series Guides to Sources for British History, based in part on the contents of the National Register of Archives (see below). Topics covered included the papers of British cabinet ministers; of British colonial governors; of the British textile, leather and metal-processing industries; and of British antiquaries and historians.

Between 1962 and 1980, the Commission entered into partnerships with local record societies to publish 27 volumes of editions and calendars of significant manuscripts, in what was called its Joint Publications series.

In 1964, the Commission first published its Record Repositories in Great Britain, a geographical directory to publicly accessible national, local and specialist archive repositories. This was regularly updated and reissued in revised editions, and became a standard resource for researchers. The last edition was the 11th, published in 1999: it has now been superseded by the online ARCHON directory maintained by The National Archives.