personal papers in history: papers from the third international conference on the history of records...

Custodial History, Provenance, and the Description of Personal RecordsAuthor(s): Geoffrey YeoSource: Libraries & the Cultural Record, Vol. 44, No. 1, Personal Papers in History: Papersfrom the Third International Conference on the History of Records and Archives (2009), pp.50-64Published by: University of Texas PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25549536 .

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Custodial History, Provenance, and the

Description of Personal Records

Geoffrey Yeo

This article takes as its main case study the custodial and archival history of the papers of Sir Richard Fanshawe (1608-66). Like many personal pa pers, they have had many adventures, and it is difficult to give an adequate account of their complex provenance using conventional approaches to

archival description. In describing such papers archivists need to rein

terpret traditional distinctions between fonds and collections. Instead of

envisaging a simple binary division between "organic" fonds and "artificial"

collections, they should interpret the fonds as a grouping determined by context of creation and the collection as a grouping determined by cus

todianship. A fonds may sometimes be reified as a single collection but is

often distributed across multiple collections. Both creation contexts and

collection histories inform knowledge and understanding of archives.

On June 26, 1666, about ten weeks before London was burned to

the ground in the Great Fire, Sir Richard Fanshawe died in Madrid. An

English royalist and diplomat, Fanshawe had served as envoy to Portugal

from 1661 to 1663 and as ambassador to Spain from 1664 to 1666; he

also had a literary reputation

as a poet and a translator of Virgil, Horace,

Guarini, and Camoens.1 His papers, which included many letters and

dispatches from major political figures of the seventeenth century, were

brought back from Spain to England by his widow, Ann.2 Although most

were concerned with official business, some related to personal

and

family matters; in accordance with the custom of the time, the papers formed a single aggregation, and Ann Fanshawe assumed ownership and custody of them as a matter of course. The history of these papers forms the main case study for this article.

After Ann Fanshawe died in 1680 the papers began a long process of gradual depletion as they passed through a succession of custodians.

Ann's daughter Katherine gave a number of letters dated 1664 and 1665

to an anonymous editor, who published a transcript of them in 1702.3

Copies of the published transcript can be found in a few libraries, but

the originals of these letters are now lost. A further 153 items dated

Libraries &> the Cultural Record, Vol. 44, No. 1, 2009 ?2009 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819



51

1665 and 1666 were also extracted, presumably for publication of a

second volume of transcripts; this publication never appeared, but the

originals survived and are now in the British Library.4

By the 1820s the rest of Sir Richard's papers had found their way to

Conington Castle, Huntingdonshire, which had once belonged to the

Cotton family. It seems probable that Katherine Fanshawe gave them

to Sir John Cotton, owner of the famous Cotton library, which had

been built up by the Cotton family in the seventeenth century and was

acquired by the British government shortly before Sir John's death in

1702. The library passed to the newly founded British Museum in 1753, but the Fanshawe papers were apparently overlooked and remained

at Conington Castle.5 In 1824 the daughter of John Heathcote, then

owner of the castle, removed thirty-nine letters; these were eventually

deposited in the Leicestershire Record Office in 1957.6 The remain

ing papers at Conington were inspected by the Royal Commission on

Historical Manuscripts in the 1890s, and some of them were described

in detail in a report published by the commission in 1899.7

The 1899 publication came to the notice of Evelyn Fanshawe, a for mer officer in the West Essex Militia, and he approached John Moyer Heathcote at Conington. Heathcote gave him some of the letters and

sold him the remainder of the papers in the early years of the twentieth

century. It is unclear how far Evelyn Fanshawe was motivated by family interest in the papers and how far his concerns were pecuniary. He was

continually in financial difficulty, and to meet his debts he put most of

the papers up for sale at Sotheby's auction house in 1912 in small lots, all of which were bought by dealers.8 The few items that he did not sell

passed through various hands and were acquired by the Hertfordshire Record Office in 1967.9 Many (but by no means all) of the items sold at Sotheby's were subsequently purchased from the dealers by Evelyn's brother Basil Fanshawe, a retired tea planter; a few were purchased by his sister. The fate and present location of most of the others is unknown.

Basil Fanshawe's antiquarian interests also led him to collect other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century documents. He acquired

a number

of literary manuscripts and stray items from government and private archives in which members of the Fanshawe family were mentioned, besides a few other documents of more general historical interest. Dur

ing the second decade of the twentieth century many of the papers as

sembled by Basil Fanshawe were used and heavily annotated by a distant

cousin, Herbert C. Fanshawe, who was researching the family history.10 In 1961 Basil Fanshawe's son donated all the papers that Basil had col

lected, together with Herbert C. Fanshawe's extensive research notes, to



52 L&CR/ Custodial History, Provenance, and Description

Valence House Museum in Dagenham, Essex. The seventeenth-century items that had been bought by Basil's sister after the 1912 sale were

given to Valence House in 1964.

The Fanshawe family had strong connections with Dagenham, and

Valence House Museum already held a small number of letters written

by members of the family (including Ann Fanshawe) between 1658 and

1676 that were strays from the dispersed archive of the London bankers

Robert Clayton and John Morris.11 As a result of the donations of 1961

and 1964, Valence House acquired more than seven hundred of Sir

Richard's own papers that Ann Fanshawe had brought back from Spain in the late 1660s. Only about one hundred of these are described in the

report published by the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts in 1899. The others were presumably seen by the commission but not

deemed worth calendaring. However, the commission's report includes

descriptions of about four hundred further items not held at Valence

House and effectively lost following the 1912 sale.

In the 1960s Valence House, a local history museum, had no profes

sionally qualified archivist. The immediate source of acquisition of the

Clayton and Morris strays had been documented in the museum's ac

cession records, but their archival provenance seems not to have been

recognized at that time.12 After 1964 the museum continued to acquire individual documents relating to the Fanshawe family both from members

of the family and from other sources. The creation dates of these later

acquisitions range from 1747 to the mid-twentieth century. Some of the

documents originated within the family, while others merely mention the

Fanshawes in their subject matter. The content and the immediate source

of each acquisition were normally documented at the time of receipt, but systems for linking the physical items to their documentation were

not always robust, and archival provenance was

largely disregarded. The

importance of Sir Richard Fanshawe's papers for political and diplomatic

history was recognized when they were donated in 1961, and the papers were notionally accessible for research, but, as an academic researcher

who examined them in 1970 commented, their physical arrangement was

haphazard.13 For more than thirty years after their acquisition no descrip tive finding aid was available. Some conservation work was undertaken,

but the complex history of the papers meant that their original order

had long been lost, and materials of different provenance had become

intermixed; even locating

a known item among the mass of papers had

become increasingly difficult. Since 2003, when a professional archivist

was employed

at Valence House, the need for reliable systems to manage,

interpret, and provide access to the Fanshawe papers has been identified



53

as a priority task, and a scheme of work to organize their storage and

improve their accessibility is now in progress.14

Descriptive Challenges

Papers such as these present many challenges, both to archivists and

to users. From the point of view of the archivist, the loss of original order, the presence of official or semiofficial documents in a personal archive, the collecting of items on the basis of their subject matter, and

the past failure to differentiate provenance all give rise to questions of

how best to arrange the papers to support their interpretation and use.

No easy answers are available, but for the user effective access largely

depends on how far the archivist is successful in resolving these ques tions and in producing a coherent description of the papers held in

the repository. Users also face the difficulty of tracing the whereabouts

of items separated or removed from the papers in the past. Most of these challenges result in one way or another from the adven

tures of the papers in the course of what is often called their custodial

history. Archival standards such as the Rules for Archival Description (RAD),

Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS), and the first edition of

ISAD(G): General International Standard Archival Description use the term

"custodial history" to refer to the "successive transfers of ownership and

custody or control" that are frequently characteristic of archival materi

als.15 The history of the Fanshawe papers is not atypical of the vicissitudes to which personal and family archives are often subject, except perhaps in the long span of years over which the depredations occurred.16 Many

of the descriptive challenges that result from the complexities of custo dial history, especially questions about the application of the "principle of original order" when no original order remains apparent, have been

widely explored in professional literature.17 Rather than revisiting the discussion of original order, this article sets out to examine some

aspects of provenance. What are the implications of such fluctuating custodial histories for an understanding of the concept of the fonds? How should archivists interpret and how should they document the provenance of

papers like these? The fonds concept, or at any rate its articulation in standards such as RAD and ISAD(G), has frequently been criticized on the

grounds that it fails to account for the effects of administrative change on organizational archives, but it is often believed to be unproblematic

where personal records are concerned.18 In this article I use the example of the Fanshawe archive to argue that its application to the description of personal papers can also be challenging.




A finding aid describing some of the Fanshawe papers held at Valence

House Museum was compiled in the 1990s by two academic historians.

They probably knew nothing of ISAD(G) or of the term fonds or its

equivalents such as "archive group," but after studying the papers over

a period of years they produced an itemized list of most (though not

all) of the seventeenth-century Fanshawe documents at Valence House.

Their finding aid presents the documents as a single sequence described

in chronological order. When describing personal papers whose original order is lost, arranging them in a single chronological sequence may

provide a clearer picture of the creator's life than any other arrange

ment could offer, but unfortunately the decision to use chronological order was taken to the extreme of separating incoming letters from their

enclosures and from drafts or copies of replies. Moreover, while most

of the papers described were Sir Richard Fanshawe's, some extraneous

seventeenth-century documents that retired tea planter Basil Fanshawe

had collected were put in the same sequence; some Clayton and Morris

letters and some other documents written after Sir Richard's death were

also included.19 The finding aid was published under the title The Papers

of Sir Richard Fanshawe, Bart, and the compilers described it as a catalogue raisonne, a term largely unknown to archivists but widely used in the

world of art history to denote a description of the total known output of

a single named artist.20 The compilers noted the dispersal of Sir Richard's

archive and explained it in a separate publication.21 However, the title

chosen for their published finding aid might easily be taken to imply that

it describes the whole of Sir Richard's surviving papers and nothing else; it ignores both the existence of further papers elsewhere and the inclu

sion in the finding aid of items that were never in Sir Richard's hands.

Since the compilers were not professional archivists, it would be wrong to assume that their approach reflects typical archival practice, but it is

interesting to note that they took advice from two senior members of

the archival profession in the United Kingdom. The published finding aid is concerned only with seventeenth-century

documents. For the archivist seeking to gain control of the whole of the

accumulated Fanshawe materials or of other similar accumulations, the

intellectual challenges are manifold. If the papers are to be arranged and described in accordance with ISAD(G), where are the boundaries of

the fonds? If there is indeed a fonds, or perhaps more than one, to be

identified in the Fanshawe papers, should the archivist seek to identify and delimit the personal fonds of Sir Richard Fanshawe, the diplomat, or a wider fonds of the whole Fanshawe family? Since the subset of Sir

Richard's papers surviving at Valence House Museum is largely the



55

result of the collecting activity of Basil Fanshawe and his sister, should

the fonds perhaps be described as theirs?

One might also question whether a fonds exists here at all. Would

the papers be more appropriately described as an artificial collection as

sembled by two individuals at the beginning of the twentieth century? Are there really two collections, one assembled by Basil and one by his

sister? Or, given the merging of the two and the intermixture of further

materials since the 1960s, should the description be of a single collec

tion assembled in recent years by Valence House Museum? Are there

perhaps fonds or parts of fonds to be found within the collection? The

questions seem endless, and ISAD(G) and other published standards

provide little or no guidance on how they might be answered.

A Comparative Survey

The challenges and issues of description raised by the Fanshawe

papers are not unusual. To attempt a

rough assessment of the wider

frequency with which such issues arise, I made a brief survey of 120

description projects undertaken by students working toward a master's

degree in archives and records management at University College Lon

don between 2003 and 2007. Each project was undertaken by a single student working in an archival repository in the United Kingdom or

Ireland under the supervision of professionally qualified staff. Fifty-four students were asked to arrange and describe aggregations of organiza

tional records and sixty-six were asked to work on personal papers.

Only one of the organizational aggregations contained items that had not been created or received within the organizations concerned, but

extraneous material came to light in twenty-five aggregations of personal

papers. About two-thirds of these were aggregations largely created by a

named individual but also containing materials created or inserted by a

spouse and/or by other family members at a later date. There were seven

instances where extraneous items had apparently been inserted by later

custodians who were not family members, and (more worryingly)

two

instances where such items had been inserted by the archival repository. Because each project had to be achievable within a two-week practical

placement, my sample included no large aggregations, but the projects were spread across forty-six different repositories in the government, business, academic, and nonprofit sectors, so it seems reasonable to as

sume that in most other respects my sample was fairly representative of

archival holdings in general. Only one student assignment approached the level of complexity of the Fanshawe papers, and none tackled family




papers extending over many generations

or many centuries, but many

of the descriptive challenges raised by the Fanshawe papers recurred

in one form or another in the student projects.

Reviewing their high-level descriptions, I found that a number of the

students, guided by their professional hosts, had tended to underplay the presence of extraneous materials added by later custodians. The

students were asked to complete their assignments in broad conformity with ISAD(G) and to use ISAD(Gfs terminology wherever possible. One

would expect that in most cases an appropriate response would be to

treat the extraneous materials as separate subfonds or

perhaps even as

separate fonds. In fact, three out of twenty-five students segregated such

materials into a separate fonds; thirteen arranged them in separate sub

fonds or other structural divisions. In terms of description, fourteen of

the twenty-five students employed the ISAD(G) fonds-level description to

alert users to the presence of extraneous materials within the aggregation

or to advise them that such materials had been present when descriptive

processing was begun, but eleven wrote nothing at fonds level about

the presence of such materials. Only three reflected their presence in

the ISAD(G) title element at fonds level. Even in three instances where

"extraneous" materials constituted about half of the total aggregation, the title used at fonds level mentioned only the creator of the earliest

or most "interesting"

material. In at least four instances where it would

have been possible to identify

an individual, usually a

family member,

who had been responsible for assembling or reassembling the papers after a

previous dispersal, a fonds title was chosen that failed to name

the individual concerned.

No blame attaches to the students. They all had spent many hours

studying principles of description, but on placement they were told

to follow the house style of the repository and the instructions of the

archivist supervising them. Many of them provided an astute analysis of

provenance in the commentaries they were asked to write at the end

of their placement. It must be assumed, however, that the practices mentioned above are accepted by and employed in the work of many archival repositories. This conclusion is supported by a further (and

admittedly unrepresentative) survey that I conducted by examining sum

mary lists of personal papers in the published guides to the holdings of

two repositories, one in North America and one in the United Kingdom. Neither guide included detailed finding aids, but both listed the names

of "creators" of the aggregations of personal papers in the repository and the covering dates of the materials held. In each case substantial

numbers of personal aggregations (14 percent and 21 percent of the



57

respective totals) were claimed to extend beyond the date of death of

the supposed "creator" of the fonds. The obvious inference is that other

hands, unacknowledged in the published guides, had been at work.

Much of this approach to description probably results from what might be called the Great Man syndrome (and most of the named "creators"

were indeed men, even if it is questionable whether all were "great"). It

seems to be widely assumed that the celebrity of a particular person and

a perceived need to give exclusive emphasis to this person's name in the

title assigned to an aggregation override any requirement to provide an

unambiguous account of provenance.

The Fonds and the Collection

Archival thinking in many countries posits a distinction between the

fonds?commonly interpreted as an aggregation of records resulting from the work of an organization or the daily activities of an individual

?and the collection?seen as a set of items arbitrarily or artificially

brought together from a variety of sources.22 In the United States,

although the term fonds is barely used in professional literature, broadly the same distinction can be found in T R. Schellenberg's discussion of

differences between "organic" and "artificial" collections.23 In practice,

however, the traditional dichotomy between fonds and artificial collec

tions is problematic. If an "artificial collection" denotes an assemblage of items of unrelated provenance acquired wholly from collecting in the

auction or used goods markets, then none of the student projects that I surveyed fell into this category. But when I examined these projects I found that over a third of the aggregations of personal papers had

been supplemented with extraneous material at one or more stages of

their custodial history. Some contained a few items added by a widow after her husband's death; others revealed evidence of additions and sometimes rearrangement by other family members or more substantial

alterations by later custodians; and at least one aggregation comprised

papers reassembled from the dispersed archive of a noted individual

along with a few items of different provenance that mentioned him in their textual content, brought together by someone with historical interests long after the event. It seems impossible to postulate a rigid

dividing line between aggregations that are artificial and those that are not. A continuum runs from aggregations created by individuals in the course of their daily life that have survived to the present day largely intact and untouched, through various intermediate states as

suggested above, to aggregations whose present shape is partly or wholly




the product of collecting activity by antiquarians often more concerned

with subject matter than provenance.

Where does this leave the perception of the fonds as a supposedly

organic unity arising naturally from business functions or daily life?

Canadian archival thinker Terry Cook and others have argued that the

fonds is not, or not primarily, a physical entity.24 In contrast to ISAD(G) and other standards, which assume that the fonds exists as a single physi cal aggregation of records, Cook sees it as a conceptual abstraction. The

Australian "series system" arguably rests on a similar understanding, and

the case has been widely made that volatile administrative structures

and increasingly complex patterns of record creation in organizational

settings have invalidated the idea that the fonds is a physical entity with

a single creator and exclusive membership.25 But in the case of the

Fanshawe archive, the papers that Ann Fanshawe brought from Spain to England in 1666 did indeed form a single physical aggregation that

closely corresponded to the traditional notion of the fonds. The papers had arisen from the activities of their creator and had accumulated

more or less naturally through the passing years of his life. Sir Richard

Fanshawe seems to have kept everything that he received or wrote in

Spain, including preliminary drafts and file copies of outgoing letters.

All the papers were his, and no others were intermixed. Arguably, then,

concept and physicality were coterminous. Even if, as Cook suggests, the fonds should be seen

"primarily as an intellectual construct," the

construct can sometimes be reified as an actual aggregation.26

The Fanshawe documents now held at Valence House Museum do

not, however, constitute the fonds as it was reified in Sir Richard's life

time. The scope and extent of the papers held at the museum and their

presentation to users are circumscribed by actions and choices made by

successive custodians and collectors between the seventeenth century and

the present day; their presentation will also be influenced by arrangement and other decisions taken by the archivist as a means toward making them safely "accessible." Moreover, many of the papers that existed in

1666 have been lost or are dispersed among other institutions.

I believe it would be a mistake to label the documents at Valence

House Museum as a fonds. In many countries, when the papers of an

individual are split between several repositories, it is not unusual for

each repository to describe its holdings as a fonds; but archival litera

ture and professional standards assert that the term fonds denotes the

whole of the records of a single creator, and using this term to refer to

the part of a fonds that happens to be held by a particular institution

seems potentially misleading, if not erroneous. I would suggest that the



59

Fanshawe documents held at the museum are better described as a col

lection, containing a substantial part of Sir Richard Fanshawe's papers as well as other items acquired through collecting activity by various

custodians over time.

The fonds and the collection are often considered mutually exclusive; some physical aggregations are seen as "organic" fonds and others as

"artificial" collections.27 Archivists should replace this simple binary

opposition with an awareness of more complex relationships between

the fonds as a grouping determined by context of creation and the

collection as a grouping determined by custodianship. Consider the

paradox emerging from recent literature, where records are seen as

both fixed and mutable, as providing stable evidence of past events, but also constantly evolving over time.28 A personal fonds looks back to

those past events; the fonds grows during the lifetime of its creator, but

its conceptual boundaries are stabilized when the creator dies. Thus, I

would argue that the boundaries of Sir Richard Fanshawe's fonds were

fixed in the seventeenth century; it is the physical collection or collec

tions that remain fluid and subject to continuing evolution. Collections

are formed and re-formed. Some may disappear from view, only to re

surface at a later date. The fonds is often distributed across more than

one collection, and over time parts of it may move from one collection to another.

In their descriptive work archivists should not fall into the trap of

confusing collections with fonds. Archivists necessarily describe a collec

tion as it is currently constituted in an archival repository; but the title

they assign to a collection and the high-level description they compose should not mislead users about losses and additions that have occurred

over time or about the role of collectors, custodians, and others who

have intervened since the records were created. All form part of a

collection's provenance. Of course, the more complex the story, the

more difficult it will be to present it succinctly in a summary title, but the nature and historical development of a collection should always be

noted and explained as fully as possible within the top-level description. Archivists should seek to describe the growth of the conceptual fonds, the extent to which that fonds was coextensive with a physical collection

during the lifetime of the creator, and the various stages that led to the

emergence of the collection as currently constituted.

Most obviously, archivists can capture information about custodial

developments (and archival interventions) by writing a "custodial his

tory" of the present collection. If sufficient resources are available,

they may also seek to reconstruct?or provide users with the ability




to reconstruct?earlier collection arrangements. Digital technology

facilitates the task of reconstruction by making it easy to combine,

share, and link images of and metadata about items that are physically

dispersed. If a fonds was once reified as a single collection, technology can be used to reconstitute this reification, although when, as in the

case of the Fanshawe papers, some original items have been lost, any

attempt at reconstruction must necessarily be imperfect. And even if

the conceptual fonds was never physically reified, it may be possible to

use technological tools to assemble and organize information about the

fonds and its components.29

Insofar as the current constitution of collections is normally given

primacy in descriptive work, the reasons for this are largely pragmatic. Archival repositories need documentation of the present scope of each

collection they hold, both for management purposes and for access by current users. Nevertheless, archivists should be alert to the danger of

assuming that any collection has achieved a "final" form. Further changes to custodial arrangements (and hence to the shape of collections) may occur in the future not only when accruals are received or deposited hold

ings withdrawn but also when archival repositories merge or funding for

existing repositories ceases. Such changes will need to be documented

when they occur. But it is also important that operational needs to describe

current collections and changes

to current custodial arrangements do

not lead archivists either to overlook the composition of previous physical

collections, or?crucially?to lose sight of the conceptual fonds.

Writing in the Canadian journal Archivaria, Terry Cook once affirmed

that archival description should be aimed at the fonds as a "conceptual whole."30 More recently, another Canadian writer, Laura Millar, has ar

gued that archivists should "bid farewell" to the notion of the fonds and

"address the reality of collections."31 Much archival practice (or, at any

rate, archival terminology) in the United States also prefers to emphasize the "collection." I suggest that both collections and fonds are impor tant. Collections?past or present, dispersed or intact?supply a level

of meaning. They reflect assessments of value made by collectors over

time. Previous selection and aggregation decisions, whether by private collectors or by professional archivists, are inevitably influenced by the

cultural contexts in which they are made and may provide later users

with insight into the contextualized modes of thought of past custodians.

The extent and shape of current collections also determine what users

see and how archival records are presented

to them. But interpreta

tion of a record also requires an understanding of its origins and its

linkages to other records whose origins

are similar, understandings that



61

are embodied in the concept of the fonds. Regardless of whether it has

ever been reified as a single collection, a fonds conceptually embraces

all the records made or received by its creator in the course of daily life.

As archival theory emphasizes, these records are elucidated by complex

interrelationships determined by the circumstances of their creation.

Such interrelationships are intrinsic to the fonds but will almost certainly be difficult to comprehend when its components are dispersed and

undocumented. The concepts of fonds and collection are distinct, yet

many current standards and practices seek to conflate description of a

fonds with description of the collection held in a particular repository. The fonds of a deceased person is conceptually stable, but collections are

shaped and will continue to be shaped by their adventures over time and

by the actions of their custodians. Both creation contexts and collection

histories inform our knowledge of archives, but the archival profession needs descriptive systems and tools that neither confuse origins with

custodial development nor

privilege one above the other.

Notes

1. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com. 2. Ann Fanshawe became a minor literary figure in her own right; after

her husband's death she wrote her memoirs, and these have been published in

several editions, most recently in J. Loftis, ed., The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett, and Ann, Lady Fanshawe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).

3. Original Letters of His Excellency Sir Richard Fanshaw (London: A. Roper, R. Basset and W. Turner, 1702), reprinted

as Original Letters and Negociations of

His Excellency Sir Richard Fanshaw, the Earl of Sandwich, the Earl of Sunderland, and

Sir William Godolphin, vol. 1 (London: John Wilford, 1724). 4. British Library, Ms. Had. 7010.

5. Roger M. Walker and W. H. Liddell, From Bilbao to Becontree: The Previous

History of the Papers of Sir Richard Fanshawe (Leeds: Maney, 1996), 8-12.

6. Leicestershire Record Office, in DE316.

7. The Manuscripts off. M. Heathcote, Esq., Conington Castle (Norwich: HMSO,

1899). 8. Walker and Liddell, From Bilbao to Becontree, 13-15.

9. Hertfordshire Record Office, D/Z13. 10. Herbert C. Fanshawe died in 1922, but the results of his research were

published posthumously as H. C. Fanshawe, The History of the Fanshawe Family

(Newcastle upon Tyne: Privately printed, 1927). 11. For Clayton and Morris see Frank Melton, Sir Robert Clayton and the Ori

gins of English Deposit Banking 1658-1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

12. According to the accession records, the Clayton and Morris letters were

donated by Arthur Pearce in 1956.

13. Walker and Liddell, From Bilbao to Becontree, 20.




14. I am grateful to Judith Etherton, borough archivist of Barking and

Dagenham, for allowing me to have access to the Fanshawe papers at Valence

House Museum.

15. Rules for Archival Description (Ottawa: Bureau of Canadian Archivists,

1990); Describing Archives: A Content Standard (Chicago: Society of American

Archivists, 2004); ISAD(G): General International Standard Archival Description, 1st ed. (Ottawa: International Council on Archives, 1994); quote from Rules for

Archival Description, rule 1.7C.

16. Among many other examples see Simon Adams, "The Papers of Robert

Dudley, Earl of Leicester," Archives^! (1992): 63-85; P.J. Kulisheck, "The 'Lost'

Pelham Papers," Archives 101 (1999): 37-43; R.J. Olney, "The Portland Papers," Archives 82 (1989): 78-87; Jennifer E. Steenshorne, "History and Memory in

the Archives: The Jay Papers," in Third International Conference on the History of

Records and Archives I-CHORA: Conference Program and Participants'Papers (Boston:

Massachusetts Historical Society, 2007), 26-35. Of course, the papers of major historical figures are

especially prone to depredation and dispersal because

of their attractiveness to collectors of autographs and memorabilia and their

potential sale room value. For a broader overview see Christopher Kitching, "Archives Sans Frontieres? The Worldwide Dispersion of British Private Papers," in Miscellanea in Honorem Caroli Kecskemeti, ed. J. Booms and J. Favier (Brussels:

Archives et bibliotheques nationales de Belgique, 1998).

17. See, e.g., Frank Boles, "Disrespecting Original Order," American Archivist

45 (1982): 26-32; Chris Hurley, "Personal Papers and the Treatment of Archi

val Principles," Archives and Manuscripts 6 (1977): 351-65; Jennifer Meehan,

"Everything in Its Right Place: Re-thinking the Idea of Original Order with

Regard to Personal Records," in Third International Conference, 149-58; Colin

Smith, "A Case for Abandonment of Respect," Archives and Manuscripts 14 (1986):

154-68, and 15 (1987): 20-28. 18. ISAD(G) defines fonds as the whole of the records, regardless of form

or medium, organically created and/or accumulated and used by a particular

person, family, or corporate body in the course of that creator's activities and

functions (ISAD(G): General International Standard Archival Description, 2nd ed.

[Ottawa: International Council on Archives, 2000], 10, http://www.ica.org/

sites/default/files/isad_g_2e.pdf, accessed December 9, 2008). Terry Cook,

"The Concept of the Archival Fonds: Theory, Description, and Provenance

in the Post-custodial Era," in The Archival "Fonds": From Theory to Practice, ed.

Terry Eastwood (Ottawa: Bureau of Canadian Archivists, 1992), 46, notes that

"criteria for non-corporate . . .

fonds have rarely been addressed in archival

literature. The reason for this omission may be that the issue appears to be so

straight-forward that nothing need be said." Writings that discuss the fonds only

in terms of organizational records include Michel Duchein, "Theoretical Prin

ciples and Practical Problems of Respect des Fonds in Archival Science," Archivaria

16 (1983): 64-82; Terry Eastwood, "Putting the Parts of the Whole Together: Systematic Arrangement of Archives," Archivaria 50 (2000): 93-116; Peter

Horsman, "The Last Dance of the Phoenix, or the De-discovery of the Archival

Fonds," Archivaria 54 (2002): 1-23; and the papers in Kerstin Abunkhanfusa

and Jan Sydbeck, eds., The Principle of Provenance: Report from the First Stockholm

Conference on Archival Theory and the Principle of Provenance, 2-3 September 1993

(Stockholm: Riksarkivet, 1994).



63

19. Items certainly or probably extraneous include Valence House NR90/8,

245, 670-72, 674-78. The differences in provenance are unremarked in the

published finding aid. 20. Roger M. Walker and W. H. Liddell, The Papers of Sir Richard Fanshawe,

Bart (Leeds: Maney, 1999).

21. Ibid., 17; Walker and Liddell, From Bilbao to Becontree.

22. ISAD(G), 2nd ed., 10; Rules for Archival Description, xvi; Statement of Principles for the CUSTARD Project (2002), http://www.archivists.org/news/custardproject

.asp, principle 6.

23. T. R. Schellenberg, The Management of Archives (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1965), 174. In 2004 Describing Archives: A Content Standard claimed to have done away with the notion of an "artificial" collection (viii).

More precisely, it claimed to have removed the notion that artificial collections

should be described differently from "materials traditionally considered to be

organic" (viii), in contrast to the assertion made in 2002 by the CUSTARD project

team, that "there are some cases where [artificial] collections require special rules" (Statement of Principles for the CUSTARD Project, principle 6). However, the distinction survives in rule 2.3.18 of Describing Archives, where the label "collec

tion" is reserved for "an intentionally assembled collection" and other archival

units are denominated as "records" or "papers."

24. Terry Cook, "The Concept of the Archival Fonds in the Post-custodial

Era," Archivaria 35 (1993): 24-37; Cook, "The Concept of the Archival

Fonds" Cf. Debra Barr, "The Fonds Concept in the Working Group on Archival

StandardsReport," Archivaria^ (1987-88): 163-70; Horsman, "The Last Dance of

the Phoenix."

25. The Australian "series system," which emerged from the work of Peter

Scott in the 1960s, is a response to the descriptive challenges arising from or

ganizational change. When responsibilities for business functions or processes move from one

department or agency to another, the life of a

physical series

of records frequently extends across such changes, and records are added to a

single series by different creators. To an archivist who views the fonds as a physi cal aggregation, such series present a dilemma because they are candidates for

membership of several fonds or subfonds. The series system separates what Scott

called context control from record control. Its separate description of creators

and series allows a series to be linked to as many record-creating entities as

context documentation requires. Many of the classic articles on the subject were

reprinted in Peter Biskup et al., eds., Debates and Discourses: Selected Australian

Writings on Archival Theory (Canberra: Australian Society of Archivists, 1995). See

also Sue McKemmish, "Are Records Ever Actual?" in The Records Continuum: Ian

Maclean and Australian Archives First Fifty Years, ed. Sue McKemmish and Michael

Piggott (Clayton, Victoria: Ancora Press, 1994). 26. For Cook's positioning of the fonds as an intellectual construct see his

"The Concept of the Archival Fonds," 73, and "The Concept of the Archival

Fonds in the Post-custodial Era," 33.

27. A fundamental dichotomy between fonds and collections is asserted by,

among others, Cook, "The Concept of the Archival Fonds," 41; and Peter Horsman, Archival Description from

a Distant View (1999), http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/ asa/stama/conf/WWKHorsman.htm. Carol Couture and Jean-Yves Rousseau go so far as to say that "an archives collection we might call an

anti-/onds" (The Life




of a Document: A Global Approach to Archives and Records Management [Montreal:

Vehicule Press, 1987], 161). 28. Sue McKemmish et al., eds., Archives: Recordkeeping in Society (Wagga Wagga,

New South Wales: Charles Sturt University, 2005), 14, 128, 164. 29. Moreover, if we concede that a set of papers can be considered to belong

to more than one conceptual fonds, that Sir Richard Fanshawe's papers, for

example, could be perceived both as the constituents of Sir Richard's own fonds

and as a part of a larger Fanshawe family fonds, then we could use technological

tools to assemble images and/or metadata to represent either or both of these

fonds as we wish. The notion that a set of papers might belong to more than

one fonds is not countenanced in traditional approaches to archival descrip

tion, which can only call on the more restrictive possibilities of the subfonds

level; but it is certainly implicit in the "series system" and in an understanding of the fonds as

conceptual rather than physical. See Eastwood, "Putting the

Parts of the Whole Together," 114; Chris Hurley, "Parallel Provenance: (2)

When Something Is Not Related to Everything Else," Archives and Manuscripts

33, no. 2 (2005): 67-69. 30. Cook, "The Concept of the Archival Fonds in the Post-custodial Era," 33.

31. Laura Millar, "The Death of the Fonds and the Resurrection of Provenance:

Archival Context in Space and Time," Archivaria 53 (2002): 14.



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