The Domestic series comprise royal and secretarial correspon dence, both letters received (in-letters) and letters despatched (out-letters), whether in the form of loose drafts or of copies entered into bound volumes (Entry Books), warrants, dockets (abstracts of warrants), orders, commissions, petitions and a host of miscellaneous material, among which are to be found a num ber of collections of private correspondence. Those belonging to the Commonwealth period, when the affairs of the kingdom were administered almost entirely by committees, take on a special character. The State Papers Foreign, which from 1577 are arranged according to the foreign countries which they concern, consist in the main of correspondence between ambassadors and secretaries of State, treaties and treaty papers (records of negotia tions), archives of British legations abroad and memorials and letters from foreign ministers in England.
In 1800 a royal commission was ap pointed which was charged with the arrangement and publication of public records and the control of repositories. So far as arrange ment and control were concerned practically nothing was done, but a number of calendars were published. The contractions of the original documents have not been expanded, no attempt has been made to identify names which may be spelt in a dozen different ways, they abound in inaccuracies of transcription and their indexes are utterly inadequate. The calendars prepared at the Public Record Office are a very different matter. Though it must still be many years before the collection, even excluding the mod ern departmental papers, has been completely described, great progress has been made with most of the more important series of records and some hundreds of volumes have already been issued. The tendency, moreover, has been towards a greater and greater completeness of presentation; so that the student, unless he wish to make an exact and verbatim transcript of a particular document, can work independently of the originals. Nor has attention been paid exclusively to records housed in the office itself. The series of Letters and Papers of Henry VIII. includes documents in the British Museum, at Oxford and Cambridge and elsewhere, and papers relating to English affairs in various foreign archives (Rome, Venice, Salamanca) have been calendared by delegates sent out for the purpose. Moreover, much valuable critical work has been done on the public records by unofficial learned bodies, such as the Pipe Roll Society and the Selden Society.
In 191o, a royal commission was appointed to make exhaustive enquiry into the preservation of records. The reports of the commission, completed in 1929, were a condemnation of the policy of excessive centralization and an endorsement of that of the territorial administration pursued in France and elsewhere. So far, however—that is to say in 1928— no steps have been taken by the State to carry the recommenda tions of the commission into effect.
Not, by any means, that the local records of England, whether municipal, parochial or ecclesiastical, have been universally neglected. Moreover, much has been done in the way of pub lication, whether of the records of a particular town or parish or by specialists in a particular kind of record, such as Dr. Charles Gross in his classic Gild Merchant or A. Ballard in his British Borough Charters, or by such bodies as the Parish Register Society or the various societies connected with particular counties. But all this activity has been the result of private enterprise and local patriotism : it has been neither controlled nor officially recognized by the State. Signs, however, are not wanting that the findings of the commission of 1910 will eventually bear fruit. By the Law of Property (Amendment) Act of 1924 Manorial documents were brought under the control of the Master of the Rolls, with out whose consent such records, as valuable to the social historian as they are liable to dispersal, might not thenceforth be disposed of ; and the Surrey County Council appointed a records committee which in 1928 published a volume of abstracts of civil and ecclesiastical records and another of manorial court rolls pre served in the county.
The federal records of the United States are kept in the Library of Congress at Washing ton, and each State has its own archives. These are independent of the national Government, and various systems of administra tion are in force. "There are departments of archives and history, divisions of archives in State libraries, State historical commis sions and State historical societies charged with some of the f unc tions of archivists" (Botha). The American Historical Society, with its archives commission and historical manuscripts com mission, which, like the similarly named body in England, devotes itself to the exploration of private collections, has done admirable work. But American history begins long before America had a national entity, and the student must seek much of his material in Europe. His principal sources are the Colonial State Papers and the Journal of the Board of Trade and Plantations in the Public Record Office of London, but there are many others. Excellent guides have been compiled by Mr. Andrews of manu scripts relating to the United States in the Public Record Offide, the British Museum, the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge, the House of Lords, and other repositories, but that there are still untapped sources is indicated by the recent discovery among the archives of Bristol of the Tolzey books, recording the names of 12,000 to 15,000 persons who emigrated, as "servants to the for eign plantations," to Virginia, Maryland and the West Indies in the third quarter of the 17th century.