RECORDS, PCDLIC. In the broadest sense, a public record is a written account, history, or memorandum of a fact or etent of general public interest, made by a public official in the perform ance of his duties, and intended to be preserved as permanent evidence of the matters to which it relates. However, the term is usually con fined to authenticated accounts of legislative acts and proceedings, the judgments and records of proceedings of courts of law, and the originals or copies of wills, mortgages, and conveyances, preserved under recording acts.
The nations of remote antiquity had very little idea of preserving these memorials for the pub lic benefit. Accounts of the doings of the rulers were indeed preserved, as by the clay tablets of Nineveh and Babylon, but they recorded merely military expeditions or the splendor of the mon arch, rather than laws or rights affecting the general public. However, as the world became more enlightened and the common people were accorded some rights, it became customary to promulgate laws and preserve them in writing in some royal repository, and these were the first true public records. No provision was made for their inspection by the people, and where it was desirable to promulgate a law affecting the people in general, it was usually written upon parchment, or some more indestructible sub stance, and posted in a public place. o• com municated to those in authority in various dis tricts and proclaimed by them, through their subordinates o• deputies, to the people in their respective districts. No method of recording titles to real estate was known until compara tively modern times. Thus, in A.D. 303, the prin cipal laws of Rome were painted on twelve wooden hoards, known as the 'Twelve Tables' and exhibited in the Forum. During the medieval ages the laws were usually written on parch ment and preserved by certain public officials, hut it seems that no systematic record of judg ments or conveyances was kept. The French were probably the first nation to keep judicial records in the sense we employ the term now, and the Normans introduced the practice into England.
Under the feudal system the method of eon veying land was by feoffment with livery of seisin, a sort of dramatic ceremony on the land itself. and written conveyances were not intro duced until after the Statute of Uses. 27 Hen. VII.. e. 10. By 27 Hen. V111., e. 10, known as the Statute of Enrollments, it was provided that conveyances by 'bargain and sale' should be en rolled, that is. recorded. These acts were the
basis of the recording acts in England and the United States.
England has the most complete collection of public records of any of the older nations of the world. However, until 1838, there records were so negligently kept that many valuable ones were destroyed or lost. The oldest English records are the 'tallies in exchequer,' which were made by means of wooden sticks marked on one side with notches to indicate the sum for which the tally was an acknowledgment. while on the other two sides were written the amount, the name of the payer, and the date of the transaction, and then dividing the stick longitudinally, so that it could be fitted together again and read. the one half being preserved in exchequer, and the other given to the person who had paid the money. This rude contrivance was probably of Norman-French origin. the name being derived from the French faille I to cut off). and it prob ably proved satisfactory in those simple times. This method continued until 17s3, when the statute of 23 Geo. III., c. `-12. abolished the office of 'tally-cutter,' and substituted indented paper checks as receipts for payments into exchequer. _Most of the accumulated tallies. being practically useless. were destroyed by horning.
During the era of the Norman kings the Par liamentary records were in the Norman-French language. and were written on parchment. This language continued to lie used for Parliamentary records until the fifteenth century, and Latin was in common use in judicial records until the reign of George I1. Various methods for pre serving the records were employed before the art of bookbinding came into practical use. Some were crudely bound in hook form ; others were attached together and wound up in rolls (q.v.) ; and the parchments containing many records were simply folded and filed in their original form. One of the most noted ancient records is the 'Domesday Book,' which, as its name indicates. is in hook form, and contains a record of land surveys and titles to land, com piled by order of William the Conqueror. This was probably the first attempt to make a com plete record of the ownership or tenure of land. Such records as had been kept by the Saxons prior to the Conquest had been preserved by the clergy in monasteries and religious houses, and this practice was continued as to many impor tant records for centuries. Many copies of the Magna Charta were put under the Great Seal and delivered to the archbishops for safe keep ing.