More good, bad, and ugly.

After another couple of months in the archives, a second work post seemed in order, especially since I’ve been taking loads of digital pictures recently. The research continues to frustrate, but that is the way it goes sometimes. I’ve changed gears to looking at a lot more stuff very quickly, instead of fewer things in some depth. That is where digital pictures come in handy, although it is always easier to read these things on paper or parchment than on the computer screen. Ugh, at least both beat microfilm, which kills the eyes. Digital images are definitely better, but the plain old codex style book with paper is truly a wonderful technology in its own right and will not be going away anytime soon.

The sources I’ve been looking at the most are from High Court Admiralty (HCA), England’s top maritime court. It was a civil law court, unlike most of the rest of England’s judiciary, which was/is Common Law. But I’m not terribly interested in HCA’s forms and functions, but rather what it can tell me about relations with the Spanish on a day to day level, and legal records are one of the few places that such records still exist for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These days, however, it’s not telling me a whole lot. HCA is a notoriously difficult class of documents to use, primarily because it’s never been indexed or cataloged. So no one – including The National Archives itself – really knows what is in here. In the months I’ve been here I’ve never seen anyone else using them. And therein lies the attraction. Could be gold somewhere in all those dirty old documents. And when I mean dirty, I’m not joking.

Historians don’t usually get dirty in their line of work, which has its pluses and its minuses. But every once in a while I pull a box of documents that is simply covered in the dirt of the centuries, or just plain old coal soot, and it seems like no one else has even looked at them for forty or more years. At the end of the day I’ll look at the sleeves or the front of my shirt and they’ll be filthy.

I have to admit, the HCA documents occasionally make feel a little like one of the poor Christians in the Colosseum. When the gates go up, I’m not sure if a lion, a bear, or who knows what else is going to jump out. Or in this particular case, I don’t know whether I’m going to get a box the size of a television set.

Or a box where the documents spill out when you take the top off.

Or just a bunch of loose letters with no dates and no sorting.

Or perhaps just a bunch of documents that have been stuffed haphazardly in a box.

It’s the last ones that worry me the most, both as a historian and a PhD student. These documents are literally irreplaceable, even if they are quotidian bits and bobs of the early modern legal process, so you want to see them last forever. As a PhD student they are alarming because you’re just not sure what you’re supposed to do with them. I nearly wept when I finally fished these documents out of the box.

No, that is not some sort of wrapping paper. Those are small documents, wrapped inside large ones, with the largest ones getting mutilated in the process.

Large bits of these documents have simply been worn away, and you have to kind of guess what they might say, which is not an ideal situation! Sometimes they are wrapped up like this, and bound together, so you can’t even pull them apart to read them, but have to hold them down with weights and kind of peer into the document.

So there is a good reason historians tend to shy away from HCA documents. No one knows exactly what is in there, what they say, how they should be organized, if they are organized, etc. They’ll come Just as they were originally filed four centuries ago. I’m starting to think that those historians who do shy away from HCA are just plain ole smarter than me for it!