Incendiary Accounting

The English Exchequer kept its accounts on sticks.

Not as a memory aid or a peasant expedient. As the formal legal record of the receipt of money by the Crown, from the twelfth century to the nineteenth, in the most sophisticated financial administration in Europe.

How a tally works

A stick of hazel or willow, squared off. When a payment came in, the amount was cut into the edge in notches, to a standardised scale: the notch for a thousand pounds was the width of a hand, and it descended by defined widths through hundreds, twenties, pounds and shillings to a small nick for a penny.

The details of the transaction were written on the flat sides.

Then the stick was split lengthwise, through the notches, from one end, leaving a stub at the other so the two halves were of unequal length.

The Exchequer kept the shorter half, called the foil. The payer took the longer half, the stock, as his receipt.

Which is where the word stockholder comes from.

Why it was any good

Two properties.

The first is that the split is unforgeable. Wood does not split twice the same way. The grain runs where it runs, and the two halves of a given tally will match each other along their whole length and will match nothing else in the world. To verify a receipt, you took the stock to the Exchequer and laid it against the foil. If they fitted, it was genuine.

That is a physical cryptographic check, in hazel, running on a technology available to anyone with a knife, in a period when most of the people involved could not read.

The second is that the tallies became money. A stock representing a future payment from the Crown could be sold at a discount to somebody who wanted a claim on the Treasury, and a secondary market grew up in them. The Exchequer was issuing what amounted to negotiable government debt on sticks.

The abolition

The system was finally too archaic to defend and an Act of 1782 abolished it — except that the Act could not take effect until the officeholders whose sinecures depended on it had died out, which took until 1826.

So the Exchequer stopped using tallies, and was left with several centuries of them in store: an enormous quantity of split hazel sticks, filling rooms.

The question of what to do with them was put to the authorities. It was suggested that they might be given away as firewood to the poor of Westminster.

The official view was that they were public records and could not simply be distributed, and that they must be disposed of privately.

16 October 1834

So on that day, two workmen were set to burn the tallies in the furnaces under the House of Lords, which heated the chamber above.

They fed them in all day. The furnaces were designed for coke, not for enormous quantities of dry, resinous, well-seasoned wood. The flues overheated. Somebody noticed smoke in the Lords in the afternoon and was reassured.

That evening the panelling caught, and the fire went up into the roof and along the building, and by the time it was out the Palace of Westminster had essentially gone. Westminster Hall was saved by the fire crews and a change in the wind. The Jewel Tower, the cloisters and the crypt survived.

Almost everything else — the medieval Painted Chamber, both Houses, the Speaker’s House, the libraries and a great many of the records — did not.

Enormous crowds came out to watch, on the bridges and the river, and by most accounts a good proportion of them cheered. Turner was among the spectators and made sketches on the spot; the two paintings he produced are among the best-known things he ever did.

What it cost

The building that replaced it is Barry and Pugin’s.

And a fair proportion of the tallies themselves went too, along with the records they belonged to.

Dickens told the story in a speech in 1855, and drew the obvious moral. The sticks were obsolete, harmless, and could have warmed poor households through a winter. Officialdom decided that would be improper, insisted on doing it correctly and privately, and burned down Parliament.