I t is ​ an instructive irony of English political history that the Houses of Parliament were burned down not by revolutionaries but by bureaucr

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2024-10-31 04:30:06

I t is ​ an instructive irony of English political history that the Houses of Parliament were burned down not by revolutionaries but by bureaucrats. In 1834, John Phipps, an assistant surveyor for London in the Office of Woods and Forests, was tasked with finding more office space in the cluttered Exchequer buildings at Westminster. He discovered that a whole suite of rooms was being used for the storage of old tally-sticks, great stacks of obsolete financial records notched on wood. The tallies were ‘entirely useless’, according to the Treasury. Phipps and his colleague Richard Weobley came up with an economical solution: they would send the tallies, two cartloads’ worth of fiscal kindling, as extra fuel for the stoves under the House of Lords. The Times leader the next day called the conflagration, which began when two stoves ignited, a ‘spectacle of terrible beauty’.

Tallies were long, squared-off pieces of wood – often hazel – cut with horizontal notches to represent quantities of money or goods that had changed hands between two people. After the transaction, the tally was split in half along the length, into a ‘stock’, for the creditor to hold on to, and a ‘foil’ for the debtor. When the debt was settled, stock and foil were matched to demonstrate that the amount was correct.

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