‘It Will Be a Publick Service That This Should Be Done’: The 1704 Reform of the Tower Records Office

The 1704 reform of the Tower Records Office was the apex of a series of reforms in record-keeping in the period from 1660 to 1707. This was expressed through a reassertion of physical controls on records, better intellectual control and finding aids to order collections, and a higher quality of professional control of the clerks that worked in the Records Office. These reforms reflected the intellectual and cultural importance of records in a Restoration culture that based political legitimacy on versions of English history that were rooted in the relative antiquities of Crown and parliament. This was catalysed by the particular dynamics of the rivalry and contestation between Robert Brady (c.1627–1700) and William Petyt (1640/1–1707), but quickly took on institutional form, both establishing the coherence of the Records Office itself, and threading the story of records into the general reform of state or para-state institutions as instigated in the 1690s.