Information and its retrieval

Abstract

The management and archiving of information are matters of relevance to historians in all periods, for archiving practices have structured the data available for modern analysis. It is rarer that such matters attain the status of a significant subject for debate and discussion among historians. In relation to England in the central Middle Ages this has come to pass largely through the work of M. T. Clanchy, presented in From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307. The starting point of his work is the upwards trend in the amount of written material surviving from that period, which moves from the paucity of the mid-eleventh century to the relative abundance of the early fourteenth. This change had been observed before, but Clanchy imposed a new sense of structure on historians' understanding of these developments. He argued not only that the increase in surviving records marked expanding familiarity with writing, but also that archiving was in some sense a cause of literacy, because making records and keeping them familiarized many kinds of people with the practical and everyday uses of literacy, as opposed to solemn and ritual uses, and this familiarity over time turned into the habit of using documents.