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Caroline Shenton

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Tally Ho!

10 August 2010 By Caroline Shenton

Tallies were responsible for the fire of 1834 at Parliament.  Or rather: the idiocy of people disposing of them was responsible.  One of the tallies on display at work had split into pieces, so our collection care manager took on the task of repairing a seven-hundred year old stick of hazel-wood.  But before she did that, she needed to know how the writing on the broken wood fitted together.  This is me helping her out with the jigsaw a few weeks ago.
 

Here I’m using an “optivisor headband magnifier,” which looks like a pair of welding goggles and some tweezers to put the broken pieces of the earliest Jewish tally in existence, written in Latin and Hebrew, in the right order. And look! No white gloves…they make you clumsy.

 
 
The damaged tally, arranged in the correct position, ready for repair.  My good medieval deed for the day. That label looks 700 years old too…
 

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Filed Under: The 1834 Fire

About Caroline Shenton

Dr Caroline Shenton is an archivist and historian. She was formerly Director of the Parliamentary Archives in London, and before that was a senior archivist at the National Archives. Her book The Day Parliament Burned Down won the Political Book of the Year Award in 2013 and Mary Beard called it 'microhistory at its absolute best' while Dan Jones considered it 'glorious'. Its acclaimed sequel, Mr Barryís War, about the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster, was a Book of the Year in 2016 for The Daily Telegraph and BBC History Magazine and was described by Lucy Worsley as 'a real jewel, finely wrought and beautiful'. During 2017 Caroline was Political Writer in Residence at Gladstone's Library.

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About Caroline

Dr Caroline Shenton is an archivist and historian. Her book The Day Parliament Burned Down won the Political Book of the Year Award in 2013. Read More…

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