On the evening of 16 October 1834, Londoners packed Westminster Bridge and the banks of the Thames to watch the Houses of Parliament burn. J. M. W. Turner sketched the blaze from the river and later worked it up into two celebrated canvases; John Constable watched from a hackney cab on the bridge. By morning most of the medieval Palace of Westminster was a smoking shell, in what was widely called the capital's worst fire since the Great Fire of 1666 — a distinction it kept until the Blitz. The cause was neither arson nor lightning nor revolution. It was housekeeping: the government had spent the day burning sticks.
The sticks were tally sticks, and for roughly six centuries they had been the backbone of English public accounting. In use at the Exchequer from the twelfth century, the system was set out in the Dialogus de Scaccario, the great medieval treatise on Exchequer practice: a sum owed to or by the Crown was recorded as notches cut across a squared rod of hazel, the size of each notch denoting the amount. A cut the width of a man's palm stood for a thousand pounds, a thumb's breadth for a hundred, and a nick the width of a barleycorn for a single pound.
The genius lay in the split. Once notched, the stick was cleaved lengthwise into two unequal parts, each carrying the same marks. The longer piece, with its stump or handle, was the 'stock', kept by the party owed the money — the origin of our words stockholder and, by extension, stocks themselves. The shorter piece, the 'foil', stayed with the debtor; its descendant survives as the counterfoil of a chequebook. Since the grain of the wood and the pattern of notches had to match exactly when the halves were reunited, a tally was all but impossible to forge — a medieval receipt with tamper-proofing grown into the timber. And tallies did more than record taxes: they were assigned, endorsed and discounted, circulating as a rudimentary form of government paper long before banknotes existed. Private lenders and tradesmen used them for everyday debts too, and the habit survives in the language — we still speak of keeping a tally, and of accounts that tally.
Two cartloads of history
By the nineteenth century the system was an unembarrassed antique, kept alive in part because the Exchequer's comfortable fee-earning offices were kept alive with it. Reform finally arrived: the Exchequer stopped using tallies in 1826, and when the last of the old Exchequer offices was wound up in 1834 the accumulated sticks — centuries of the national accounts in hazel — were suddenly nothing but lumber. Charles Dickens, in a speech two decades later, turned their fate into a parable of bureaucratic idiocy: the worn-out, worm-eaten sticks, he pointed out, could simply have been given as firewood to the poor who lived nearby; instead, officialdom decided they should be burned privately and confidentially, within the precincts of Westminster itself.
The job fell to two workmen, who on 16 October 1834 began feeding two cartloads of tallies into the coal furnaces beneath the House of Lords. Furnaces built for a steady diet of coal were gorged instead with bone-dry hazel, and the brick flues running beneath the floors overheated through the afternoon — visitors to the Lords' chamber that day noticed heat rising through the stone floor and a smell of smoke, and were reassured that nothing was amiss. Around six o'clock the chamber went up, and the fire raced through the rambling old palace of timber, wainscot and accumulated centuries. Firefighters, soldiers and volunteers — helped by a providential change of wind — saved Westminster Hall and its great fourteenth-century hammer-beam roof; most of the rest was lost, along with heaps of ancient records.
The catastrophe became an opportunity. A competition held in 1835 for a new palace in the Gothic or Elizabethan style drew ninety-seven entries and was won by Charles Barry, working with the Gothic visionary Augustus Pugin; their replacement gave London the Victoria Tower, the great riverfront façade and the clock tower that houses Big Ben. The disaster also shamed the state into caring for its archives, feeding the case for a proper Public Record Office. It is a neat irony that the country which invented so much of modern finance ran its books on wood well into the railway age — and a neater one that the ledger itself got the last word.
The tally sticks had kept England's accounts faithfully for six hundred years. Discarded, they settled them in a single night.
Quiz nuggets
- Two cartloads of obsolete Exchequer tally sticks, burned in furnaces beneath the House of Lords, started the fire that destroyed the Palace of Westminster on 16 October 1834.
- On a tally stick a notch the width of a palm recorded £1,000; a nick the width of a barleycorn recorded £1.
- The creditor's half of a split tally was the 'stock' — the root of 'stockholder' — and the debtor's half the 'foil', ancestor of the chequebook counterfoil.
- The Exchequer used tally sticks from the twelfth century until 1826.
- Turner painted the fire from the Thames, and Charles Barry with Augustus Pugin won the 1835 competition to design the replacement palace.