Catalogue description Treasury Long Bundles

Arranged in bundle number order.

From 1782, Treasury clerks began to create subject bundles of papers, whose contents they did not always register, for certain frequent topics concerning the work or establishment of other departments of state. These existed as a separate set of files to the ordinary registered paper until 1840, when instructions were given that the subject bundles were no longer to be added and directions were given, but not followed, for the bundles to be weeded and their contents put into their proper numerical or chronological place in the Registry. However, it was not until the Treasury began to use the newly established Public Record Office for the storage of its older records and until it appointed one of its own staff, Henry Cotton, during the 1860s, to sort the papers transferred to the PRO that any attempt was made to weed the subject bundles.

Cotton prepared an alphabetical register of the bundles by title and marked these titles in the appropriate places in the Skeleton Registers (now in T 3) with a capital L for Long Bundles. After the alphabetical register was made and the bundles were numbered, the contents of some of them were completely weeded out, and those of others were fed back into the main sequence of papers, so that the sequence of Long Bundles as originally described by Cotton is no longer complete.