The problem of preserving the continuity of English documents

In order to make any topic manageable it is necessary to draw boundaries. Many historians draw narrow temporal boundaries, perhaps studying a generation, a decade or even a single year. To have limited ourselves in this introduction to even a relatively long period, say the years 1500-1700, would have run against one of the central features of English documentary evidence and of the institutions which produced them, that is their immensely long duration and continuity. When we examine the records of England as a whole it is difficult to find any convincing period at which to break off the survey. A realization of this continuity was one of the reasons which led G.R. Elton to take the whole period 1200-1640 as a period of record-keeping (Elton 1969). Yet 1640 is not a major permanent break and most series of records except those of certain prerogative courts continue again after the Restoration up to the nineteenth century. This is a problem which faced F.W. Maitland. When considering the forms of action at common law Maitland devoted one lecture to the period 1307-1833, that is between the accession of Edward I and the changes in the parliamentary system (1832), the legal system (1833) and the Poor Law (1834), which all occurred in the 1830s and could be seen as a plausible stopping point. Maitland ended his two-volume History of English Law at 1307 having shown that many of the major principles and procedures, the administrative and legal structure had already been laid down by that date. He thus saw the next five hundred years as one integral period.