Annex

摘要

I was one of the first round of applicants accepted on the course, coming from a background in librarianship and with a librarian's take on cataloguing and organizing knowledge. Freddy was a thorough and patient tutor, coping with my library-orientated views. One particular exercise of mine in the early 1980s started a dialogue of a different order. I had produced a piece on the records of the manor of Walthamstow Toney and, without checking the manorial documents register, had asserted that the earliest surviving register dated from 1677. Back came the marked exercise, with an accession record for a court book for the years 1509-1535, taken in as a stray into Staffordshire Record Office amongst a collection of local solicitors' papers. It ought to have wended its way to an appropriate repository some years previously, but both staff at Vestry House Museum and Essex Record Office had laid claim, and Freddy, not wishing to exercise the judgement of Solomon, had hung on it. With at least one of the claimants having retired, Freddy felt this was the opportunity for it to leave Staffordshire's care. I was invited to come to the William Salt Library to collect it.