This chapter traces the legal and political frameworks that underpinned rights of access to archives in the decades preceding the outbreak of civil war in 1642, showing that there were two different cultures of access: one determined by the rights of subjects to consult legal court records; the other shaped by the culture of secrecy associated with the records of crown estates and royal prerogative. Over the course of the civil war, a new language of access emerged. The assertion of parliamentary sovereignty and the dislocating experiences of civil war mobilisation led to a radical, perhaps unprecedented, articulation of the rights of the people to control and access the information that defined their material rights and status. Ultimately this chapter argues that this new, if short lived, articulation of public right of access to records is important not only for the history of record-keeping, but also reveals much about the political and material interests that were at stake in the English revolution.
‘All Government is in the people, from the people, and for the people’: Democracy in the English Revolution