Business and money

The Stick That Burned Down Parliament

For more than six centuries, the English Exchequer recorded sums of money not on paper but on wood. A stick was cut with notches of different widths, each standing for a different sum, and then split lengthways, so that the notches ran across both halves. The person paying kept one half and the Exchequer the other, and since no two pieces of wood ever split in quite the same way, a dispute could be settled simply by fitting them back together. The method was cheap, durable and remarkably hard to falsify. It was also, by the standards of a modernising state, hopelessly old-fashioned. By the early nineteenth century, with paper records in general use, the system had all [1] run its course, although the last tallies were not cut until 1826. What remained was a vast store of redundant sticks. In October 1834 officials decided to dispose of them in the furnaces beneath the House of Lords. The fires were stoked so fiercely that the flues overheated, and the blaze that followed destroyed most of the old Palace of Westminster.