Credit crunch histories: records of bankrupts in The National Archives

I think in these credit crunch times, with bankruptcies at record levels, we’re all particularly aware of the problems caused by unpaid debt, for individuals, for companies, for governments and for society generally. This is a good thing because I think this will help us to understand the history of bankruptcy proceedings in the U.K.

In The National Archives there are records of perhaps a million people who were involved in bankruptcy proceedings and suffered their own personal credit crunches, between the late 16th and the late 20th century. I should mention these are not records to raise the spirits. The stories they tell centre on economic misfortune, economic mismanagement, and on poverty and imprisonment and on human gullibility, dishonesty and greed.

But if any of you are still with me, they are a rich source for family history and biography, and they could also be used for a wide range of social and economic history topics. So, my aim today is to explain what bankruptcy was, how it was administered, what records it produced and how to go about researching them.

As I’ve mentioned, running out of money has always been a significant problem, not only for individuals, but also for society generally. It’s therefore always been a matter of concern for government and the courts. From the Middle Ages onwards, creditors, those who are owed money or goods, could proceed against debtors, those who owed them and could not or would not repay them, in the Common Law Courts.

The courts offered various remedies, usually including the seizure of some or all of the debtor’s property and his imprisonment until the debts were paid, but these remedies were obviously unsatisfactory; debtors often found ways to defraud creditors, especially by concealing their assets. On the other hand, honest but unfortunate debtors might be imprisoned and thus rendered incapable of earning what they needed to pay their debts. They often spent many years in jail, leaving their dependents destitute.

There was no procedure to investigate and regulate the claims of creditors. Meanwhile, the government and the commercial classes believed that these factors limited the availability of credit in trade and commerce and thus restricted economic progress. So the government therefore sought to develop a legal and administrative system to deal with these problems as far as was possible.

This lead in 1571 to the Bankruptcy Act which empowered the Lord Chancellor to employ commissioners in England and Wales to detain bankrupts, defined as traders who could not pay their debts, to examine them, seize and sell their possessions and distribute the proceeds to their creditor or creditors, without subjecting them to imprisonment.

The activities of the commissioners became known as bankruptcy proceedings. The details of these proceedings changed frequently over the years and over the centuries, but their basic principles have remained the same to the present day.

Here’s the classic definition of bankruptcy from William Blackstone. Basically, if I owe you, or several of you, money, and I can’t or won’t repay it, you can file a bankruptcy petition in a court which will trigger the seizure of my assets. The court will then distribute my assets among you on a pro rata basis, subject to the payment of expenses. In appropriate cases, the court can discharge me from further liability, so that encourages me to become economically active again.

If you’re looking at bankruptcy records it’s very important to understand who were subject to them and who were exempt from them. Before 1862, the only people subject to bankruptcy proceedings were individuals defined as traders. Now, the problem here is that the qualifying occupations were never comprehensively defined, and the matter was often disputed, but generally anyone who made a living by buying and selling, wholesale or retail, would be included.

People who would not be included in this would be members of the professions, bankers, and landowners or farmers. From 1862, the distinction between traders and non-traders was abolished, and all debtors who owed more than a specified sum, could be included in bankruptcy proceedings.

So, just to make it clear who were excluded: debtors who were not traders, we’ve discussed that; small debtors. The amounts which qualified you for bankruptcy proceedings were defined by statute; they varied from time to time and generally rose with inflation, as you’d expect. From 1706 to 1842 only those traders owing more than £100 to a single creditor, £150 to two or £200 to three or more were subject to bankruptcy proceedings.

Now these sums were the equivalent to several thousand pounds today, therefore small traders rarely appeared in bankruptcy records and they were subject instead to the law of insolvency, more about that later.

From 1842 the qualifying sums were halved, and although they’ve often been adjusted since, they generally followed a downward trend, bringing more and more people into the range of the bankruptcy law; the current bankruptcy levels for debt is £750, so that’s comparatively low.

Fraudulent debtors were not included in bankruptcy proceedings. They were subject to the criminal law. I’ll say a bit more about companies in a minute. As bankruptcy proceedings developed the position of debtors not included in bankruptcy records caused a lot of concern, and in 1813 a Court for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors was set up to provide a regular method for some debtors to petition for release from prison. I’ll provide an example of this later.

Between 1847 and 1861 insolvents who were small traders could put themselves under the protection of a court with a bankruptcy jurisdiction, and therefore they do appear in the bankruptcy records. You just have to remember these minor variations.

Companies: not normally included, but basically, between 1844 and 1862 they were included and some details of the winding up of companies may appear in bankruptcy records right up until 1893 […].

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How was bankruptcy administered? Here we need to distinguish between London and country bankruptcies. (This slide relates to London.) From 1571 to 1831 bankruptcy proceedings were conducted by Commissioners of Bankrupts appointed by the Lord Chancellor as you’ve already heard. They had no court but they sat as was necessary in various locations in England and Wales. There’s no regular series of records before 1710 when they began to be centralised by the Office for the Commissioners of Bankrupts in London.

In 1831 the Court of Bankruptcy was created in London. The distinction between London and country bankruptcies became significant, so if you’re searching for a bankrupt you need to know where they lived, or where their place of business was, to get going.

Until 1869, when the London bankruptcy court was created, the definition of London seems to have varied. It certainly included the continuous built up metropolitan area, sometimes it was held to extend to a 20 mile radius from the centre or to the area covered by the Bills of Mortality.

From 1869 when the London Court of Bankruptcy was established, London was defined as the area within the jurisdiction of the City of London and of the Metropolitan County Courts, which were then Bloomsbury, Bow, Brompton, Clerkenwell,  Lambeth, Marylebone, Southwark, Shoreditch, Westminster and Whitechapel. Later it extended to the County of London and then to the County of Greater London.

Meanwhile, ‘country’ referred throughout to the remainder of England and Wales. But, at all periods, proceedings relating to country bankruptcies could be heard in London, and vice versa, for cause given. So you just have to remember, even if your chap was a country man, he might still be in the London courts and vice versa.

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The country bankruptcies; I’ve covered the first part of that, and you’ll see that the Court of Bankruptcy in London continued to administer the country commissioners right up to 1842, but from 1842 onwards, country bankruptcy proceedings were held in first of all the District Bankruptcy Courts…and in the County Courts.

The final point to notice there, and on the previous slide, is that until 1883 the Bankruptcy Commissioners and Courts were responsible not only for the legal function of determining bankruptcy, but also for overseeing the practical function of administering, realising and transferring bankrupts’ estates, but from 1883, the latter function was transferred for both London and Country to the Bankruptcy department of the Board of Trade and its successors.

So even though there are records of local bankruptcies in local courts, the central function of administering the estates remains with the Board of Trade and its successors, and the records are in The National Archives.

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During all this time you could appeal against bankruptcy verdicts. It’s worth knowing this because if you’re interested in somebody who did go to appeal, in the appeal records you’ll often find considerable details which are not found in the original case, and I’ve already mentioned that in 1813, the Court for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors was set up; this was for insolvent debtors who hadn’t qualified for bankruptcy proceedings and up till then had been subject to the criminal law. Details of proceedings against them appear in local and national Criminal Court and prison records, so in lots of different places, and lists of insolvents prisoners applying for release were also published in the London Gazette.

In 1813, the Court for the Relief of Insolvent debtors was established, and it regulated a gradual reduction in the harshness of the law against debtors over the following decades. They were increasingly able to petition for release from prison, or for protection under aspects of bankruptcy law, and therefore details of insolvent debtors are increasingly, but not always, found in bankruptcy records.

As I’ve already mentioned, after 1861 the distinctions between bankruptcy and insolvency were abolished and all debtors became subject to bankruptcy proceedings.

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…This is…the London Bankruptcy Court in Basinghall Street.  As I’ve said, before that was established, the Commission seemed to have sat in several places. The London ones sat at Guildhall in the City, and at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in Westminster. The permanent court was built in 1821 at 82 Basinghall Street, where it remained until 1869.

Here’s a contemporary account of it: ‘A large, quadrangular building, consisting of 14 rooms, connected by commodious galleries. It is entirely devoted to matters of bankruptcy and has an attached office to the Registry, of all business relating thereto.’ In other words, that’s where all the records come from.

In 1869 the Court transferred to 33 – 34 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and since 1883, as part of the Supreme Court, it has sat both within the Royal Courts of Justice and at Carey Street, nearby. Some of you will be aware that the term ‘In Carey Street’ was used allusively as a description of a bankrupt person – you find it in 1920s and 30s novels.

I’ve described the system, and I’m now going to move on the records it produced. Now as I’ve already said, the formal records of Commissions of Bankrupts don’t start before 1710, but early records of bankruptcy proceedings can be found in a number of sources here in The National Archives. State papers and proceedings of Privy Council; these contain occasional references to bankruptcy proceedings, usually in connection with petitions to the Crown by bankrupts or creditors alleging injustice…

The Close Rolls; these contain copies of the conveyances of bankrupts’ estates, by Commissioners of Bankrupts, and the entries often include details of proceedings.  Finally from 1684 onwards, the London Gazette contains official notices relating to bankruptcy proceedings. It includes the names of many who don’t appear in the records, but it excludes many who do, so it’s always worth a look. I’ll be saying more about that in a minute.

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Here is a Privy Council Register…it records a complaint from John Kember to the Lord Chancellor; he says that he was still owed £80 from the estates of Lightfoot and Robins Presumably bankruptcy proceedings were being concluded against them, and it appears that the money hadn’t come to John Kember but it got into the hands of Sir Thomas Offley, who was presumably another creditor, and John Kember wanted to get hold of it. I’m afraid we don’t know the outcome of the case, but you can imagine if creditors aren’t properly regulated that’s the sort of thing which could happen.

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An official notice of bankruptcy in the London Gazette: the main purpose of these was to inform creditors about how and where they should prove their debts and secure their share of the bankrupt’s assets. As I’ve said, they don’t precisely overlap with the records themselves, and I think this is mainly because the records in the London Gazette are only for cases where proceedings have been pursued to the stage where the creditors might expect to be able to claim a share of the assets. If any case came to an end before that it wouldn’t appear in the London Gazette.

There are many other published sources of lists of bankrupts; the Times newspaper lists them from 1785 onwards…there is now an online product which enables easy searching – you can access it here [at The National Archives] and at other places as well; local newspapers are a very good source for local bankruptcy proceedings, and again there is now an online product produced by the British Library which contains records of many local newspapers, far smaller but that’s another good thing to search.

[There are]…several specialist periodicals which just listed bankrupts and insolvents; you can find those in many places. So far as I’m aware though, all those [periodicals] are based on the London Gazette, and also outside England and Wales, there are the Edinburgh, Dublin and Belfast Gazettes.

The Court Records record three different stages, on the whole. First of all there are the Initiation of Bankruptcy proceedings. The proceedings were initiated by a petition for bankruptcy by creditors to the Commissions or Courts, and they were followed by the issue of a Commission (to 1831) or a Fiat (1832-1842) or Adjudication (from 1849) of bankruptcy by the Courts, so that’s stage one: the person is decreed bankrupt.

Following that, there’s a phase which was devoted to the transfer, management and distribution of the bankrupt’s estates. From 1707 bankruptcy Commissioners and Courts were empowered to transfer the estates to assignees, or later trustees, chosen by the creditors, or by the Court, so that they might realise its value and distribute it rateably, in proportion, among the creditors.

This usually involves examinations of the bankrupt, and depositions, or sworn statements, from the witnesses…The distribution of estates could be decided by a ‘resolution of creditors’, with a ‘composition’, or ‘arrangement’, between debtors and creditors. All these words appear in the records, so that’s why I’m telling you them. Sometimes debts could be settled by partial payments, which were called dividends.
From 1888 many cases were settled by private deeds of arrangement, without the need for full bankruptcy proceedings, but the deeds of arrangement are still recorded in the records.

From 1883, when a bankruptcy petition was presented, the courts made receiving orders, or administration orders (we still have those today) for an Official Receiver of the Board of Trade, to receive and manage the estate in the interest of creditors, pending the appointment of trustees, and when they’d finished their duties, the Official Receivers were granted an official release. All these things are described in the records.

The third stage, after the estates had been distributed, was the discharging of bankrupts. From 1705 bankrupts who conformed to the statutory requirements could, and providing a specified proportion of creditors agreed, be discharged form the remaining debts, and resume economic activity, and this was affected by grants of Certificates of Conformity up till 1861 and Orders of Discharge from 1861 onwards.

A bit about the typical types of records you’ll see if you get into bankruptcy records…Registers; these relate to all bankruptcy proceedings and usually include the name, place of residence and occupation of the bankrupt, and of his creditors, and the dates and results of the bankruptcy proceedings. Some also give the name and address of the bankrupt’s solicitor or agent.

Enrolments; between 1758 and 1859, bankrupts, or other persons with an interest in the case could petition for copies of proceedings to be enrolled, as a record, and the resulting enrolment books often give much more information than the registers, but of course they only cover a small proportion of the cases.

Case files; now these are usually the most detailed source, and they bring together all the papers relating to a particular case and unfortunately they only survive for a small proportion of bankruptcies. They may include the bankrupt’s balance sheets, which itemises assets and liabilities, and they may give much incidental information about the bankrupt, his family and circumstances. They are also a useful source for social and economic history, for their aggregate information about wealth, credit, capital investment, income, profit, suppliers, customers and business practices.

Then finally and separately, appeals orders and the minutes…something worth looking at.

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Here’s an example of a register; the well known Bankruptcy Docket Books; you can see the columns there: Bankrupts; Description (i.e. trade or occupation); Residence; Solicitor or Agent; a record of the dates on which the proceedings took place. That is a typical bankruptcy register. That’s the basic information you get about all bankrupts.

…The underlined red numerals indicate where a case file has survived, so if you find a reference in these registers which indicates there’s a case file you can go straight to the case file records.

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Right, more examples: Oscar Wilde; this was before he went bankrupt, and as you can see he still looks confident, happy and full of himself. It’s well known that Wilde’s brilliant career as an author and wit came to an end when he ill-advisedly sued the Marquis of Queensbury for criminal libel. This led to a sequence of events in which he himself was eventually charge and convicted of gross indecency.

What’s less well known is that he was also adjudicated bankrupt, and remained so until he died. The costs in the libel case were awarded to the Marquis of Queensbury; Wilde couldn’t pay them. His friends rallied round, but then several other creditors emerged with claims against him. Even the sale of his house in Tite Street, and all his possessions, could not save him, and he was declared bankrupt in the Carey Street Court, in November 1895.

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Here is a copy of his examination…It’s the same old story: more out-goings than in-goings. It says…’Question: Your expenditure during the two years preceding the date of the Receiving Order has been at the rate of £2,900 a year,’ (Quite a lot of money in those days) ‘and upwards. You were therefore living beyond your income. Is that not so?’ Wilde: ‘Yes.’ ‘And the accounts show that in July 1893 your liabilities were in excess of your assets to the amount of £1,450.’ ‘Yes’. That’s it. Even Oscar Wilde was humbled.

This is also in his file  – this is a document of the costs involved in selling his literary assets. It’s a matter of considerable interest to literary historians, people who are interested in Wilde’s career and what he wrote, and it’s also still relevant today. As I’ve mentioned, once the Marquis of Queensbury had demanded the costs of the case, and Wilde, as I was saying, he couldn’t afford it; hundreds, literally hundreds of other creditors came out of the woodwork and filed bills about what Wilde owed them.

Up to then, he was a successful, forward looking famous person riding on the crest of a wave and nobody bothered about collecting bills. A bit like certain banks we can think of today. But below it, he was spending more than he was getting so all the creditors came out of the woodwork.

…Anyone who’s read Little Dorrit or Dombey and Sons or Pickwick Papers or David Copperfield, will possibly have noticed that Dickens was very interested in the matter of debt and bankruptcy and its corrosive effects on the lives of the people involved and this is why: this records John, his father, being convicted as an insolvent debtor and committed to the Marshalsea Debtor’s Prison in 1824, together with his wife and children.

Those that know about Dickens’s life will know that that excepted Charles, who was then 12, and after an idyllic childhood was sent to work in a blacking factory, pasting labels on blacking bottles for 6 shillings a week; a seminal moment in his life which completely changed his outlook.

Charles Dickens left an account of visiting his father: ‘and he told me, I remember, to take warning by the Marshalsea, and to observe that if a man had £20 a year, and spent £19, 19 shillings and sixpence, he would be happy, but that a shilling spent the other way would make him wretched.’ And I think that many of you will know that that was advice which was later immortalised by Mr Micawber in David Copperfield.

So far, I’ve been focusing on the value of bankruptcy records for the biographies of individuals, but they can also be used for wider social and economic history topics. Now to illustrate this, I’m going to do something fairly simple: I’m just going to show you some graphs which were produced by one historian of late 19th century England, who conducted a large scale horizontal study of the records. He wasn’t going deep down to investigate one individual; he was looking at information about particular things across a range of records.

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Here he records the levels of bankruptcy in Manchester over a period of about 25 years. Now I don’t know anything about the history of Manchester but you can see that he’s produced good information about what was going on here during a period of great prosperity; what was going on here in a period with problems. If you’re interested in Manchester that’s obviously good stuff.

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Likewise if you’re interested in particular trades or occupations; you can see the bankruptcy levels for farmers. Obviously they were having some sort of cycle of boom and bust. Again I don’t know anything about agricultural history, but this is obviously good evidence for what may have been going on in the world of farming.

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Finally, on the macro scale, this is a record of the numbers of bankruptcy for the whole of the national economy…you’ve got a certain number of bankruptcies and deeds arrangement and then you’ve got… details of the size of the bankrupts’ estates as a percentage of GDP, the changes there. So if you’re interested in the economic history of the UK this is good evidence to show what was happening.

Regarding the bankruptcy records themselves; the best approach is to consult the two research guides on our website, which will give you the references to the record series you need, and then you can use our catalogue, either on-line or paper lists, to identify the particular items you need to order. Once you get to the records, most of the series of bankruptcy records in The National Archives are arranged or listed alphabetically, or are indexed by the name of the bankrupt. So…if you have got an approximate date and a name, the search can be quite easy. But if you haven’t got approximate dates, it’s not, because there are a lot of records and you have to search through a lot of volumes because they are very, very voluminous.

So far as I know there is no systematic description of all the records of local district bankruptcy courts and county courts relating to bankruptcy.

And I need to say a little bit about problems. As I’ve already indicated, bankruptcy proceedings were often lengthy and complicated and they centred on legal technicalities and statutory requirements which often changed considerably over the years, therefore they can be quite difficult to understand.

The sensible thing is to consult the glossary of terms, which accompanies the B3 series list in the Open Reading room at Kew. Very helpful, that one.

There’s the problem of un-indexed partners; the records tend only to be indexed by the first named partner, so if Marks and Spencer had gone bankrupt and you’re looking for Spencer, you won’t find him.

Debtors economical with the truth: debtors often gave false information about their occupation, and they did this in order to qualify as a trader. Dickens gives the example of somebody who loans some friends some matches and then calls himself a timber merchant.

So, many, many people engaged in a minor transaction outside their usual occupation in order to qualify, and if you look through the lists you’ll find that an improbably large proportion of bankrupts gave themselves the vague description of ‘dealer and chapman’, or ‘dealer and chapwoman’, which covers just about anything.

As you’d expect, fraud was endemic in bankruptcy cases, particularly by debtors trying to conceal the full extent of their assets in order to protect them from seizure, so the financial details and records may not be accurate.

Right, I hope that just by highlighting these difficulties I haven’t put you off searching bankruptcy records. I hope I’ve convinced you they’re a rich source and well worth investigating. Thank you.