Cui bono? The transition from the government-issued tally sticks (which allowed for debt without private banks) to modern paper money and bonds (controlled by banks) was absolutely beneficial to the banking industry. - Angelos Agathangelou
Erased Century: Tally sticks, stockholder origin, Bank of England 1694, Parliament fire 1834, medieval currency, Exchequer records, King Henry I, split wood accounting, Great Stop of the Exchequer 1672 — why did they burn 726 years of financial records and accidentally destroy Parliament in the process? In this episode, we trace a currency system that built the British Empire, then vanished from memory within a single generation.
Do you own stock? The word comes from a stick of wood. Specifically, the longer half of a split tally stick given to whoever held a financial claim. The stock holder. From 1100 AD until 1826, England tracked debt, recorded taxes, and ran its economy with notched pieces of hazel wood split in half to prevent forgery. One half for the creditor. One half for the debtor. The grain matched so perfectly that counterfeiting was physically impossible. This system built an empire. Then they burned every last stick — and Parliament went up in flames with it.
King Henry I introduced tallies in 1100. The Dialogue Concerning the Exchequer, a twelfth century manual, documents the denominations precisely. A cut the thickness of a palm meant one thousand pounds. The breadth of a thumb meant one hundred. A penny was a single cut that removed no wood at all. Once notched, the stick was split lengthwise. The longer piece — the stock — went to the creditor. The shorter piece — the foil — went to the debtor. For seven centuries, this was money.
The Bank of England was founded in 1694, capitalized with a loan of 1.2 million pounds. But the first shareholders didn't pay with gold or silver. They paid with tally sticks. The Bank Act of 1697 allowed up to 80% of capital increases to be paid in tallies. The system that would replace tally sticks was literally bootstrapped by tally sticks. The new financial order was purchased with the currency of the old.
Parliament abolished tallies in 1782, but the act only took effect once the last Exchequer officials died. That didn't happen until 1826. For 44 years, the system lingered in bureaucratic limbo. Six centuries of sticks accumulated in storage at Westminster. Then on October 16, 1834, Richard Weobley ordered them burned in the furnaces beneath the House of Lords. Two laborers fed 700 years of financial records into the flames. By evening, the copper chimney linings had melted. Both Houses of Parliament were destroyed. The largest fire in London between 1666 and the Blitz. No one was prosecuted.
By 1850 — just 16 years later — Alfred Smee reported that no gentleman in the Bank of England recollects the mode of reading them. 726 years of continuous use. 16 years of total forgetting. The physical records were gone. The institutional memory was gone. Only the etymology survived. Stock. Stockholder. Going long. Going short. The language remembers what the documents do not.
The material on this channel presents exploratory interpretations of history and imaginative speculation, conveyed through narrative storytelling rather than precise historical documentation. Viewpoints and visual representations are dramatized or intentionally constructed to support alternative narrative exploration. Visual elements may at times be created using automated or generative tools. The content shared should not be considered factual.
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