 It was a really great insight into some of the drama of the early 16th century. I think we're now very quickly going to hear from John Cooper about the research of Kirsty Wright, who would have been giving a paper in this slot. Her paper title was ransacking papers for precedence politics in the past in the Exchequer of Receipt 1580 to 1630. So I'll just pass on to John now. So this really is putting me on the spot. Kirsty unfortunately can't be here today because she's lost her voice. I bear some responsibility for her losing her voice because she's actually teaching a couple of sections of my Tudor regime module at the University of York, and obviously had such talkative York students that she's lost her voice in the process. She's gutted actually not to be here. But I'll just for a couple of minutes, I thought I'd just alert you to the significance of her research and some of the questions that she's thinking about. So Kirsty is a third year PhD student at the University of York working with me. She's funded by society, architectural historians of Great Britain and the University of York. And she's really focusing on the buildings of the former St. Stephen's College in the Palace of Westminster. Now this is a subject that links more than one person in the room. So Elizabeth Biggs, who you saw earlier this morning, wrote her doctoral thesis on St. Stephen's College between 1348 and 1548. I've been working on this space for a long time. I'd love to show you a slide of the Palace of Westminster, of course I haven't prepared with that I'm afraid. But Mary Tremelian here in the defetching scarlet mask in the front row is, is sort of picking up the story in the in this later 18th and early 19th centuries in that same space. What Kirsty is thinking about is the relationship between the medieval English crown institution of the Exchequer and the former buildings of St. Stephen's College as they are repurposed as a result of the reformation that closes down St. Stephen's College so the chapel itself becomes the House of Commons Chamber where the House of Commons remains until 1834, but there's also a cloister. There are vickers and cannons houses that were initially investigated by Elizabeth Biggs, and it's those spaces it's the use of those spaces within the Palace of Westminster that Kirsty has been thinking about. And some of the questions that she's been thinking about are the extent to which Exchequer is an unchanging or an ossified institution in the 16th century, which is how it's conventionally portrayed, or is actually still in motion still in flux still vibrant and remarkable to the English crown that we've heard from more than one speaker already today how important those the Exchequer was, but also how critical Exchequer records are, and where some other records have disappeared that remarkably the Exchequer has survived and not quite an unbroken but a fantastically rich set of resources for medieval and early modern historians and, and what Kirsty is doing is, is sort of thinking through the relationship between Exchequer and the spaces within the Palace of Westminster, in order to explore some of those cultural cultural relationships. Ventriloquizing for her, one of the things I think is most fascinating about what she's done is she's actually sort of reconstructed a typical day, as if you were an auditor or a club working in the Exchequer, including the spatial layout of the, of the buildings of the Exchequer which were at the opposite end of Westminster Hall from St Stephen's Chapel, and they were on several stories. And, you know, she's, she's recovered this in marvelous detail including Clarks doing their work and actually then essentially dropping their paperwork down a pipe in the floor where it plots onto a table in the tier of administration below, and another set of men they were all men, Clarks, get working on those papers and start claiming their fees. So these same spaces that were inhabited by Exchequer Clarks in the 16th century. They are both office space and they become domestic space so the, the auditor of the Exchequer develops a very fine townhouse there which goes through a whole series of commendations into the 18th century, which point it's tremendously remodeled, and this is what Murray Tremellon's research focuses on as it becomes a house for the speaker of the House of Commons. So we see in Kirsty's work a whole nexus of interactions between administrative history, I mean what you might call her work the new administrative history, but also social culture, disability and ritual, and I think what she is recovering in terms of how the Exchequer functions. That looks to me not simply like Clarks doing their job, there is an element of ritual life. I think in that, in that crown administration world of the 16th century, and what it was particularly unfortunate she can't be here because what her most recent work is doing is thinking about the interaction between this and antiquaries and antiquarianism and record keeping. And so she has in the nick of time in the last 10 minutes sent through one paragraph description, so I'll give you that and then I'll sit down and we can think about questions. My research, Kirsty's research examines the Exchequer of receipt, there are two Exchequers, the upper Exchequer and the Exchequer of receipt, this is where the money comes in. Within the Palace of Westminster, and it's political significance within early modern government. It takes an architectural approach to administrative history to reexamine the receipt as a place which acted as a point of contact between state and subject. That's obviously picking up a language that was used by Professor Sir Geoffrey Elton back in the 1950s, and through to the end of his work in the 1990s. Parliament as a point of contact was one of the kind of final great contributions that Geoffrey Elton made to our understanding of English politics and the court and particularly the Palace of Westminster. In fact, Kirsty is picking up that language of point of contact between state and subject. But she's taking it further because she's thinking about Exchequer as a custodian of financial patronage, so the sort of human relationships that persist within this structure, and a custodian of memory. And there she's really picking up on the work of one of my medieval colleagues who did have a career in the National Archives, and then moved on to become a very senior official within the House of Lords, Elizabeth Hallam Smith. And Elizabeth Hallam Smith has fed through a lot of her research to me and to Murray Tremelen and Kirsty Wright and I'd like to acknowledge her work that she's also a fellow of this society. But Kirsty's work reconstructs the internal layout actually room by room space by space of the receipt of the Exchequer in some of the same ways that Murray is doing for the rooms of the speaker's house from the 1790s. She focuses in particular on the reuse of the former St Stephen's College buildings. And really contributes to our better understanding of the reuse of the Palace of Westminster, the repurposing of the Palace of Westminster, as this really ceases to be a royal palace in the very early 16th century and becomes the preeminent place of Crown Administration. And this is something that I've looked at in some of my current work in terms of the repurposing of St Stephen's Chapel as the House of Commons Chamber. It's also at the kind of latter end of Elizabeth Biggs's work with her kind of Tudor hat on rather than her medieval Ireland hat on in terms of thinking about the repurposing of the Palace after the Palace Fire 1512 to 13 when Henry VIII moves out. And the Palace of Westminster is really given over to become the preeminent point of Crown Administration. But by considering questions of place and space, Kirsty's work enables attention to be focused on the people who move between the spaces that Exchequer occupied so movement within the Palace of Westminster reconstructs in quite a forensic way is an important part of what she's doing. In order to understand the value and the nature of administrative office and the changing use of those offices over time, as the her clerks of the Exchequer shift, and this is the really critical point I think in her current work, shift from everyday clerical roles to politically influential and I think it's quite clear that a lot of her Exchequer clerks and auditors are no longer simply the people who are claiming fees for copying out Exchequer dockets. That can actually be delegated to other people. They are politically significant and some of these people are politically connected with parliamentarians who of course are simply at the other end of Westminster Hall. And parliament are literally cheek by jowl in the 16th century, and increasingly, a number of those auditors and clerks are themselves antiquarians they are interested in the ransacking of records whether those are Exchequer records or whether those are state paper and of course those aren't held in some public record office they're not held in the British Library, there are a lot of them are still on site and accessible within the Palace of Westminster, or the dual tower or other adjacent spaces. So, Kirsty is very sorry that she couldn't be here. Her paper would have opened out some of those issues through examination of the largely neglected role of the receipt in record keeping, and it's intersection with antiquarian scholarship through discussion of the architecture of the four treasuries of the receipt in the Palace of Westminster. If any of you, if that sparks your interest then Kirsty is very happy to share a copy of the text of her paper with any of you in the room. And if you want to come and talk to me afterwards I'll be happy to pass on her contact details. So thank you.