land, after a long
period of regrettable indifference to the study of the national and
municipal archives of the country, some effort has been made in recent
years to remove the reproach. The publications of the Public Record
Office and of the department of MSS. in the British Museum are more
numerous and are issued more regularly than in former times; and an
awakened interest is manifested by the foundation in the universities of
a few lectureships in diplomatic and palaeography, and by the attention
which those subjects receive in such an institution as the London School
of Economics, and in the publications of private literary societies. But
such efforts can never show the systematic results which are to be
attained by a special institution of the character of the French Ecole
des Chartes.

_Extent of the Science._--The field covered by the study of diplomatic
is so extensive and the different kinds of documents which it takes into
its purview are so numerous and various, that it is impossible to do
more than give a few general indications of their nature. No nation can
have advanced far on the path of civilization before discovering the
necessity for documentary evidence both in public and in private life.
The laws, the constitutions, the decrees of government, on the one hand,
and private contracts between man and man, on the other, must be
embodied in formal documents, in order to ensure permanent record. In
the case of a nation advancing independently from a primitive to a later
stage of civilization we should have to trace the origin of its
documentary records and examine their development from a rudimentary
condition. But in an inquiry into the history of the documents of the
middle ages in Europe we do not begin with primitive forms. Those ages
inherited the documentary system which had been created and developed by
the Romans; and, imperfect and limited in number as are the earliest
surviving charters and diplomas of European medieval history, they
present themselves to us fully developed and cast in the mould and
employing the methods and formulae of the earlier tradition. Based on
this foundation the chanceries of the several countries of Europe, as
they came into existence and were organized, reduced to method and rule
on one general system the various documents which the exigencies of
public and of private life from time to time called into existence, each
individual chancery at the same time following it