Tallies

On the wall in the corridor near the Strangers' Bar in the House of Commons there is a little box with ancient bits of wood in it. For those not in the know tallies were used from the time of the Norman conquest until 1829, although they were officially abolished in 1752. They are a record of expenditure owing cut into a piece of wood. (Hence the name - tailler - means to cut in French).

You start with a piece of hazel or similar (hazel was the only one that I remember out of the examples given) and you square it off so that you have a flat piece of wood. You then carve notches into the wood, large notches for pounds (they were about 4mm deep), medium sized notches for shillings (about 2mm deep) and small notches (really just indented lines) for the pennies. The larger notches were triangular in shape.

Also on the piece of wood was some ink writing that gave details of how the debt was incurred and on some of them how much it was for.

Once you have completed this you split the wood down the middle so that each party gets one of the pieces with a matching set of notches. Usually the person owed the money gets the L shaped piece and the other party gets the straight bit.

The main use for the tallies for us could be in paying for billeting, supplies, powder etc where the main exchequer of the army would pay out the actual cash for what we have consumed (probably offset against the tax that should have been raised). Also when we are doing household stuff some of the larger purchases might be done with tallies as they were in widespread use, not just for government accounts.

The last interesting fact was that it was the burning of all the surplus tallies in the early nineteenth century that caused the fire that destroyed the original house of commons.