Finance, old wood, and flame

February 25, 2016 2:12 PM

How do you make a secure record of a debt or exchange if you can't read or write? Cut a number of notches across a stick to symbolize the assets involved, then split the wood lengthwise: you now have two tamper-proof receipts, one for each party to the transaction. The split tally method formed the basis for much of European bookkeeping between medieval times and the modern era.

Split tally sticks (or "nick-sticks") were particularly popular in England, where Henry I introduced them for tax assessments in the 12th century. The Exchequer continued to use tallies for the next 700 years.

Here's Charles Dickens on the end of the tradition:

In the reign of George III. an inquiry was made by some revolutionary spirit, whether pens, ink, and paper, slates and pencils, being in existence, this obstinate adherence to an obsolete custom ought to be continued, and whether a change ought not to be effected.

All the red tape in the country grew redder at the bare mention of this bold and original conception, and it took till 1826 to get these sticks abolished. In 1834 it was found that there was a considerable accumulation of them; and the question then arose, what was to be done with such worn-out, worm-eaten, rotten old bits of wood? [...] The sticks were housed at Westminster, and it would naturally occur to any intelligent person that nothing could be easier than to allow them to be carried away for fire-wood by the miserable people who live in that neighbourhood. However, they never had been useful, and official routine required that they never should be, and so the order went forth that they were to be privately and confidentially burnt. It came to pass that they were burnt in a stove in the House of Lords.

The flames produced by two cartloads of old tally sticks burned too high and too strong for the furnaces beneath the House of Lords: the copper flues melted, and fire penetrated the chimney walls. The conflagration that followed (London's most violent between the Great Fire of 1666 and the Blitz) would destroy both houses of Parliament and the greater part of the Palace of Westminster.

posted by Iridic (20 comments total)

"Short end of the stick" and "stockholder" feel like probable folk etymologies to me. I can't turn up much in way of support for them. Anyone know of good textual evidence that either is cromulent?
posted by howfar at 2:23 PM on February 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

Rather than give the sticks away to be used as firewood, or burning them in an outdoor fire, a decision was made to burn them in two furnaces in the House of Lords. The resulting conflagration set fire to the wood paneling and both Houses of Parliament were destroyed.

The wisdom of national monetary policymakers has not improved all that much in the intervening 200 years.
posted by Rock Steady at 2:24 PM on February 25, 2016 [15 favorites]

"Short end of the stick" and "stockholder" feel like probable folk etymologies to me.

Yeah, I wouldn't put much stofaith in them, either. The Online Etymology Dictionary admits that the ultimate connection between stocc ("stump, post, stake, tree trunk, log") and stock ("supply for future use," "sum of money") is uncertain, but none of its guesses have anything to do with tally sticks.
posted by Iridic at 2:43 PM on February 25, 2016

"Short end of the stick" and "stockholder" feel like probable folk etymologies to me

This article supports a very different (but still somewhat unclear) history of the phrase "short end of the stick."

Etymologies for stockholder and stock suggest no connection to tally sticks.

The tally stick etymologies seem to be either unreferenced or reference the Wikipedia article on tally sticks, which itself has no citation for those claims.
posted by jedicus at 2:44 PM on February 25, 2016

Here's a nice article on the conservation and preservation of some damaged tally sticks from the 13th century.
posted by jedicus at 2:49 PM on February 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm none the wiser about how exactly tally sticks were used throughout English history. It seems they were 1) receipts for taxes paid, 2) records of loans, and 3) a medium of exchange. I can understand how these uses intwine, and how one may grow out of another. But it strikes me as anachronous to suggest--as the first article does--that all three uses existed at the same time and right from the beginning.
posted by Emma May Smith at 2:59 PM on February 25, 2016

george dyson on exchequer tallies! (previously ;)
posted by kliuless at 3:03 PM on February 25, 2016

The OED apparently supports the "short end of the stick" etymology. It says that one of the meanings of "stock" is:

42. The portion of a tally which was given to the person making a payment to the Exchequer.
The counterpart kept in the Exchequer was called the foil or counterstock. In Anglo-L. the terms were stipes and folium. Cf. F. souche (lit. tree-trunk), the longer of the two portions of a tally, hence also the counterfoils in a register or cheque-book.

As for "stock" in the sense of shares, my reading of the OED supports that, too. As with many etymologies there are multiple interacting meanings. To start with, there was Stocks Market, a London supposedly built on a site that had been formerly used for stocks (the old punishment of confining people in public by locking their limbs within a wooden frame). I often find that an existing name gets conveniently appropriated for a secondary use.

The secondary use may have come from the use of the word "stock" to mean a reserve or supply of capital. OED says that this derivation is "obscure" but that it may derive from the idea of a trunk (another meaning of stock) from which branches grow. Companies (i.e. a group of people) were originally partnerships, in which the partners supplied the trading stock or capital of the business. As the legal form of these partnerships became more sophisticated the partners' relationship was no longer necessarily a personal one, but was defined by the partners' ownership of shares in the business, and each share entitled its owner to a part of the company's stock.

As companies prosper or fail, the amount of stock (capital) they hold will rise or fall. People trading in shares of those companies are interested in the value of the company's stock, but since they're actually trading shares, I can imagine that the idea of owning a portion of the stock may have become attached to the shares being traded - probably aided by the existing name "stocks market". So ultimately, the idea of a stock market does ultimately come from the idea of a tree and its branches - but by a circuitous route.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:03 PM on February 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

Oh yes, and the third influence is what I said up above: that the idea of a "stock" being a financial instrument did already exist in the form of the tally sticks. here's the quotations the OED supplies in its support:

 a 1601 Sir T. Fanshawe Pract. Exch. (1658) 98 The joyners of the tallies‥do see if the stock and the file do agree in hand, letter, and joyning.    
1642 C. Vernon Consid. Exch. 44 The said stocke is delivered to the party that paid the money for his discharge, and the foile is cast into the Chamberlaines chest.    
1671 E. Chamberlayne Pres. St. Eng. ii. (ed. 5) 101 The Counterfoyles of the Talleys‥so exactly ranged‥that they may be found out, to be joyned with their respective Stock or Tally.    
1714 [Bp. Atterbury] Eng. Advice to Freeholders 4 Boroughs are rated on Royal Exchange, like Stocks and Tallies.

posted by Joe in Australia at 3:07 PM on February 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

Early Accounting: The Tally and Checkerboard which of course leads us all the way along to the tallyman.
posted by adamvasco at 3:19 PM on February 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

Thanks, adamvasco! I looked all over for a comprehensive, well-informed account like that, but my Google searches kept bringing up page after page of blog posts about how tally sticks prove that fiat money is the tool of Satan. (Or about how tally sticks were "the original blockchain," etc.)
posted by Iridic at 3:32 PM on February 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

The flames produced by two cartloads of old tally sticks burned too high and too strong for the furnaces beneath the House of Lords: the copper flues melted, and fire penetrated the chimney walls. The conflagration that followed (London's most violent between the Great Fire of 1666 and the Blitz) would destroy both houses of Parliament and the greater part of the Palace of Westminster.

I can't help but feel there's a lesson and/or a metaphor buried in there somewhere.
posted by nubs at 4:15 PM on February 25, 2016

Neat. The other day I was looking at the wiki page on indentured servitude. Similarly, a contract would be written in duplicate on a single page, then a saw-tooth edge cut to separate the two copies.
posted by bonobothegreat at 4:27 PM on February 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

They were money:

Typically, the money-thing issued by the authorities was not gold-money, nor was there any promise to convert the money-thing to gold. Indeed, as Innes insisted, throughout most of Europe’s history, the money-thing issued by the state was the hazelwood tally stick:

This is well seen in medieval England, where the regular method used by the government for paying a creditor was by “raising a tally” on the Customs or on some other revenue getting department, that is to say by giving to the creditor as an acknowledgment of indebtedness a wooden tally. (Innes 1913, p. 398; see also Robert 1956 and Maddox 1969).
Other money-things included clay tablets, leather and base metal coins, and paper certificates. Why would the population accept otherwise “worthless” sticks, clay, base metal,
leather, or paper? Because these were evidence of the state’s liabilities that it would accept in payment of taxes and other debts owed to itself.

Introduction to an Alternative History of Money

posted by wuwei at 4:40 PM on February 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

Damn, Dickens could really write.
posted by zipadee at 5:14 PM on February 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

That's the main reason the Muslims didn't bother to come back after Charles Martel. There wasn't anything in Europe that you couldn't keep track of with just a stick.
posted by carping demon at 8:22 PM on February 25, 2016

I can't help but feel there's a lesson and/or a metaphor buried in there somewhere.

I suspect Dickens's reaction was "If I had invented the fire of old tally sticks burning down Parliament in my books, my readers would have thought I was over-egging it."
posted by sebastienbailard at 8:52 PM on February 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

I imagine that this tradition is related to communication by Scytale.
posted by MisplaceDisgrace at 9:32 PM on February 25, 2016

In Japan, certain legal documents are produced on two copies, and one held partially over the other so that when the parties stamp the documents, half of the stamp mark is produced on each sheet. Each party takes one sheet, and hence the fidelity of the two copies is assured.
posted by oheso at 4:10 AM on February 26, 2016

Blockchain and the holy real-time settlement grail
posted by kliuless at 11:33 AM on February 29, 2016