Guide DN - Norwich Diocesan Archives

The archives of the Diocese of Norwich were for a long time housed in a range of chambers over the East Walk of the Cloisters of Norwich Cathedral. At the beginning of the 1939-45 war, all documents more than one hundred years old, with the exception of tithe records and terriers, together with some of a later date, were removed for safe custody to various repositories in the Diocese. After the end of the war, all that had been removed were brought together again in a new repository formed in Bishop Reynolds's Chapel adjoining the then Bishop's Palace.
Their arrangement prior to removal was not satisfactory. Great care was bestowed on them during the war by Revd J.F. Williams, MA, FSA, of South Walsham, in whose custody a large proportion was, but despite this their arrangement became further confused by the two moves and the fact that they were not boxed but for the most part in paper parcels. On their return to Norwich, they were boxed with the help of a grant from the Pilgrim Trust and roughly arranged in classes with the help of evening work by Mr Philip Hepworth the Norwich City Librarian with his assistants, Miss Kennedy and Miss Grace (archivists) and by Thomas F. Barton, who continued the work of identifying and re-establishing the different classes and of listing them. It was Barton who assigned three-letter mnemonic references to all the older series of records (e.g., REG for Bishops' registers).\r\n\r\nBarton's handlist extended to those documents only which were removed in 1939 and later returned, though a search was also made through the documents remaining over the Cloisters in order to fill gaps. Tithe records and terriers, therefore, did not figure in his handlist. Apart from this, he considered it to be a reasonably complete list of the documents assembled in Bishop Reynolds's Chapel, though, having regard to the magnitude of the task, it could pretend to being more than a general description of most of the documents. The Probate Inventories, numbering some 16,800, however, were listed in detail.
(Edited from Thomas F. Barton's foreword to his Handlist of the Diocesan records, October 1963.)