Customer account ledgers of Edward Backwell, 1663-1672
From RBS History
This page is about historical records held in the archives of The Royal Bank of Scotland Group relating to Edward Backwell.
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Background
Edward Backwell had a large and diverse business, comprising thousands of separate accounts with a wide range of clients, including merchants and tradesmen; departments of government and the royal household; City livery companies and chartered overseas trading companies; and individuals with substantial income or wealth.
Most of these clients came to him for financial services. Others came to purchase or commission items of jewellery or objects fashioned from gold or silver. For some clients he provided a safe place to deposit, and earn interest on, their money; for others he provided loans; for others foreign exchange; for others the convenience of an account from which to pay their day to day expenses.
Backwell’s ledgers record his dealings with each of these clients. The transactions recorded in the ledgers show the sources of each client’s money and the nature of their expenditure.
The ledgers are the earliest systematic set of banking records to survive in the United Kingdom, and are all the more important for being the records of one of the financial giants of his age. They predate the foundation of the Bank of England by over thirty years, and demonstrate the early form of modern banking in Britain, showing how payments at home and abroad were made, the terms on which interest was received and paid, how foreign exchange was undertaken, how bankers kept track of their business and how they worked together to provide a coordinated and stable financial system.
The only other extant banking records contemporaneous with these ledgers are those of the Fleet Street goldsmith bankers Robert Blanchard and Francis Child (whose business was later known as Child & Co) and Thomas Fowle, whose activities were more narrowly focused on personal clients and in the 1660s were only beginning to move into banking, and a number of discrete account books and other records of the scrivener bankers Robert Abbott, Robert Clayton and John Morris.
Documents
RBS holds Backwell’s nine surviving customer account ledgers. Each ledger contains between 1,700 and 2,500 separate accounts, and together there are a total of over 5,700 open page spreads, here referred to as ‘folios’. These records are the continuation of a series of eight earlier ledgers which have not survived.
The ledgers would have been the most important items (hence their survival) within a wider set of financial records. Cross references to some of these related records which have not survived appear against some of the transactions in the ledgers. For instance, in relation to Backwell’s handling of transactions involving goldsmiths work there are often cross references to ‘WB’, thought to stand for ‘Work Book’.
It is not known with certainty who entered the transactions in the ledgers, but from 1666 the ledger entries are written in a new hand, which is believed to be that of Charles Duncombe, who had been apprenticed to Backwell the previous year, and who was later also to become a great financier.
Each folio is identified by a contemporary number, and contains debit entries on the left hand page and credit entries on the right hand page. On each folio there may be one or more individual customer accounts, and some customer accounts run over several folios.
Where an account has an outstanding debit or credit balance at the end of the period covered by the ledger, this is carried forward to a later ledger, and the account contains a reference to the ledger and folio to which the balance is carried forward. A corresponding reference appears in the later ledger, giving the folio and ledger from which the balance has been brought forward. These cross references indicate that each ledger was identified by a letter of the alphabet, as detailed below.
- Ledger I/J (ref EB/1/1): March 1663 – December 1663
- Ledger L (ref EB/1/2): March 1664 – September 1664
- Ledger M (ref EB/1/3): September 1664 – March 1665
- Ledger O (ref EB/1/4): January 1666 – December 1666
- Ledger P (ref EB/1/5): January 1667 – March 1668
- Ledger Q (ref EB/1/6): March 1668 – March 1669
- Ledger R (ref EB/1/7): March 1669 – March 1670
- Ledger S (ref EB/1/8): March 1670 – March 1671
- Ledger T (ref EB/1/9): March 1671 – March 1672
Eight ledgers referred to as A-H must have once existed, and there are entries brought forward from ledger H into the surviving volumes. The series also originally extended beyond ledger T as some of the account balances within the later surviving ledgers are carried forward to ledgers U/V and W. There are also two ledgers (K and N) which have not survived in the extant series, the latter coinciding with the Great Plague of 1665.
In order to minimise handling of this unique collection, access is permitted by appointment to microfilm copies of the ledgers only.
Index
An index to the contents of these ledgers is available on this site.
Physical description
All of the volumes are handwritten, with iron gall ink on paper
- Ledger I/J: 611 folios, conserved and re-bound as two volumes. Dimensions: volume 1, 44 x 31 cm; volume 2, 44 x 31 cm.
- Ledger L: 671 folios, conserved and re-bound as two volumes. Dimensions: volume 1, 44.5 x 32 cm; volume 2, 44.5 x 32 cm.
- Ledger M: 648 folios. Dimensions: 44.5 x 30 cm.
- Ledger O: 636 folios, conserved and re-bound as two volumes. Dimensions: volume 1, 46 x 30 cm; volume 2, 45.5 x 30.5 cm.
- Ledger P: 655 folios, conserved and re-bound as two volumes. Dimensions: volume 1, 46.5 x 30 cm; volume 2, 46.5 x 30 cm.
- Ledger Q: 635 folios. Dimensions: 44.5 x 29.5 cm.
- Ledger R: 609 folios. Dimensions: 45 x 29.5 cm.
- Ledger S: 643 folios. Dimensions: 44 x 30 cm.
- Ledger T: 621 folios, conserved and re-bound as two volumes. Dimensions: volume 1, 45.5 x 32 cm; volume 2, 45.5 x 30cm.