Ely Diocesan Records

Abstract

Augustus Jessopp, reporting in 1891 for the Historical Manuscripts Commission on the records of the bishop of Ely, found three stores of documents: Ely House, Dover Street; the consistory court in Great St Mary’s church at Cambridge; and the palace at Ely. This division seems to have been customary since the sixteenth century and ended only when the bishop of Ely, Bishop Lord Alwyne Compton, had the contents of all three repositories moved, first into Bishop Alcock’s tower in the palace at Ely where Alfred Gibbons saw and listed them, and then into the ‘old prison,’ now 4 Lynn Road, Ely, where they remained until their transfer, in June 1962, to the Cambridge University Library. The consistory court had been a store of current records as long as the registrars or their deputies had their office in Cambridge; but about 1790 the diocesan registry seems to have been transferred to Ely, at which time began the long connection with the diocese of the firm of Evans and Son, solicitors, members of which firm acted as registrars almost without interruption from then until 1959. In Messrs. Evans’s office, and also since 1902 in the ‘old prison,’ the registrars had accumulated a considerable store of documents. These, too, have come to the University Library, where the Church Commissioners have also deposited the records of the Ely episcopal estates which they have held since the mid-nineteenth century.