THE MUNICIPAL RECORDS of Ipswich are as full and as justly celebrated as those of any historic English borough, and rather more than most. They range over eight centuries, and include the text of one of the earliest borough custumals in England, known as the Black or Ipswich Domesday, with its origins in the traditions of the Anglian settlement. In 2000 they were the subject of a detailed catalogue published to commemorate the eight-hundredth anniversary of King John's grant of the borough's first charter, in May 1200. The catalogue, to the costs of which both the borough and the county council, together with the British Library, contributed, was an appropriate marker of the event. It was also the forty-third volume published by the Suffolk Records Society, itself one of many felicitous enterprises for which the county and region are indebted to Norman Scarfe, that redoubtable Suffolk man.

The borough records are now housed in the Suffolk Record Office in Gatacre Road, some way beyond the ramparts of the medieval town, but comfortably within its liberties, which in the middle ages made up the half-hundred of Ipswich. The core of the building, including the present reading room and library, is the premises of the former Bramford Road council school. It is the latest, and certainly the best appointed, of a series of lodgings which the records of Ipswich have occupied over eight centuries.

We know rather more about the origins of those records than we know of many others, and indeed have an account of them which is unique in its detail. We know less about the places in which they were kept in their earliest days, though in the circumstances it is remarkable enough that there should be anything recorded about the matter at all. One fact that does emerge is that they were not always kept as carefully as they might have been, but the fluster that occurs when things go wrong is often more informative than the smooth course of an established routine. That they survived the hazards of existence for so long before they reached their present haven is a matter of good fortune, with some timely assistance from individuals.