The Notched Sticks That Burned Down Parliament

From at least the 12th century, the English Exchequer recorded debts on tally sticks: lengths of willow, notched on one edge to mark the amount, then split along the grain into two unequal pieces. The longer half (the stock) went to the creditor; the shorter (the foil) stayed with the Treasury. To redeem, the holder brought their stock back, the two pieces were married up, and the matching grain proved neither side had been tampered with. A counterfeit was almost impossible — wood doesn't grow back the same way twice.

The Exchequer kept this up for the better part of seven centuries. Government creditors held tallies the way later investors would hold bonds; tallies circulated, were endorsed, and were sometimes traded at a discount. Parliament voted in 1782 to phase out the system in favour of paper, but the last sinecure-holder didn't die until 1826, and the warehouses kept filling up.

In October 1834, Richard Weobley, Clerk of Works at the Palace of Westminster, was told to clear the stockpile. He decided against giving the willow away as kindling and ordered it stuffed into the two coal-fired stoves in the basement of the House of Lords — directly under the peers' chamber. The stoves overheated. The flues caught. By evening on October 16, the medieval Palace of Westminster was the largest fire London had seen since 1666.

Turner painted it twice. The Lords and Commons that meet today sit in Charles Barry's Gothic replacement, finished in 1860. Britain's national accounting system, in other words, took its old hardware out one last time, and burned the building down with it.