ABSTRACT
Freedom of Information (FoI) is associated in the public mind with access to government secrets and with finding out why certain decisions that matter to individuals have been made. As Simon James has noted earlier in this book ‘the key objective (of FoI) was to open up the operations of public bodies to public scrutiny’. Very few people perceive FoI as relevant to access to medieval deeds held by an archives service although they would expect the service itself to be accountable with regard to its operations.
