ABSTRACT
The textuality of Jenkinson is rooted in the intertextuality imposed on the public records by Harley Rodney and others. V. H. Galbraith dreamed of an archivist's history in which the past appeared as a vast collection of original documents, falling into types, classes and series. The progress of history would appear as a slow pageant of slowly changing records, marked from time to time by the occasional disappearance of one class and the gradual emergence of another. It was this kind of archival Darwinian fantasy that Jenkinson sought to impose. In the official account, the stress is rather the way in which the court sought to help the misguided radical: It is no trouble it is their duty to put questions to people, that it may appear what questions you refuse to answer. Both these records are accurate accounts of the event according to their own lights, but they give completely different impressions of what happened.
