Parliament's historic archives, including the 1605 Thanksgiving Act that established Bonfire Night, have been transferred to the National Archives at Kew in south-west London, completing a five-year project that moved 4 million records from Victoria Tower at the Palace of Westminster.
The Thanksgiving Act was passed by James I after Guy Fawkes's failed assassination attempt on the king, Lords, and Commons. It directed church services be held every 5 November to commemorate the "Gunpowder Plot" and celebrate the "miraculous and gracious deliverance" of the Protestant church from "malignant and devilish papists".
Among the transferred documents is a House of Commons journal with a handwritten margin entry from 5 November 1605 describing the search of Palace of Westminster cellars and discovery of 36 barrels of gunpowder with Guy Fawkes. A separate scroll records an Act of Attainder declaring Fawkes and his co-conspirators guilty of treason and subject to hanging, drawing and quartering.
Dr Graham Moore, an early modern parliament specialist, noted that acts of this period open with flowery language explaining the reasons for legislation before the actual legal text. He pointed to a passage describing King James I as enriched with "most hopeful and plentiful progeny proceeding out of his royal loins".
The collection also includes a suffragette's banner from 28 October 1908, smuggled into the Commons chamber's Ladies' Gallery. Two suffragettes chained themselves to the gallery's iron grille while a third dropped the banner, declaring: "We have been behind this insulting grille for too long." The grille was removed with the two women still attached.
The largest document is the 1821 Land Tax Commissioners Act, the longest in parliament's archives at 348 metres in length, inscribed on 757 vellum membranes to nominate 65,000 commissioners to collect land-based revenue.
The transfer added 16.5 linear kilometres of records to the National Archives' existing 174.5 linear kilometres. Chief executive Saul Nassé said the move offers "the public more access than ever before" and noted that housing records from parliament alongside those from the judiciary and government means "you have the kind of three arms of the British state, all in one place". The National Archives now holds 20 million records total, with one-third housed at a Cheshire facility.