Lord Mansfield’s Voices

This chapter examines the emotions experienced in archives by historians and other scholars. It discusses the way in which different disciplinary formations inculcate and teach emotional responses to things, including things found in archives. Voice—language—is treated as a thing—a material object—around which emotion is articulated; other, past emotional responses inhere in it. The case study is Lord Chief Justice William Mansfield (1705–93), who, in many of the cases he adjudicated, wrote his own notes as a kind of a play script, transcribing the evidence of plaintiffs and defendants so that they appear to speak directly out of the past; a long-lost courtroom echoes with the clamorous, insistent voices of poor and middling-sort people. The chapter describes the effect of these voices on the researcher, whose listening is dictated by the accreted stories of the poor that have circulated since the end of the eighteenth century.