Reviewed by Sten Jönsson School of Economics and Commercial Law University of Gothenburg
The Tally Stick Epoch in the History of Man
This collection of articles by Axel Grandell, Scandinavia’s grand old man of accounting history, is interesting. They teach us how illiterates managed their bookkeeping from the earliest (5th century) time of the Vikings. When traders from Birka, the trading capital of the Svea vikings, went up the Russian rivers on their tours they bought furs on their way up on credit. Having sold their goods, they paid against IOUs on their way back. (Trust and goodwill were obviously built over the years.) To issue the IOU, a split tally stick was used. Two sticks with a flat surface fitting together were notched across both sticks indicating how many furs had been received. Debtor kept one and creditor the other. The proof of the claim was that the notches fitted together. Fascinating! The word for tally stick in Russian, the Baltic languages, and Finnish is “birka”, the name of the place most of these traders came from.
Another use of the split tally stick was as promissory notes by the English Crown when it borrowed money from private persons. Richard, Bishop of London and Chancellor of the Exchequer, left precise instructions for the form of tally sticks dated 1186. The depth and length of the notches indicated the currency and amount. This use of the tally stick lasted for over 600 years. When the last outstanding stick was cashed-in in 1834, it was decided to use them in heating the. Houses of Parliament. Grandell tells us that the potential of the tally stick was underestimated — the chimneys of Parliament were overheated and the buildings burnt to the ground.
There were other users of the tally stick: Marco Polo mentions that the merchants of Venice used it, other users include the Hansean merchants, tax collectors in the 16th century and onwards, traders with the Lapps of the North and, of course, industrial users, from the inception of ironworks in the 13th up to the end of the 19th century. The Hammersmith Order of December 27, 1703, reads, “those who can neither read nor write shall keep two tallies, cut in daler and ore, one at his place of work and the other among his possessions and money.
The book contains 13 articles — two of them are written in English, the others have short English summaries — on different aspects of the history of the tally stick: notch writing, from the 4th-century Ogham writing, through the runic writing of the Viking time (and the secret writing of that time in code) to the symbols for the figures used in recording days of work and charcoal deliveries to iron works. There are also accounts of how wolf hunting was organized and tallied in Finland.
This reviewer, admittedly, has not paid much attention to the history of accounting before literacy, but Grandell opens one’s eyes. The tally stick is an ingenious invention. The split stick allows two parties to record a transaction together and both can bring objective evidence with them. The Emperor of China (200 B.C.) used a split tiger, he keeping one part and the general Yangling the other, to be able to prove that the messenger carried genuine imperial orders to the army. Reading about it stimulates your fantasy. Just think how the tally stick solved a data security problem, and how it functioned in the building of business networks in less organized times than ours. (This collection is a complement to Grandell’s earlier book from 1982 The Tally Stick. A neglected bearer of cultural tradition, in Swedish, published by Abo Akademi).
