Explore our Collections

About the Borthwick Institute

Founded in 1953, the Borthwick Institute is now part of University of York’s department of Libraries, Archives and Learning Services. Our mission is to support and expand the University of York’s cultural endeavour and contribute to human understanding through collecting archives, preserving them and making them widely available for research to all people, now and in the future.

Few universities have archives with the range and quality of those at the Borthwick – from the medieval to modern periods, from York to Cape Town, and from Shanghai to Washington DC. We have some of the earliest archbishops’ registers in the world, the archives of path-breaking psychiatric hospitals, business collections including the chocolate factories Rowntrees & Co Ltd and Terrys of York, and much more.

We support teaching across a wide range of departments and provide work experience and skills teaching across archive and archive conservation work, ranging through digital archives, parchment codices, photographic prints and negatives and reel-to-reel tapes. Our blogs, Instagram, Twitter and Bluesky feeds are good ways to discover how you can be involved with one of the country’s leading archives, whether you are interested in research for your dissertation, helping to create online resources, looking to work with us on a community project, or gaining work experience for your career after you graduate.

Before embarking on this partnership with the Company of Merchant Adventurers of the City of York, we already had links to the Company and the Hall through our former Director, Professor David Smith, who was Honorary Archivist to the Company between 1988-1998, and published the first comprehensive guide to the Company archive in 1990 via our Borthwick Publications.

Our Guild records

In addition to the archive of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of the City of York, we also hold the archives of the Merchants of the Staple of England, and the Merchant Taylors' Company of York. Within the records of the Merchant Taylors' Company you can also find records relating to other local guilds, including the ordinances of the Company of Weavers (1578-1606), ordinances of the Company of Embroiderers, Vestment Makers, Cutters and Drawers (1591), accounts and quarterly minutes of the Company of Innholders (1633-1778) and a register of the Company of Bakers (1724-1835). The Company of Merchant Adventurers of the City of York archive also includes records relating to the Merchant Adventurers of England: York Residence (1693-1815), the Company of Eastland Merchants: York Residence (1617-1699) and the Company of Porters of York (1675-1740).

Other allied collections

There are a number of collections in our care which have links to the Company. We hold the archives of notable members and officers of the company, including Prof. Sir Ron Cooke, Darrell Buttery, Sir Donald Barron, JB Morrell, the Rowntree family, Dick Reid, William Kaye Sessions, and Patrick Waddington. We also hold a unique (and once-lost) roll of the Pater Noster Guild of York, 1399-1400. There are references to the early development of the Fraternity hospital in the records of the Archbishops of York; information relating to the development of the Mystery Plays in the records of our founder, Canon John Stanley Purvis; and multiple other references in our other archives (with more yet to be discovered by future researchers). We also hold archives relating to the stained glass specialists J W Knowles & Sons and Harry Stammers, both of whom worked on the Hall at different times. Our archives document, in particular, the  growing economic and trading relationships in the city of York and how York (and Yorkshire’s) economic fortunes changed over the 20th century, not least in the expansion into confectionary manufacture by Rowntree, Terry and Craven.