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white cabinets with glass doors jutted from the walls and formed bays at the centre of the room. There were sixteen of them, crammed into an area barely sixteen foot by ten. Tiny points of dust sparkled in front of us, caught in the light that flooded in from the single window. It was impossible to make out what was inside the cabinets: the glare from the sun struck the glass doors, obscuring their contents.
    I moved closer, to alter the angle of light. Stacked along the shelves, I could see hundreds of box files. Every one of them was blue. Peacock blue: the colour of the Duke’s crest.
    ‘You’ll find the family’s private correspondence in there,’ Mr Granger said, pointing at the cabinets. ‘It’s all in the blue files. The letters spanalmost five hundred years. They go back to the sixteenth century – to the time of Thomas de Ros, the first Earl of Rutland.’
    He picked up a large, gold-embossed book from the desk beside him. ‘In here,’ he said, ‘are examples of the handwriting of every member of the Manners family since the 1540s. John, the 9th Duke, compiled it. We use it as an aid to identify the correspondents in the blue files.’
    Tall leather volumes crowded the shelves opposite us. ‘Those are the household accounts,’ he said, walking over to them. ‘They go back to the eleventh century, when the Manners family first came to Belvoir.’ Reaching up, he pulled down one of the ledgers and selected a page at random. The entries were in Early English, written on parchment. A spidery hand had listed the amounts spent on breakfast at the castle in the month of March 1541. The meal – ‘collops, eggs, boiled mutton, braun and beef’ – had cost three shillings.
    ‘The household accounts and the family’s letters form the backbone of the collection, but there are countless other treasures,’ Mr Granger continued. ‘It is probably one of the most important private collections of historical documents in the country.’
    He handed me the catalogue to the collection. It was eighty pages long and contained a summary of the contents of each cabinet. There were ninety-four cases in the five rooms; together, they held over a thousand rows of shelving. The range of the material was breathtaking. Besides the family’s correspondence and the Belvoir estate and household records, there were letters from King Charles I to Queen Henrietta, written days before his execution, and an unparalleled collection of printed broadsides published during the English Civil War. A large number of manuscripts dated from the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution; they included letters written by members of the
ancien régime
before they too faced public execution. Looking at the entries for the medieval period, two of the items, I noted, were extremely rare: the Chronicle of Adam of Usk – written in 1420 – and a map of Sherwood Forest, drawn in the fourteenth century, the time, purportedly, of Robin Hood.
    ‘Everything in here, everything you see,’ Mr Granger said, gesturing towards the rooms behind us, ‘was put together by John, the 9thDuke. All the cataloguing and filing is his. It was his life’s work. Most of his time was spent in these rooms.’
    He paused, and looked down at the floor.
    Then, looking at me quizzically, he said: ‘The Duke died in here, you know.’
    ‘He died in here?’ I asked, surprised.
    ‘Yes. In Room 1,’ he replied. ‘It was sometime during the last war. The place has barely been touched since then. The rooms are exactly as the Duke left them.’
    He turned and headed back along the passage. ‘Come on, I’ll show you the other rooms,’ he said.
    Rooms 3, 4 and 5 were situated at the foot of the Norman Tower, the central feature of the west front of the castle. They were indistinguishable; each was equally austere. The wooden floors were bare; aside from a number of desks and several pairs of heavy Tudor chairs, they contained no furniture. Boxes and files were stacked