For about six hundred years the English Exchequer kept count on sticks. A sum paid was cut as notches across a stick of hazel, wider notches for bigger amounts, and then the stick was split down its length through the notches, so each side carried half of every cut. Two halves only ever fit each other, which made them very hard to forge; the half the payer took away was called the stock. The system was finally retired in 1826, leaving a great heap of old sticks in a store at Westminster, and in October 1834 somebody decided the tidiest thing was to burn them in the stoves under the House of Lords. The stoves were fed all day, the flues ran too hot, and by evening both Houses of Parliament were on fire. For six centuries nobody had managed to alter those records. It took one afternoon of getting rid of them to bring the building down.