Thank you to everyone who allowed us to make use of data for this event and particular thanks to Marina Georgiou and Farah Yameen for approaching numerous data owners and bringing many of these datasets together.
The English Monastic database connects (among other things) monastic houses such as abbeys with the manors they owned. More information about the dataset is here
The Gazetteer of markets and fairs lists around 2,400 places in England and Wales which had a market or fair by 1516. You can search or familiarise yourself with the data via the website (or here is the entry for the county of Yorkshire) and download various versions above. The Gazetteer contains dates of when rights to hold fairs and markets were granted (and by and to who) and when they happened (e.g. for Hornsea, St Nicholas Fair and a fair for the feast of St Peter's Chains).
Dyffryn Clwyd Court Rolls Database Data extracted from the court rolls of this Welsh manor. The dataset is quite complicated so zipped here are tables representing entries from the 1340s and 1390s together with the user guide and more data can be provided.
Beresford's Lost Villages contains geodata for thousands of medieval settlements which no longer exist. This dataset has strong links to other data, such as the National Monuments Record and you can see more information about it and explore the online version here.
Ancient Correspondence (SC 1) Rich descriptions of this group of records at The National Archives giving details of letters to (and from - but mostly to) the King and other high officials. These letters come from a wide range of individuals and cover all sorts of topics. More information on the records here.
Ancient Petitions (SC 8) Rich descriptions of this group of records at The National Archives giving details of petitions to the King and other high officials. These petitions come from a huge range of individuals and cover all sorts of topics - but there are lots of references to manors and to the city of York More information on the records here.
Medieval Crop Yields Database These spreadsheets show 30,000 data points on a range of agricultural produce from 1211 to 1491 (though most observations are from 1270-1430). The data is arranged by crop and county.
Popular Protests in Late Medieval English Towns. The dataset covers 1196-1452 and could be interesting compared with the above data and tax data. Although the dataset is well structured, some research might be required to understand what the values in the all the fields signify.
England's Immigrants (1330-1550) is a database of 64,000 migrants to England documented here.
Digitizing historical plague provides time and place data for a large range of (British and International) plague outbreaks. The dataset includes outbreaks beyond the medieval period.
Information on medieval taxes extracted from the E 179 database of Exchequer records held at The National Archives
The Manorial Documents Register is a comprehensive listing of English and Welsh manors (...with a handful of counties yet to go online). It is searchable and downloadable via Discovery and Wikidata (example here).
Open Domesday is a free and open version of Domesday Book with an API. The API will return manors for a given hundred and manors near given coordinates.
Inquistions Post Mortem is a database of these documents focusing on listing the lands of recently deceased wealthy individuals known or believed to hold lands granted by the crown. More about these documents is here. The site indexes by place and by person. Many of the individuals listed under a manor may simply have had the inquisition heard there - it does not mean they hold that manor.
Victoria County History is an extraordinary collection of information about British places through time. A lot of useful information about the owners of manors and events in them (example here) often listed under the parish. But information on many other sites is also present - for example abbeys and their abbots.
The Fine Rolls record payments to the crown for permissions or privileges, such as the right to inherit, marry or secure land or establish a fair or market. Transcripts covering the reign of Henry III (much of the 13th century) are transcribed and searchable here. Plenty of manors get a mention.
The York Archbishop's Registers database also contains good quality descriptions of the wheelings, dealings, cases and decisions of the Archbishop. These might involve land deals, licences to do various things or criminal cases.
The Itinerary of King John tracks England's most unpopular monarch throughout his reign. The underlying data for the site is on Github here.
Taxatio is a database of taxes paid by churches in 1291/2. It is arranged by place. This entry, for instance, is for Hornsea, a parish overlapping the manor owned by St Mary's Abbey, York. Entries contain grid references.
Bridges of Medieval England to c.1250. Dataset of georeferenced medieval bridges downloadable here. The King could grant pontage, the right to levy a tax to pay for building or repairing a bridge (see an example described here).
These documents are typically semi-structured and will require cleaning in order to make them machine processable
Wakefield Court Rolls Transcripts from the Internet Archive. Downloadable as plaintext (1331-3, 1338-40, 1348-52 (2 vols), 1433-6, 1537-40). Not very structured data. Further Wakefield court rolls covering 1274-97 are here. Also unstructured.
Conisbrough Court Rolls Cases heard in this Yorkshire manorial court. Also semi-structured. Quite a bit of cleaning and scraping needed. Has 1324/5, 1349/50, 1380/1, 1480-6, 1536.
Norton Manorial Court Rolls cover cases heard at the manorial court of the Lincolnshire manor of Norton from 1246 to 1539.
Manorial and medieval documents can include quite a few unfamiliar words connected with land, the law, agriculture and many (many) different kinds of tax or fine.
Marina Georgiou and Farah Yameen have brought together many online glossaries for these terms in one place.
If you find yourself looking up a term that is not on this list, please consider adding it and the definition so everyone at the event can benefit from your new knowledge.
Google My Maps Very quick way to get coordinates onto a map
Programming Historian Dozens of tutorials focusing on everything from georeferencing to turning data into music
Palladio Palladio makes it easy to create visualisations of networks and relationships from data
Twine Tool for interactive storytelling
- Medieval Meme generator
- British Library digitised manuscripts
- Cumbrian manorial documents - explains types, scans with commentary rather than transcription
- Nottingham manorial research guidance - document types with examples here