Update: Early Modern Resources is back up, though not as yet fully restored.
Some readers may have noticed that my Early Modern Resources website has been down for a couple of months now. I’m rebuilding it, but it’s going to be a little while. In the meantime, here is a google spreadsheet of about 150 online primary source collections from the EMR database.
This is the second of a two-part series about the Westminster Coroners’ Inquests data. See part 1 for more detail about the source of the data, and my initial explorations of the summary data.
This post focuses more on the text of inquisitions (the formal legal record of the inquest’s findings and verdict). …
Posted at In Her Mind’s Eye
My first efforts at interactive data visualisations go back several years to some incredibly frustrating attempts to get the hang of D3.js. These were, with hindsight, doomed because (a) I didn’t really know any javascript, and D3 isn’t easy javascript; (b) I was really only just getting the hang of manipulating data… D3 was just overwhelming in terms of both code and data.. …
Posted at In Her Mind’s Eye
Cleaned-up and slightly extended version of a paper presented at the conference Gender and Violence in the Early Modern World (University of Cambridge, 23 November 2019).
In 1594 Allys Whittingham, William Bealey and Margery his wife petitioned Cheshire Quarter Sessions, setting out the many abuses and outrages perpetrated against them by Anne Lingard.1
She had had unjust warrants against them, claiming to be afraid of “bodily harm”. This was “greatly astonishing” to the petitioners, who were “well known never to have disturbed her majesties peace” or threatened Anne herself.
Anne had come to Allys’s house early one morning and sneakily “convaye[d] her selffe into the house to doe some outrage upon” Allys, and finding her alone,
did assault and treade her the sayd Allys (beinge an aged woman) under feete and would her have murdred or otherwayes fouly intreated yf she hadd not bine prevented by [Margery] whoe hearinge the crye came imediatly…
This was “a matter soe shamfull and unnaturall, as the lyke by anie woman hath seeldome bine offred in anie [christian?] cuntrey or towne”. Further, Anne was a frequent disturber of the peace, causing many “unseemly” brawls and affrays, and upsetting the “best sort” of the town’s inhabitants.
As a result, Allys could “not be at peace within her owne house” and was “much affrayd” of further attacks; and so they prayed both to be released from Anne’s warrants against them and for the authorities to take action against Anne.
Some elements of the case are really unusual: the language – “shamfull and unnaturall… the lyke by anie woman hath seeldome bine offred” – as well as their demand for the magistrates to “brydle the outragousnesse of the sayd Anne Lingard”. There’s nothing quite like this in any of the other petitions.
Nonetheless it reflects a number of common themes in petition narratives by victims of violence:
Continue reading Women, gender and non-lethal violence in Quarter Sessions petitioning narratives
This post for Women’s History Month 2020 explores the Bluestocking Corpus of Elizabeth Montagu’s letters, created by Anni Sairio.
This first version of the Bluestocking Corpus consists of 243 manuscript letters, written by the ‘Queen of the Blues’ Elizabeth Montagu between the 1730s and the 1780s. Elizabeth Montagu (née Robinson, 1718-1800) was one of the key figures of the learning-oriented Bluestocking Circle in eighteenth-century England. …
Read full post at In Her Mind’s Eye
Among its many other wonders, you can find a marvellous run of 16th- and 17th-century CSPD on the Internet Archive. But they’re not consistently titled, and there are duplicates of many volumes, so it’s not easy to piece them together. I made a chronological list while I was preparing a sample of State Papers petitions for the Power of Petitioning project, so it may be helpful to share it. (For R users, I found the Internet Archive package and this rOpenSci tutorial very helpful.)
TNA guides, including how to convert reference in the calendars to modern references:
I think there’s a complete run of CSPD from 1547 to 1660, after which I’ve found only a handful of volumes. (There are three volumes of calendars for the interregnum Committee for the Advance of Money, but I don’t know whether any other Committees were calendared separately from the main run of commonwealth CSPD; if so, they’re not included.) There may be more volumes I didn’t find, and if I learn of any more I’ll update the spreadsheet.
The url is for the volume’s main page on the Internet Archive, from where you can access a PDF, OCR’ed text version and other formats.
Several calendars have multiple copies with separate pages; where this is the case they’re listed in the additional_ids column. If you want to try one of these instead of the main listing (the choice was arbitrary; some copies might be better quality than others), just copy and paste the id of your choice into the search box.
Link to download the spreadsheet.
This started with a question on Twitter about sources for JPs, which got me looking up some old references.
It slowly dawned on me that I had in fact seen a copy of that particular edition somewhere quite recently…
And that, in turn, got me thinking about how much freely available source material (primary and secondary) I’ve randomly stumbled across on local historical societies’ websites in the last few years. And wondering: how much more is out there?
I got several great responses to this*, so I began looking more closely, and the TLDR; answer is: a helluva lot of it. The upshot was a Google spreadsheet, which you can see at the bottom of this post.
I’m genuinely impressed at how much stuff these societies have put online, and several more are clearly keen to follow suit – if they can fund it. Some have adopted a pragmatic policy of embargoing their most recent publications (anything between 3 and 10 years; and if you really can’t wait that long, you can buy print or digital copies – or a subscription – for sod all). They often have limited resources, and good quality digitisation isn’t cheap. So, y’know, do encourage societies of interest to you to do this; but don’t lecture them if they haven’t (you might consider instead how you could actually help them to do it).
It’s also more generally noteworthy how many societies have websites (some kept more up to date than others…), and even if they haven’t digitised the publications, nearly all have made finding aids of some sort (indexes, TOCs, abstracts, etc, even searchable databases) available.
(And undoubtedly all this applies far beyond England and Wales, but someone else will have to compile those resources. Sorry.)
Why am I telling you all this? Because these local societies (under their many and varied names: “record/historical/antiquarian/archaeological” society, or some entirely quirky local name) are treasure troves for historians, not just those who think of themselves as “local” historians. They’ve been around for a long time (many were established in the 19th century), publishing high-quality source editions, calendars, abstracts, extracts, indexes, etc, for a wide range of archive sources – parish, legal and administrative, personal, estate records, and more – as well as secondary articles. But often they were published in tiny print runs and even finding aids were hard to come by before the advent of the online catalogue. So it’s a wondrous thing that so many can now be accessed freely and located much more easily.
In addition to content found at society websites, I added a couple more tabs to the spreadsheet: some of the many publications digitised for Welsh Journals Online, and an undoubtedly tiny portion of what might be found at the Internet Archive. Enjoy exploring!
link to spreadsheet (if you’d prefer a version you can download for offline use, use this link instead)
* Many thanks to @newton_key, @LinuxGnome, @VCH_London, @rdgresident, @alexjcraven, @anterotesis, @YstadauCymru!
An extended version of my paper for the April 2019 workshop held by the AHRC Research Network on Petitions and Petitioning from the Medieval Period to the Present, on the theme Petitioning in Context: when and why do petitions matter?
The paper uses data from the London Lives Petitions Project to explore the decline in female petitioning and rise in petitions from institutions in 18th-century London.
Read the post at In Her Mind’s Eye!
