Vance Mead
19-09-2010, 4:51 PM
A few months ago I mentioned that there is a very valuable site with millions of images of legal documents from Common Pleas, King's/Queen's Bench, Chancery, etc. They cover the period 1217 - 1714, so far. Located here:
http://aalt.law.uh.edu/IndexPri.html
The wealth of material is also its biggest difficulty, since there is no index. You have to scroll and read through 1000s if not millions of pages of abbreviated Latin. It would take a lifetime to read even a tiny fraction of it.
I met Professor Palmer, the person in charge of the project, at the National Archives in June and volunteered to start indexing the records. The first index - Hilary term 1545 for Common Pleas (CP40) is available at the address above. Scroll to Henry VIII (from 1529) and then select MOD IDX. This can be searched by plaintiff, defendant, and county+plaintiff. Many of the cases have several defendants or plaintiffs, so you can also use your browser's search function to find particular surnames and place names. The spelling of surnames is as in the original, so try all possible variants.
There are about 4500 entries for this term. Each entry has at least one plaintiff and defendant - and sometimes quite many - so there are more than 10,000 names. This is, however, just one term, in one year, in one court - perhaps 1/2000th of the total material available online. So you can imagine the vast amount of material there is.
http://aalt.law.uh.edu/IndexPri.html
The wealth of material is also its biggest difficulty, since there is no index. You have to scroll and read through 1000s if not millions of pages of abbreviated Latin. It would take a lifetime to read even a tiny fraction of it.
I met Professor Palmer, the person in charge of the project, at the National Archives in June and volunteered to start indexing the records. The first index - Hilary term 1545 for Common Pleas (CP40) is available at the address above. Scroll to Henry VIII (from 1529) and then select MOD IDX. This can be searched by plaintiff, defendant, and county+plaintiff. Many of the cases have several defendants or plaintiffs, so you can also use your browser's search function to find particular surnames and place names. The spelling of surnames is as in the original, so try all possible variants.
There are about 4500 entries for this term. Each entry has at least one plaintiff and defendant - and sometimes quite many - so there are more than 10,000 names. This is, however, just one term, in one year, in one court - perhaps 1/2000th of the total material available online. So you can imagine the vast amount of material there is.