English Monastic Archives Databases: How to Search

There are three main databases, each of which can be used in a variety of ways. Click the menu at the left hand side of the page, or under one of the images representing each database, to select the database that you want. Users will rapidly work out different possibilities by experimenting with the ‘drop-down’ menus.
See the ‘Special Note’ at the end for more information about what is included. Note also that the three databases were designed to be a research tool: the ‘Archives’ database is a guide to the types and current locations of documents generated by medieval English monasteries, but not, as a rule, to the information contained within those documents.

'Religious Houses' Database| ‘Properties’ Database | ‘Archives’ Database

THE ‘RELIGIOUS HOUSES’ DATABASE

This database enables you to search for a specific religious house, by ‘County’, ‘Gender’, ‘Order’, and by ‘Year of Foundation’ (also by ‘Year of Dissolution’, though that option will not be needed so often), or to do various combined searches, set out below.

Single Searches

• To find out about a specific house: If you click on a specific religious house from the drop-down list you will be presented with the following data about that house: the county, the order, the type of house, the sex of the members, a brief history of the house, when it was founded, when it was dissolved, and general observations on the history of the archive.

• If you are studying a particular county: If you click on ‘County’ you will be presented with a drop-down menu listing counties. Click on a County and you will be given a list of all the religious houses in that county, together with the order, date of foundation, and date of dissolution. You may then want to find out more details about a particular religious house. Click on the name of that house and you will be taken to the data (which you would have reached had you searched under that name in the first place). Note that Yorkshire is divided into North, East and West Ridings and the City of York.

• If you want to study specifically female or male houses: Click on ‘male’, ‘female’, or ‘both’ in the drop-down menu under ‘Sex’ and you will be given a list of all the relevant religious houses. Click on the name of a particular house and you will be taken to the data (which you would have reached had you searched under that name in the first place).

• If you are working on a specific order: If you click on the name of a specific order in the drop-down menu under ‘Order’ you could call up a list of, say, all houses of Cistercian monks. Click on the name of a particular house and you will be taken to the data (which you would have reached had you searched under that name in the first place).

• If you are interested in a particular date or time-span: If you type a year in the ‘year of foundation’ or ‘year of dissolution’ box, you will be presented with a list of all the religious houses founded (or dissolved) in that year. You could thus rapidly compile comparative statistics of the numbers of religious houses founded in given reigns, for example. Click on the name of a particular house and you will be taken to the data (which you would have reached had you searched under that name in the first place). Note that you must enter a specific year. It is not at present possible to specify ‘before’ or ‘after’, or date ranges.

Combined Searches

• If you want to find all the houses of a particular order in a particular county, there is a combined search option towards the foot of the screen. Pick the county you want from the drop-down menu, then the order you want from the drop-down menu beside it, then click on ‘Submit’. Note: the drop-down menu for ‘order’ will list only those orders with houses in the county you have chosen.

• Just below there is a search option to enable you to find just all the female or just all the male religious houses in a county. Pick the county from the drop down menu, then the sex from the drop-down menu just to the right of it, then click on ‘Submit’. Note: the drop-down menu for ‘sex’ will not include a sex if there were no orders of that sex in the county you have chosen.

• To find just all female or all male orders, or to find houses of the female branch of a given order, say, Benedictine nuns, you can simply search under ‘order’, higher up the page, and it will be easy to select what you want from the list, which is short: thus there is no need for a special combined search option.

THE ‘PROPERTIES’ DATABASE

This database links religious houses with the properties that they owned: manors, granges, churches, chapels and urban properties.

Note that ‘manor’ is shorthand here for any property called a manor or grange, or a rural estate worth £5 per annum or more; similarly, the term ‘urban property’ refers to property in cities or boroughs worth £5 per annum or more, e.g., in 1535. The database includes appropriated churches and chapels, and also those over which a given house held merely the advowson (or right of presentation to the benefice). Where only one date is given in the ‘Dates of Tenure’ field (as opposed to a date range), this date represents the date of acquisition of the property, and it is to be assumed that the monastic house in question held the property until the house’s dissolution.

Single Searches

• To find all the properties owned by a particular religious house, simply select the house you want from the drop-down menu at the top of the screen. Click on the name of a particular property and you will be taken to a screen containing more data on that property.

• To find all such properties in a particular county, move down to the ‘County’ search option and use the drop-down menu.

• Just to the right of this is a drop-down menu under the heading ‘Property Type’. This enables you to collect data on just one kind of monastic property, singling out, say, all churches, and leaving manors etc. aside. Further down the screen, you will be able to search for property types in conjunction with particular houses or counties.

• If you are studying a particular parish, move down to the box to the right of ‘Parish Name’, type in the parish that interests you, and you will be presented with a list of the monastic properties in that parish. You can just type in the first few letters of the parish name.

• If you want to search for a particular manor, church, chapel or urban property, move down to the box to the right of ‘Property Name’, type in the name of the manor, etc., that interests you, and you will be presented with a list of properties with that name. You can just type in the first few letters of the property name.

Combined Searches

• You may want to find all the properties of one particular type (e.g. all chapels) in one county. At the bottom of the page you will find a heading: ‘To find all the properties of a specific type within a given county’. Select the county that you require from the drop-down menu and then select the property type from the drop-down menu to the right. Note that you will only be able to choose from property types which existed in the county you have chosen.

• Then you may want to find all the properties of one particular type (e.g. all manors) owned by a given religious house. The final search option gives you two drop-down screens: one for the name of the religious house and the other for property type. Choose the house that you are searching for, then select from the list of property types belonging to that house in the drop-down menu to the right.

THE ‘ARCHIVES’ DATABASE

Single Searches

• The first search option is headed ‘To search for Archives from a specific House’. Choose the monastic house you want from the drop-down screen, press ‘Submit’, and the documents generated by that house will be listed, alphabetically, according to genre. Note that if we have found no documents from a house, it will not appear on this list. Click on the genre for more information.

• The next option, ‘Order’, enables you to do the same thing for whole orders: e.g. to get a list of all documents generated by all the houses of the order selected. This will be enormous in the case of the biggest orders but manageable with, say, Benedictine nuns. Each house may be listed several times, for different genres of documents. Click on the house name for more information on the archives in that genre.

• Just to the right is a search option, ‘County’, enabling you to do the same but this time for counties: select a county and you will be given a list of all the documents generated by houses within it, arranged in alphabetical order of houses.

• Underneath these options there is a series of boxes enabling you to search for documents generated within, or applicable to, a particular period. There are seven time blocks: whole centuries, except that the eleventh century is split into pre- and post-Conquest. (The post-Conquest eleventh-century box is abbreviated to ‘11th Century’.) You can only search under one box at a time.

• Underneath these boxes there is a drop-down scheme enabling you to find the documents in a given ‘Repository’. So you could pick, say, ‘Canterbury Cathedral Archives’ and get a list of monastic documents there.

• The ‘Genre’ search option is arguably the most interesting of all. It enables you to select a type of document from a drop-down screen – e.g. ‘Records of Jurisdiction’ – to get a list of all the documents of that type on the database. The potential for substantive historical research, for Diplomatic and for the typology of monastic documents generally is enormous. Click on the house name for more information on a particular document.

• The ‘Reference Code’ search will help you find what the database has on a given document whose reference code, shelf-mark, or call number you have. Note however that the success of the search cannot be guaranteed because it depends on your typing in the call number in the form in which it was entered on the database. If the document you want does not come up, try typing in just a few letters or numbers from it.

• The final single search option is a for a general keyword search, under the heading ‘To search by keyword across numerous fields’. This option enables you to search for specific names, places or topics within the ‘Description’, ‘Provenance’, ‘Copies/Transcripts’, ‘Printed’, ‘Literature’, and ‘Illustrations’ fields. You might want to search here for documents collected, copied or printed by a particular collector or antiquary of monastic documents, or for documents relating to a specific place, or for documents relating to the topic of, say, book ownership by monasteries (by searching on the word ‘book’). You might also search here for documents in a specific language – either in English or Anglo-Norman. If it is not otherwise stated, all documents referred to will be in Latin.

A keyword search can be useful even when there is an option to search for a given topic in a field such as ‘Genre’. For instance, a search in the ‘Genre’ field for ‘Building Accounts’ will produce a list of discrete monastic building accounts, but these will not include building accounts which were part of more general series of accounts, classified as ‘Central Accounts’ or ‘Estate Records: Manorial etc. Accounts’. A keyword search on the word ‘building’, however, will find accounts of expenditure on building works which are subsumed into central or manorial accounts, when these have been noted in the ‘Description’ field. There are undoubtedly other similar examples where searching by keyword, as well as by genre, will yield further documents relevant to your research.

Combined Searches

• If you want to find all the archives of a specific house in a certain genre – say, for example, all the charters from the priory of Langley in Leicestershire – then choose ‘Langley (Leics.)’ from the pull-down list of houses in the box on the left, and, from the list in the box on the right, choose ‘Charters’.

• The next search allows you to find, in a similar way, all the archives of a monastic order in a certain genre. You may, for example, want to know how many Benedictine nunneries owned cartularies, or all liturgical custumals surviving from houses of Carthusian monks. Choose one from each box, as in the previous search.

• Finally, the last combination search enables you to find all the archives from all monastic houses in a specific county, by genre – for example, all manorial court rolls from Hertfordshire monasteries – and it works like the other two searches.

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The foregoing introduction is intended only to start you searching and is designed especially for scholars who may be advanced academic researchers but beginners when it comes to databases. The best advice is to allow yourself plenty of time to play with the various options and to see how they can be harnessed to serve your own research projects.

Special Note

What Is Included and Excluded

The English Monastic Archives Project is meant to be a reconstruction of the archives of England’s monastic houses. Excluded altogether from consideration, therefore, are the friars and the military orders. There are also a number of deliberate omissions from the ‘Archives’ database. All post-dissolution documents, for example, have been excluded, with one exception. The deeds of surrender made to the Crown’s dissolution commissioners, even though never part of a house’s archive, are included because they provide a firm date for the end of the house’s existence and bear the signatures of the monks and (sometimes) nuns. Also deliberately excluded are single charters - apart from ‘Charters of Foundation’, which comprise a separate genre.

The first two years of the project were spent compiling the list of monastic estates entered into the properties database. This work took longer than expected, and consequently, soon after the work of reconstructing the houses’ archives had begun, it became apparent that in this phase of the project we would need to limit ourselves to the monastic orders of monks and nuns – Benedictines, Cluniacs, Cistercians and Carthusians – as well as the late medieval orders of Bonhommes and Bridgettines, in order to finish the project in the allotted time. Also excluded from our archival reconstruction, along with Augustinian, Premonstratensian and Gilbertine canons and canonesses, are the non-denizen alien priories. All houses of canons, canonesses and alien priories are included, however, in both the ‘Religious Houses’ and ‘Properties’ databases.

There is an important exception to these omissions. The archival reconstruction of all the houses of Buckinghamshire was completed before the decision was reached to exclude houses of canons and canonesses and non-denizen alien priories, and therefore the archival entries for all the monasteries of Buckinghamshire do appear in the archives database.

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