Henry III Fine Rolls Project

The Henry III Fine Rolls, The National Archive, Kew (series C60 and E371). "One of the chief treasures of The National Archives is the great series of rolls on which the English royal Chancery recorded its business, a unique resource for historians without parallel in the rest of Europe. Of these rolls, the fine rolls are the earliest. The charter, close and patent rolls are usually thought to have started at the point from which they begin to survive, that is from around the start of John’s reign in 1199. The fine rolls likewise survive from this point but they almost certainly had an earlier life, one which stretched back at least to the 1170s. The fine rolls are equally distinctive in function. Their companion rolls recorded the written instruments which the Chancery was issuing, charters on the charter roll, letters patent on the patent roll and letters close on the close roll. The fine rolls, by contrast, at least in their original form, recorded offers of money to the king for concessions and favours, a fine being essentially an agreement made with the king to pay a certain sum of money for a specified benefit. In the earliest surviving rolls ‘offer’ and ‘fine’ were used interchangeably. (From David Carpenter, 'Historical Introduction': http://www.frh3.org.uk/cocoon/frh3/content/about/historical_intro.html) "Fine rolls contain offers of money to the king for a multiplicity of concessions and favours, as well as a great deal of other material. They are important for the study of political, governmental, legal, social, and economic history. There is a fine roll for each of the fifty-six years of Henry III's reign and the current project publishes rolls from 1216 to 1248. The rolls have been translated into English and encoded so that they may be indexed and searched in the most flexible and productive way online." (From Hazel Gardiner et.al, AHRC ICT Methods Network) "A TEI XML textual markup scheme was customised for this project to include aspects of physical structure (membranes and marginalia), structure of calendar entries and their contents (e.g. place and date of a fine, body of each entry, witness list) and the semantic content of the entries (e.g. identification of mentioned individuals, locations and subjects). [...] This core layer of text markup allows us to represent information as it appears in the rolls themselves, but the fine rolls often include dozens of references to the same person or place. Sometimes there may be variant spellings for the same person. On other occasions the same spelling of a given name in fact refers to more than one person. Sometimes a reference to a person will be implicit. We need to find a way to spell this out in a manner that a computer will understand. For this reason we need an external and overarching system to represent entities (such as people, places or subjects) that are mentioned in the rolls and to model scholarly judgements about their interconnections. This allows us to explore the complex relationships that exist between these entities, for example ‘all the people with marital or blood relationships with Agnes Avenel’. In order to overcome the limits of a linear edition and to facilitate the multiple and multi-node connections possible in a considered use of the digital medium, we turned our attention to emerging technologies more commonly associated with the semantic web (RDF/OWL) and with knowledge representation in the cultural heritage sector (CIDOC CRM). This ‘ontological’ approach allows us to model quite abstract information about entities referenced as part of the scholarly research, and to incorporate other key standards used for modelling humanities materials, including standards for geospatial, conceptual or time-related data. These technologies allow us to provide detailed information about each entity (e.g. original name of a person versus modernised spellings, patronymic versus tomonymic surname, textual variants) and to express complex relationships with other entities. Furthermore, we are able to use logic (as defined within the ontology) to influence the results we get. For example, if Isabella is described as the wife of William Pikoc in our ontology, we can use the principle of inverse reasoning to infer that William Pikoc is the husband of Isabella." (Adapted from Paul Spence & Arianna Ciula, 'Technical Introduction': http://www.frh3.org.uk/cocoon/frh3/content/about/technical.html) For a discussion on the resource and its aims see also the case study in Hazel Gardiner et.al, AHRC ICT Methods Network: http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/resources/casestudy10.html