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Medieval UK Battle Records Released Online
eldavojohn writes "Do you have ancestors who served in the British military under Henry V or fought in the Hundred Years War? Look them up online now that 250,000 medieval battle records are online and available for searching. According to the project details (PDF): 'The main campaigns of the period were to France but there were others to Flanders, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Wales and Scotland, a much wider geographical spectrum than before 1369. In addition, garrisons were maintained within England (such as that held at the Tower of London), the Channel Islands, Wales and the marches, as well as at Calais and in Gascony. In the fourteenth-century phase of the Hundred Years War, the English also held some garrisons in areas of northern France, and in the fifteenth century phase, there was a systematic garrison-based occupation of Normandy and surrounding regions...'"
Maybe we can find him there.
"I do not avoid women, Mandrake . . . but I do deny them my essence." - Gen. Ripper
Terrorists could exploit this knowledge to close the trebuchet gap.
""The reason the sun never sets on the British Empire is because God doesn't trust the British in the dark.""
If you were wondering who won, it was the British.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Seems that even absolute monarchies had problems with bureaucrats. Makes you wonder if the species will ever evolve past them.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Lots of records with no family /surname. "What's your name soldier?" "John" "Right, stick him down scribe, John the archer".
Don't hold your hopes out if you were dreaming to find your ancestor on some particular march out to France or Scotland. Not unless your ancestors happen to be the Dukes of Northumberland or the like...
For the first time in my life (Probably the last), I wish I was British. This is so damn cool...
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Nerds love ancient historical stuff -- who the hell else is in the Society for Creative Anachronism, the Sealed Knot, various battle re-enactment societies, etc. etc.? Nerds! And what could be more nerdy than a mountain of statistics about the same?
Oh, and anybody who can't think of a use for this data has no idea what historical research is. You crowdsource this stuff and all kinds of interesting things will pop up. The better we understand our past, the better we understand ourselves.
As for the observations about monarchs needing bureaucrats -- EVERYbody needs bureaucrats, unless you'd prefer the government to be run by astrology and guesswork. If you're a soldier and you want to get paid the correct amount, on time, you need a bureaucrat to look after it. Plus, Britain during a lot of this period was essentially a police state, and police states need more bureaucrats than most. The Stasi in East Germany were Exhibit A, closely followed by the Nazis. The latter's record-keeping got a fair number of them hanged.
I piss off bigots.
...check out John Keegan's Face of Battle. It covers the battle of Agincourt and several other major battles - Waterloo and the Somme. This book really gives you a feel for the human element in these battles.
As an additional stamp of approval, it's also on both the Army and USMC reading lists.
The Army reading list
You can do statistics on the datasets...
Did the name "Cuthbert" not appear before 1361, and then it spread along river valleys because its carriers were predominantly farmers (with occurrences of it popping up here and there because people were conscripted into armies/died out/whatever)?
Did the plague wipe out mainly those with surnames common to the Mediterranean region, because those people had less exposure to the rats, which carried the fleas, which were the main vectors?
Do "Smiths" follow the armies, or settle in the cities? Were Teutonic names more indicative of higher classes? Did northern European names cluster more with archers rather than cavalry?
I'm forseeing a lot of interesting temporal/spatial analysis which could be done with the data.
that a family member had served in the military back in the day.
Signed,
John Arrowbait
Reports like this, where fairly old records are referenced, always make me wonder about the accounting that we keep regarding current events. To what degree will our own stories be available to future generations? We have an ever-growing dependency on a computerized-only storage monoculture, and frankly all this may just be a good $CATASTROPHE$ away from being made into doorstops.
I'm not suggesting we transfer the contents of Slashdot to cave paintings, or transcribe $CELEBRITY_DU_JOUR$'s Tweets to stone tablets, but does anyone know of projects underway to preserve the highlights of modern history in some sort of permanent medium? Is anyone taking down the top x significant stories in a year and sticking them in a jar in a cave somewhere?
---
L
"The reason the sun never sets on the British Empire is because God doesn't trust the British in the dark."
God knows about Lucas, the Prince Of Darkness.
...Sphinx for lightning-fast searches (and stemming, and relevancy, and much more) and Open Calais for text analysis. Combine this data set with those two tools and you could have a pretty nifty site.
The Army reading list
>The main campaigns of the period were to France but there were others to ... Scotland
Sorry, but my ancestors were on the other side. Damn English. Well, they were good at raising cattle to steal.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
"I am Arthur, king of the Britons."
... "I am your king!" - "I didn't vote for you." - "You don't vote for kings." - "How did you become king then?"
"King of the who?" - "The Britons." - "Who are the Britons?" - "We all are. We're all Britons. And I am your king." - "Didn't know we had a king. I thought we're an autonomous collective."
"The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying, by divine providence, that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king." - "Listen, strange women lying in ponds, distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses. Not from farcical aquatic ceremony."
Let's see...
2009-1369 = 640 years
Using a (conservative) 25 years/generation...
640/25 ~= 25.6. Call it 26.
2^26 = 67,108,864
According to medieval demographics and human population, the number of people alive in "Europe" around then peaked at 70-100m *before* the famines and plagues of the 14th century. Europe would not regain that population peak again for 200 years.
If you are caucasian then, given these figures, unless you are descended from a multi-generational set of *extremely* inbred kin, the probability that at least one of your ancestors was in that battle is quite high. The Most Recent Common Ancestor of all peoples. never mind all Europeans, is more recent than you think.
Da Blog
I should add these population numbers:
1350, England: 2,500,000
1345, France: 20,200,000
Da Blog
And here I thought we were going to get to hear some 15th century hip-hop!
Breakfast served all day!
All of my ancestors are dead.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I guess it's only a start, but speaking as someone who works on database searching from a website the search method they use really sucks. You practically have to know what you're looking for in order to find it, and once you do there's precious little information apart from a couple of names and a campaign. there's no hyperlinking (er, this _is_ the web in 2009 yaknow) and there's no way to just browse the data (see commanders in a campaign for instance) to pick up interesting facts or trends. In short, useless. Most people will look up a couple of names then forget about it completely.
I hope I'm wrong.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Scotland was not a part of England at the time.
Is here. Share and enjoy.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
In the 14th century most people would have held St Edmund as the patron saint of England. St George was more associated with the Knights Of The Garter and the monarchy. It wasn't really until the 16th century that St George had fully taken over the national role.
Listen to my latest album here
However, I have to ask - if the male line died out, how do you come to have your surname? Cadet branch?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
This is typical of the National Archives. They take a document which belongs to Britain and for which the copyright has long since expired, and allow a third party to compile data from it suitable for insertion into a database. Great stuff... except they also allow that third party to retain copyright of the data as it exists in the database, thus forcing anybody else who might want to use the source material to go through the whole process again or pay up.
The 'researchers' only allow you to conduct searches via their query engine. They don't make the source material available as a download. The same is true of the Old Bailey records which went on line a while back and other sources.
They have to cover their costs, I hear you say. But these are research projects and the National Archives don't even bother to negotiate a limit on the rights of the researchers. They could for instance require the researchers to make the data source available after a set period.
The Doomsday Book is a thousand years old. You would have thought that it would be available on line free of charge by now. It isn't. The National Archives allowed a third party to perform a new translation (that way they get copyright on their brand spanking new work) and put that on the net but only via a query engine. No source material available.
The people running the National Archives should be sacked for incompetence.