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1. The Henry III Fine Rolls Project and its website: an appraisal

This month we feature a second review of the website by a King's College London M.A. Student. This month's contributor, Ryan Kaskel, combines his medieval studies with work as a computer programmer giving him a particular perspective on the project website. Readers should note that Ryan's contribution was written before the recent revision of the Search enabling users to perform a text search through all the rolls. The previous review of the website was published in the series in April 2008.

⁋1Choosing an essay topic for the Magna Carta module taught by Professor David Carpenter proved to be more difficult than I originally thought. At the heart of the dilemma was selecting an issue which had evidence accessible in terms of its ease of use and language. To the novice student of medieval English history, the variety of primary sources available is intimidating. For better or worse, I chose to write about the Royal Forest. G. J. Turner translated the majority of the forest pleas that survive from John’s reign and this material provided the backbone of my paper. ¹ One of the more difficult tasks I attempted was to try to link up the many names referred to in the pleas to names mentioned in the Pipe Rolls of the Exchequer. I took out several of the editions published by the Pipe Rolls society and for each year, looked up in the index the names I was interested in and, if found, went to the page it referred to. I then had to trawl through the transcribed Latin looking for the name of interest. After several iterations, the task became tedious and often downright boring. The Pipe Rolls Society has long been publishing transcribed editions of the rolls to the benefit and amateur and professional historians alike. Despite all the hard work done by the society, the sources are still too difficult to use for the uninitiated. And so with one finger keeping my place in the index and the others aiding my search for “Hugh de Neville” on one particular page of the pipe rolls from the ninth year of John, I could not help but wish I was working on a topic that required the use of a different primary source. At that moment I wanted to be using not the pipe rolls of the exchequer, but instead the fine rolls from the chancery.

⁋2The Henry III Fine Rolls project makes research a pleasure. The project, started in 2005, photographed, translated, and published online all the fine rolls from Henry III’s reign, from 1216 to 1272. ² The massive effort by the project’s team creates an experience that is the antithesis of the drab process of sifting through the dusty pages of the pipe rolls. If I wanted to find fines from the minority of Henry III that mention Hugh de Neville, I simply to need to enter the three variables in the site’s search engine and I immediately have in front of me forty-six relevant results. I needn’t worry about paper cuts because the only work my fingers will be doing is punching keys. In the digital age, students of history have grown up using the web from a young age and have “electronic expectations” that most modern publishers of editions of primary sources fail to live up to. Some publishers have responded and secondary sources are now widely available online. Troves of academic journals have been indexed and are searchable through websites like JSTOR. It should come as no surprise that these resources are the ones favored most by today’s students. Even in my limited experience researching medieval history, the Fine Rolls have become one of my favorite sources because of its ease of use and accessibility from anywhere with an Internet connection. The foresight of the project’s leaders, such as Louise Wilkinson, David Carpenter, and David Crook, ³ ensures that the Fine Rolls will be much more widely used by today’s students and that the period of history they cover will inevitably factor into professional research on a much greater scale.

⁋3At the same time I am pursuing a master’s degree in Medieval History at King’s, I also spend half the week doing something completely different: I am a computer programmer for an online company. My days working for the company are spent writing code that takes information inputted via a web browser, stores it in a database system, and then retrieves it at a future time and displaying back in the user’s web browser. Many of the same techniques power the Henry III Fines Rolls website. Not only am I interested in the content of the website from the perspective of student of medieval history, but also how the website functions from at a deeper technical level from the perspective of a computer programmer. As such, the dual nature of my interests enables me to analyze the project from a unique point of view. In this essay I will assess how well the project achieves its five stated goals: to fully translate the fine rolls from Henry’s reign, to index the content and make it searchable, to make available high quality images of the actual rolls, to publish book editions of the content, and finally, to make freely available a wide range of secondary research on the material. ⁴

⁋4The translation of the fine rolls from its original Latin to English immediately makes the project an order of a magnitude more accessible than other primary sources. As a novice in both paleography and Latin, researching the fine rolls would have been an immensely difficult task and too expensive in terms of time. Indeed, prior to the project, only ten percent of the fine rolls from the period were available, and then only in Latin. The indexes of the editions were also “totally inadequate.” ⁵ The project succeeds immensely in its goals of “bringing the fine rolls from the darkness” ⁶ and if the project didn’t succeed in any of its other goals, the translation into English makes the Henry III Fine Rolls website worth its weight with respect to its funding. The website presents the translations chronologically by the year of Henry’s reign, just as the information was recorded by the scribes themselves and as is customary for other record sources such as the pipe rolls. The corresponding years according to the Gregorian Calendar are likewise listed in the table alongside The National Archives (TNA) reference number. ⁷ Translations for the fines from are available for all years of Henry III’s reign, although the translations the fines from 1242-1272 have been given preliminary status by the project’s editors and might change at some point in the future. The information is presented in a straightforward tabular format except that it isn’t immediately obvious where the links to each year’s roll is located until you hover over the actual link and the browser underlines it for you. A better option would be to highlight the entire row when the mouse’s pointer hovers over it by coloring the row’s background with a different shade of grey. This would also more clearly indicate the link’s Gregorian years and TNA reference counterparts as it can be difficult for the eye to scan relatively undifferentiated rows of text.

⁋5Each year has its own page with a complete list of fines. Because Henry III was crowned on October 28, 1216, each year starts at that date and runs to October 27 of the following year. ⁸ The design of the listing of the fines and the formatting of the page are flawless. Each fine is numbered for easy reference and dates and place names are given where available. Place names and toponymic surnames are “translated” into their modern forms which is immensely helpful for today’s students. In addition, footnotes indicate other important details of the fines such as corrections and cancellations. One of the finest aspects of the project is its strict adherence to editorial standards that are clearly defined. One of the most difficult aspects of my research in the pipe rolls was how to translate the formulae that are so common to these types of sources. The Henry III Fine Rolls website standardizes the translation of these phrases and even lists them in the style guide. For example, salvo cuiuslibet iure is consistently translated as “without prejudice to anyone else's right.” ⁹ These translations not only help those students that would like to view the fine rolls in their original Latin, but also with the translation of other similar record materials. The translation of the fine rolls into English is by far the most significant accomplishment of the project, even if the just over half of the translations are in a preliminary state.

⁋6The search functionality ¹⁰ and the creation of useful indexes ¹¹ combine to form the second goal of the project. These two features highlight the power making such primary source materials available online and are the most demanding in terms of technical difficulty. They are made possible by the use of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and specifically the dialect formulated by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). ¹² This technology allows the project to “mark up,” or designate certain parts of the text as having special meaning. This process involves two levels of designation. The first is marking up the physical structure of the document. For example, each fine in the translation can be marked as a distinct entity, separate from other fines and other auxiliary information contained in the original text such as the heading of the membrane on which the fine is found. ¹³ The second level of mark-up gives semantic value to the translation. This means that all personal names, place names, and dates, for example, can be designated as such. ¹⁴ Even more abstract information can be noted through the use of special designations that express abstract relationships. ¹⁵ For example, the person Hugh de Neville can be linked to the place Lincolnshire using the special relationship “has current or former residence.” ¹⁶

⁋7The process of marking up the translations is immensely time consuming and thus far the project has only completed the task to October 27, 1242. The fruits of these efforts are a search engine that can query the “nouns” of the translated text, such as persons and places, as well as indexes which are generated from the marked up files described above. Since this data is so semantically rich, the search facility and indexes offer the team the most room for improvement. Because the data is not marked up beyond 1242, content from 1243 onwards is not searchable. The website suggests using the browsers plain text search functionality which has the severe limitation only being able to find text visible on the current page; only one year can be searched at a time. One advantage of modern commercial search engines such as Google is their ability to limit search results to a specific website. It is therefore possible to conduct a plain text search using of the fines from the years 1243 to 1272 all at once using Google. For example, a search for the person “Robert le Botyller” in Google gives me results from years 41, 44, 45, and 50 of Henry’s reign, whereas searching for the same name using the project’s search facility returns no results. ¹⁷ It would be possible to simply add a form to the current search engine page enabling visitors to search using Google. ¹⁸

⁋8The project’s own search engine is still massively helpful for visitors to the website and allows them to formulate detailed queries all because of the huge effort to mark up the translated text. Users can search by person, place and subject and limit their results to a specific range of years. One very helpful feature of the search page is the suggestion box that updates itself as you type text in the form. For example, typing “h” into the person field of the form brings up all persons whose names begin with “h”. It is essentially a very basic means to searching the indexes, a feature which is partially implemented as a thesaurus. The button to access this thesaurus, however, is barely visible on the page due to its light appearance that and only becomes obvious once you hover over it. The suggestions feature is only able to cope with single words, so typing “hugh” doesn’t suggest “Hugh de Neville.” In addition, the ability to search for keywords in the thesaurus is limited to a single letter at a time. In other words, you can only search for words beginning with “a” if you are on the “a” page of the thesaurus; a search for “hugh” would turn up zero results. A more intuitive approach would be to enable the user to search the entire thesaurus at once. Similarly, the ability to search the indexes themselves would be helpful.

⁋9The final issue with the search page is the inability to express more complex queries. At the moment, if you type in the person box “Hugh de Neville” and in the place box “Lincolnshire”, the results will display fines that contain both terms. In Boolean logic, we say these terms have been “ANDed” together. The addition of two other Boolean operators, OR and NOT, would easily allow researchers to ask more complex questions and, in turn, receive more relevant search results. Again using Hugh de Neville as an example, if I wanted to find fines that mention his name as well as Northumberland and Lincolnshire, I would have to conduct this query in two separate searches. At the moment, typing both Northumberland and the Lincolnshire into the places box would find only those fines that contain Hugh de Neville, Lincolnshire, and Northumberland. Similarly, if I wanted to search for all fines that contain the Neville family but knew that one person with the toponymic surname “de Neville” wasn’t actually part of this family, the NOT Boolean operator would help eliminate that irrelevant result. Combining all these operators together would enable a vastly more powerful search capability that is readily available with the software the site currently uses. ¹⁹ This power, of course, comes at the expense of usability, so it would probably be best set aside on an “advanced search” page. Despite these minor suggestions, the search capability saves immeasurable time over trawling indexes of a book and is still a comprehensive feature of the website in its current iteration.

⁋10The indexes section of the website provides an alternative interface to searching for semantically marked up content such as people, places, and subjects. Not only does it provide an alphabetical view of these categories of data, but it also the primary means by which the website displays the ontological relationships between entities mentioned above. For example, whereas the text of the fine rolls itself might display the “Welcumestowe,” the editors have replaced the name with its modern form “Walthamstow.” Despite the replacement, the website has been able to preserve the link between the two equivalent names. Where the place name occurs more than once, several antiquated spellings can be linked together. The indexes are therefore helpful to researchers of other primary sources because they too can use the index to find information such as the medieval names of modern places, in a context otherwise unrelated to the fine rolls. More complex abstract relationships between entities of data are also catalogued. The index, for instance, lists Thomas of Manby having a relationship with the widow Avice Manby. ²⁰ The entry for Alan of Molton lists as his role the justice of the assize. ²¹ As is evident in these entries, the use of a special, standardized ontological markup allows a researcher to conduct a type of “meta research.” Users can ask questions that may not be specifically related to the fine rolls but are still answerable because of the painstaking work done by the site’s editors who added the special information. By using common data types, such as people, places, occupations and subjects, as well as standardized relationships set forth by the CIDOC CRM Special Interest Group, facts like Alan of Molton “had the role of” justice of the assize can be expressed in a textual format easily readable by machines. Hopefully the efforts of marking up the Latin translations will be continued until the end of 1272. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is the leading advocate of these techniques that fall under the umbrella term “the semantic web.” Much research and development is being conducted to realize this goal and many more websites will soon be using similar features. ²² By marking up the many entities present in the fine rolls, the website is creating data that is suitable for the future of the web and this is the second most important accomplishment of the project. One day a user will be able to search Google for “Eva Uffington of Berkshire’s son” and get the result “Robert of Uffington” because of the Henry III Fine Roll’s project’s additional mark-up. ²³

⁋11While browsing the transcribed, translated text online is very useful, there’s nothing like seeing the original. Many people in other countries and even in England itself do not have the means to visit the National Archives to catch a glimpse of the rolls and so one of the goals of the project was to make photographs of the membranes available on the website. Extremely high quality images of all membranes of the rolls are available from a special section of the website ²⁴ as well as through links in the translation itself to the particular membrane on which the fine can be found. The placement of these links in the listing of the translated fines allows visitors to easily find the translated text in its original form. The software that displays the images is quite sophisticated and allows the user to intuitively navigate the picture by clicking and dragging it with the mouse around a special frame. In addition, researchers can zoom in to view a portion of the picture at a higher resolution which allows the finest details of the membrane to become visible. This functionality satisfies the thirst of those interested in paleographical features of manuscripts at the time as well as those who just wish to see what the originals looked like.

⁋12Book editions of the online content have been published by Boydell and Brewer, thus satisfying the fourth goal of the project. ²⁵ In the event of some technical catastrophe, in which the website’s data is lost, ²⁶ published books ensure that the content will survive. So far three volumes of the print editions have been made available and they cover the years 1216 to 1242, which is the same date range for which authoritative, semantically marked-up translations available on the website. A fourth volume covering the years 1242 to 1248 is expected to be published in 2012 following the end of the project. ²⁷ This goal is the least important because the print editions are generated from the same XML files used to publish the website. Globally distributed backups of the data would ensure that the content of the project is never actually lost. Furthermore, the website claims that the online and print editions serve different audiences: one that wants to be able to easily search the data and another that wants to be able to put “look up a particular reference and put it in context.” ²⁸ I disagree with this statement because the fines can just as easily be put into context by viewing them chronologically in the translations section of website. Because the same data is being used, the only difference between the online and the print editions is that latter can’t be dynamically searched and is therefore limited in capacity.

⁋13The final goal of the project was to publish discussions related to the “impact” of the fine rolls. Critical to any edition of primary source material, online or printed, is the inclusion of introductory information related to it. The commentary section includes a brief history of Henry III’s reign with an inline listing of related resources, such as books articles. Of supreme value is a comprehensive guide to how the fine rolls actually worked, which is essential for anyone planning to use them as evidence. This includes information into the terminology used within the fines, their role in royal finance, and information recorded on the rolls not specifically related to fines. A partially complete table lists the approximate amount of money pledged to Henry III as well as the same information for three years of John’s reign for comparison. The site also has an important feature to keep those interested in the fine rolls constantly engaged. Each month, a commentary on a particular fine or a selection of fines is published. ²⁹ Once a year, one of these “fines of the month” is selected by a committee to receive a £50 book stipend prize. Commentaries are available from December 2005 until the April 2011 and form a valuable body of secondary research to complement the fines. One of the fines of the month by Dr. John Alban even contains two translated charters from Norfolk and King’s Lynn. ³⁰ Aside from the value of having more Latin documents available in English, Alban successfully links two fines made in 1229 and 1231 to the granting of these charters. Although information on the cost of gaining a royal charter is not available in local Norfolk documents until the fourteenth century, this information can be gleaned from the fine rolls demonstrating how valuable the resource is. Each month the fine of the month competition continues, the richer the information on the Henry III Fine Rolls website becomes. The project thoroughly completed this goal.

⁋14The Henry III Fine Rolls project has set the standard for online primary source publication and the project has uniquely been able to accomplish most of its goals. While it remains to be seen if funding can be secured for the continuation of the authoritative translations beyond 1242, students and historians, both amateur and professional, now have at their fingertips this valuable resource. Even though the translation of the documents is by far the most important of the goals, the legacy of the project extends far beyond this facet of the project. In the long run, the project, with its use of the Text Encoding Initiative variety of XML and the related ontological mark-up, will be looked upon by future historians of the digital humanities as a trailblazer in the adoption of semantic web technologies. It would have been simpler and faster to make available a plain text edition of the fine rolls but the extra effort by the team in marking up the content has made important inroads in the nascent field of the digital humanities. The xMod software that powers the project’s website is expected to be released to the public at no cost in June 2011. ³¹ Publishers like the Pipe Rolls society would be wise to follow the Fine Rolls project’s lead and publish their editions online. At least a student can dream.