The Project

For much of the later Middle Ages, south-western France (Aquitaine) was under English rule. Every year from 1273 a ‘Gascon roll’ was drawn up by the English royal administration, recording a wide range of business and mentioning many people and places. The rolls were continued until 1468 even though the area was lost by the English in 1453, and are to be found today in The National Archives at Kew in class C 61. The rolls are almost entirely written in Latin. Some entries are in Anglo-Norman (French), generally forming transcripts of documents recited in entries on the rolls, or copied verbatim in the form of confirmations of documents issued by previous rulers or by officers of the administration in Aquitaine.

In 2009 a project began to produce an on-line calendar of the rolls. This was funded by the AHRC and led by Dr Malcolm Vale (Oxford), Dr Paul Booth (Liverpool), and Paul Spence (Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London). The site currently contains full calendars for the last ten years of the reign of Edward II (1317-27), and for many years of the first half of the reign of Edward III, produced in this project.

In 2012 funding was gained from the Laboratoire d’excellence LaScArBx, the Banque Numérique des Savoirs d’Aquitaine, the Château Ausone (Saint-Émilion) and Jonathan Sumption. This has enabled the continuation of the project and the development of a parallel French site, coordinated by Professor Frédéric Boutoulle and Emeritus Professor Françoise Lainé (Bordeaux) and Paul Spence.

Funding was awarded by the Leverhulme Trust for a two year project from 1 May 2013, led by Professor Anne Curry (Southampton) and Dr Philip Morgan (Keele), and Paul Spence (King’s College London). It also involved the active collaboration of the Université Bordeaux Montaigne (formerly Université Michel de Montaigne-Bordeaux 3) and UMR Ausonius. Research associates Dr Simon Harris and Dr Guilhem Pépin - the former being helped voluntarily by Nigel Coulton, a skilled palaeographer and Latinist, and the latter by Françoise Lainé, emeritus professor of the Université Bordeaux-Montaigne - and a research team based at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, all involved in the 2009 and 2012 projects, also worked on the Leverhulme project. The project also continue its association with the Ranulf Higden Society, a group of learned individuals whose work editing one of the earlier Gascon Rolls lay in part behind the ideas for the original projects, and whose full editions appear on the website.

Resources on CKAN

The Gascon Rolls CKAN Dataset makes available the following resources:

• The set of rolls in TEI-XML format;
• An Eatsml file in XML containing the set of entity records (for persons, places, etc.) out of which the indexes and search available on the project site are generated;
• The project guidelines for encoding the calendared versions of the rolls into TEI-XML.