The Project

Mapping the Medieval Countryside is a major research project dedicated to creating a digital edition of the medieval English inquisitions post mortem (IPMs) from c. 1236 to 1509.

IPMs recorded the lands held at their deaths by tenants of the crown. They comprise the most extensive and important body of source material for landholding in medieval England. Describing the lands held by thousands of families, from nobles to peasants, they are a key source for the history of almost every settlement in England and many in Wales. This digital edition includes the IPMs from 1399 to 1447 and is the most authoritative available. It is based on printed calendars of the IPMs in Modern English but incorporates numerous corrections and additions: in particular, the names of some 48,000 jurors are newly included.

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the project was a collaboration between the University of Winchester and the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London.

Resources on CKAN

The Inquisitions Post Mortem CKAN Dataset makes available the following resources:

• The set of calendars in TEI-XML format;
• Information on how the versions of the calendars were encoded following the Text Encoding Initiative model;
• An Eatsml file in XML containing the set of entity records (for persons and places) out of which the indexes and search available on the project site are generated.