History of the Project

This project has its roots in a conversation I had with my PhD advisor in the Spring of 2019. In that conversation, before I was even in the PhD program, I mentioned that I was interested in the history of food and was interested in developing a digital scholarship project that could investigate food in medieval England. I had spent some time looking at dietary preference and agricultural production in Roman Britain and Roman Gaul during the late-Republic period during my MA, and thought it would be fun to move a little forward in the future. This was partially due to a desire to have my own research project on which I could apply the digital methods I used in my job as Digital Scholarship Librarian. My advisor mentioned that there was a (relatively) under-studied set of documents produced from the 13th through 15th centuries that gave considerable data on agricultural production and prices, and that they may be worthwhile to examine to show a sort of developmental “landscape history” to the agricultural economy of England from the Roman to Medieval period. This was immediately of interest to me, as I was interested in developing a project that could include historical inquiry on archival materials, archaeological investigation into agricultural remnants, computational and statistical investigative techniques, paired with innovative research dissemination formats like interactive data visualizations, maps, and timelines. Then, as I began to delve into the literature on these Pipe Rolls, I realized that much of the computational work was well-established in prior scholarship that investigated economic histories. Dating back to Ada Levett’s 1916 investigation of the Black Death’s impact on medieval economic activity, computational investigations have been central to using and understanding the Pipe Rolls of the Bishopric of Winchester. One of the major problems to using these records, however, is their inacessibility. Compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-2021(?), access to these records in their full text is reliant on access to the Hampshire Council Office’s public records. Several transcribed or translated editions of particular years exist (cited in the About this project page). So too, several manors’ data are collected in other volumes. Otherwise, the majority of years and manors are left unpublished to my knowledge and only accessible via physical access or microfilm image, available for purchase from the Hants. record office. For the purposes of further research, I would have to gain access to these records in a way that could be digitized to allow computational interaction. But this raises the question of what direction the project should go. If the purpose of this project is to produce encoded transcription of the Pipe Rolls, it would require significant effort to make digital transcriptions of the Latin for each year. This is a monumental task partially due to the length of the individual rolls and the long-earned skill of Medieval Latin paleography that would be required to produce a transcript. This would take many years of concentrated effort even before the encoding process, which would take just as long, if not longer. This is probably the most significant finding for me during this process. Even though I began with only a single year’s record to encode, I am barely halfway through after several weeks of (admittedly infrequent) work. My cessation is partially due to time, but also because the trial license on my XML editor ran out just… I can still see the benefit of this work and will work to complete it when my schedule opens up a bit more. But to complete any significant number of these records in a period of time that is useful for other scholars, and to generate a product enriched with enough information that would be of use, would take a moderately-sized team several years. See, for example the Women Writers Project currently at Northeastern University, which has been in a state of encoding since 1993. This being said, I do not think the Pipe Rolls will necessarily benefit overmuch from fully-encoded editions for the entirety of the 200+ year run. I would instead suggest a piecemeal approach, which is what I will attempt to undertake in future iterations of this project. I think what I would prefer to do is try to transcribe and encode a particular subset of manors that are generally representative of certain aspects of my areas of interest (particularly in relation to labor costs/wages, the ratio of sown, harvested, and sold grain, and the ratio of sold/bought livestock) to assess potentialities of food consumption. Determining this representative subsample of manors and tracing development over a long period of time may serve to provide a generalizeable-enough finding that would provide historical insight into the dietary realities of the medieval manorial holdings of the Bishopric of Winchester.

Future Steps

To this end, I will be focusing future efforts primarily on identifying a set of manors with mills that exist for a considerable span of the Rolls. Mills will provide an interesting initial point of investigation since residents of a medieval vill would be legally obligated to grind their harvested grain at the manor’s mills and pay a tax to the lord for their use. Personal mills were highly regulated against, so the manorial mills offer good insight into the amount of grain that was being milled for consumption. Any additional grain purchased by the manorial lord in excess of that gathered through taxation, or by the peasantry after milling, may indicate dietary preference. The ratio of grain types used, sold, and/or milled at certain manors in certain geographic regions of the Bishopric may also be interesting to investigate as evidence of different dietary preference or availability of trade good alternatives. This step will require the extraction of data from the Rolls in a repeatable, consistent, and documented way. I hope that encoding and then extracting data directly from the encoded text will allow for a variety of computational analyses that retains at least some of the nuance of the original document. I also propose gathering as much data as possible from previously-compiled and printed editions that contain such data to reduce the number of Rolls that would have to be digitized, transcribed, and then encoded. Works such as David Stone’s analyses of the manor of Esher, Ada Levett’s body of scholarship on wages, and the exsquisite data compiled from the Pipe Rolls by Jan Titow (much held in manuscript form in the archives of the Hampshire Record Office though some in compiled monographs) will aid in this. To supplement, a systematic review of scholarship can provide piecemeal data in journal articles, etc. Once this is completed, it should provide me a good understanding of remaining gaps that will have to be filled by paleographic transcription directly from the Pipe Rolls.

The benefits of digital methods for this project

Much of this work could potentially be done through bread-and-butter historical investigation and prose analysis. However, I find that the numerical component of the quantified data for quantity and price of agricultural production will be better served by visual aids. Data visualization will provide a more compelling snapshot of certain arguments, and can be more effectively presented in a way that allows for interaction. The interrelatedness of the data, documents, and the databases in which they are found can also provide a more flexible scholarly pedigree that backs up arguments. Providing references in footnotes or bibliographies has worked for centuries, however we are in a new moment of hypertext links and linked data, which can provide more rich and informative contextual information about the places, people, and arguments I hope to engage with. Likewise, as I am interested in the geographic components of the agricultural process as it influences grain production and consumption, I would like to engage more thoughtfully with geographic visualization of some of my data. As the manorial records are linked to concrete geographic spaces, it would be interesting to investigate the archaeological evidence and landscape of those places insofar as they inform the agriculture. I am interested in doing so with an eye towards growing regions, microclimates, and other similar aspects that might be a clue (if reconstructable) towards understanding the structural conditions that impacted growing and consuming. All this presents a use case, to me at least, for digital publication methods. Though there is still an obvious need to compose in prose text for much of the arguments, there is a benefit to the interplay of the media-rich visual and interactive components that can be brought to bear to argue more strongly for my findings.