Medieval and Premodern History

Documents from Medieval and Early Modern England from the National Archives in London. This site now contains about 9,250,000 frames of historical material from the U.K. National Archives from the years 1176 to the Early Modern period. The main document series on the site are CP40 (court of common pleas plea rolls), KB27 (court of king’s bench plea rolls), KB26 (king’s bench and common pleas plea rolls from Henry III), E159 and E368 (exchequer memoranda rolls), C33 (chancery orders and decrees), CP25(1) (feet of fines), DL5 (duchy decrees and orders), and REQ1 (court of requests orders and decrees). Examples of other series are also available.

Historical documents groped by century, major collection, subject, author and title. Out of Yale Law School.

The Digital Scriptorium is a growing image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research.

Lists over 480,000 items published between 1473 and 1800 in the British Isles or North America.

A "collaborative database on the published sources of English medieval legal documents." Links to online sources are provided when available.

A fine in the reign of King Henry III (1216–1272) was an agreement to pay the king a sum of money for a specified concession. The rolls on which the fines were recorded provide the earliest systematic evidence of what people and institutions across society wanted from the king and he was prepared to give. They open a large window onto the politics, government, economy and society of England in the hinge period between the establishment of Magna Carta at the start of Henry’s reign and the parliamentary state which was emerging at its end.

The Year Books are the law reports of medieval England. The earliest examples date from about 1268, and the last in the printed series are for the year 1535.