Grace ClarkeThanks to a grant from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), staff at The University of York and The University of Sheffield have had the opportunity to digitise more than 13,000 church court documents dating from as early as the 14th century. The ecclesiastical records from the Diocesan Courts of the Archbishopric of York, 1300-1858, include details of marriages, divorces, and attempts to evade taxes. The records have been made available to the general public and are set to become “one of the most widely used historical resources in the United Kingdom.”
In the middle ages the church courts dealt with cases relating to marriage, divorce, defamation and breaches of faith. Church Courts were the most prominent court at the time, up until the late 1600s when their importance gradually started to diminish, as other courts were introduced. The 13,000 records have been stored at York University, however since the 1940s, when they were organised by a primitive index system, they have been relatively inaccessible to the research community.
The website, allows the general public to search through the records with ease. This is a great opportunity for researchers in the fields of social, economic, and legal history, as this is the largest and arguably most detailed collection of court records in the UK. Needless to say, it must have been some feat to organise them all. In fact they were rather pioneering with their methods, they used a specially designed XML schema, which allows anybody searching the records to find them with ease, each record provides details of all those involved, their locations, and any variations in the spellings of their names.
I’d recommend having a look on the website, and perhaps searching for your name for a snap shot of your potential family history…I searched for mine, all I got was several counts of “sexual slander”… some things never change.
