Manorial court rolls provide a wealth of material for family and local historians, and those for Dulwich, a manor of about 1,200 acres in south London, covering the years 1333 to 1903, are no exception. Such a long chronological range makes them a hugely valuable historical source, and it was an enormous but worthwhile project to get them online. We hope this potted outline of how we did it is useful to anyone contemplating digitising their own manorial records.

To begin with, Dulwich College Archives arranged to photograph the court rolls, which are held at the College, to a high resolution. We paid for half the costs using a bequest from Mary Boast, a much-respected member of our local history group. Patrick Darby, a current member of the group, typed out transcriptions, and translations of the Latin (and occasional legal French). On our website (https://www.dulwichsociety.com/courtrolls) the rolls are arranged by date, with the English translation and the Latin transcript as pdfs, then the photographic images of the rolls.  You simply click on a file to open it.

For most historical projects, the key lies in knowing what to search for and where to find it. For court rolls, however, the original material is readily available, though not usually in an accessible form.  Once we had ‘hi-res’ images of the rolls, Patrick painstakingly worked through them. And never forget that useful palaeographical tool of inverting an image to make it negative, or back-to-front (and upside-down) where text from one roll has stuck to another, to render otherwise incomprehensible text readable.

For the Dulwich rolls it was therefore a question of deciphering the handwriting (which became progressively easier for Patrick as he approached modern times), having a Latin dictionary handy, and making sense of the meaning (which included working out the meanings of various abbreviations - usually, but not always, obvious). The National Archives website has useful tips on its ‘Reading Old Documents’ pages.

Whoever first catalogued the Dulwich rolls, probably in the 19th century, divided them into different series using all the letters of the alphabet, double letters like TT, XA and even the Greek letters alpha and beta. This was a bit of a muddle to say the least, so Patrick decided to rename them (with the approval of Dulwich College Archives, which hold the originals), generally starting a new series after a gap of four or more years without extant rolls or evidence of lost rolls. This enabled him to give the files names that were computer-friendly, i.e. all lower case and with dashes between the words, e.g. a1-front.jpg, a1-back.jpg. This was a great help when uploading them to our website and also makes it easier to discuss the files with others. The transcripts and translations for each roll refer to it by its new name as well as its former name, for the benefit of those using an old catalogue.

Most online transcripts of court rolls make little attempt to follow the layout of the original roll. Patrick made a conscious decision to adhere to the original layout, which means that when you see his transcript next to its photograph, it matches, making it easier to follow. He used different colours for original text, indecipherable words, extrapolated abbreviations, and later additions to a roll, and added a front page to each pdf file explaining all this. Sometimes users will come to a court roll because they Google-searched for a name that is within a roll, so it’s helpful that this context is in each pdf. Having a front page also allowed us to add a link back to the overall court roll project, so that if people did come to an individual file from a search engine, they can orient themselves within the overall project.

The translations were tricky to match up to the original court roll layout, line for line, because the English translation might be longer or shorter than the Latin original. However, as a general rule, the lines are spaced so that any paragraph in the translation matches up with the same paragraph in the transcription. For later rolls the type-face Lucida Bright (with occasional forays into Lucida Blackletter) was chosen, because it most closely resembled the original script. Many of these decisions had to be made along the way, so we would urge anyone thinking of taking on such a project to think these through beforehand to make their life easier!

If you start such a project, don’t think you need to wait until it’s finished to put it online. It will probably make for more work, but if you upload files as they are ready, Google will start indexing them, meaning people will find them more quickly, making your hard work all the more useful to the wider world. Our Dulwich rolls were put on-line in two batches – the first up to 1673 and the second the remainder up to 1903.

Lastly, let any relevant archives know what you are doing. For London that included our Southwark borough archive and the London Metropolitan Archives. The National Archives were very interested in our project and wrote a piece for their newsletter as well as linking to our website on their own site.

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