I suppose that or most historical projects, the key lies in knowing where to search for original and secondary material.  For the Dulwich court rolls, however, the original material is readily available, as they are held in the Archive at Dulwich College.

So  for transcribing and translating them, it was essentially a question of (a) deciphering the hand-writing (which becomes progressively easier to do as one approaches modern times); (b) having a Latin dictionary handy, to supplement my schoolboy knowledge; (c) making sense, or approximate sense, of the meaning (including working out what words are meant by various abbreviations - usually, but not always, obvious); and (d) doing a lot, and I mean a lot, of typing.   Some knowledge of medieval land law, from my time as a law student half a century ago, certainly came in handy.

Most rolls that you see on-line, indeed all of them that I’ve come across, make no attempt to follow the lay-out of the original roll, probably because the actual images of the rolls are not available on-line.  Knowing that ours would be, I made a conscious decision to adhere to the original lay-out, in case anyone was sufficiently interested to want to compare the transcriptions with the originals.  This meant that for the earlier rolls I had to use a much smaller type-face in order to conform to the line-length of the original, and sometimes the font sizes vary from line to line (depending on how many abbreviations had to be spelled out in full).

The translations were slightly trickier to fit, because the English translation might be longer or shorter than the Latin original, but as a general rule I endeavoured to space the lines so that any paragraph in the transcription would match up with the same paragraph in the translation.

Although generally for the earlier rolls I used an Arial type-face, for later ones I favoured Lucida Bright (with occasional forays into Lucida Blackletter), as of all the type-faces available to me (most of which are far too modern for my purposes), that most closely resembled the original script.

I was able to make some use of the transcriptions of extracts for the rolls up to 1693 to be found in William Young’s ‘History of Dulwich College’ (1888), a copy of which I discovered on-line.  It helped me to remember some of the Latin case-endings that I learned at school, and others I was able to find (or guess at) using Google.  No doubt there are still mistakes, which some Latin purists may pounce on.

Whoever first catalogued the rolls divided them, where there appeared to be gaps, into series, using all the letters of the alphabet.  On the criterion that a gap of more than three years with no evidence of rolls (extant or missing) should prompt the start of a new series, and with the approval of the Keeper of the Archives at Dulwich College, I re-named some of the earlier ones, and up to April 1626 that worked fine.  Thereafter the cataloguer (and I suspect it was a different one) was far too profligate with the letters, and by 1693 all of them had been used (including some ‘cheating’ by using e.g. ‘TT’, ‘WW’, ‘XA’, 'XB’ etc.).  The next two rolls were named alpha and beta, and all the rest up to 1903 were defined as ‘h1’, h2’ etc., up to ‘h35’.  Quite apart from anything else, such names would not work for the Internet, where only lower case English letters are allowed, and ‘H1’ and ‘h1’ would therefore be confused. So, using the same criterion about gaps, I had to rename them all, which I did, with three letters of the alphabet to spare.

The project was completed on 28 March 2023, and all the Dulwich court rolls, i.e. images of the originals, with their transcriptions and translations, are now available to view on the Dulwich Society website, under ‘Local History’.

Patrick Darby

[The above is the article I wrote, at Sharon O’Coonor’s request, for submission to the British Association for Local History for publication in its Newsletter.  Below is the article which Sharon submitted, and which appeared in ‘Local History News’ (the BALH publication) on 31 January 2024, alongside a photo of Sharon (but not of me, despite having sent one to Sharon).

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 will also make 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.