Research Guide

by Dr J L Laynesmith

Background Reading

The first step in any research project is to ensure you have a good general background on the political and social context. There is very rarely one perfect introduction to a subject, and certainly not for Richard’s life or the princes: the sources we have are open to such a variety of interpretations (and every historian makes occasional mistakes). So, spend time reading around recently published books and established classics.

For the political background, the Introductory Reading List on the Society’s website should provide a helpful starting place (all available from the Society’s library) and the footnotes in these books will lead you on to other useful works. R. Horrox (ed.) Fifteenth-century Attitudes (CUP, 1994) is an exceptionally useful starting point for understanding wider society in this period (again, let this lead you to other books). For local studies, the Victoria County History series provides invaluable background on very many of England’s towns and villages (some older volumes are now online at British History online). The Ricardian, much of which is now online, is a treasure trove of detailed articles on the fifteenth century.

Taking notes as you read helps to fix important issues in the memory, even if it’s a book you own and can return to. Build up family trees, timelines, lists of servants, etc., to help you keep a sense of the connections.

Planning your approach

Your research will be a lot more rewarding if you set yourself a task that is at a slight tangent to the main topic (Richard’s Itinerary of the Missing Princes for example) so that you are building up information on a matter of interest to you while hoping to come across details for the projects. Information relevant to the projects will only occur very infrequently so focusing purely on hunting for references to Richard’s location, for instance, could end up feeling very demoralising!

You could pick a person with connections to Richard or the princes and try to build up their biography; or study the business and local politics of a town near you in the period. Alternatively, you could decide to focus on a particular source (e.g. local chamberlain’s accounts) and build up a narrative of events from it. Before you decide, consider what sources are easily accessible to you. If you are going to do a biography, be sure to check what has already been done in the books/sites listed at the end of this leaflet.

Accessing the sources

A great many fifteenth-century documents have been published and are available in libraries or on the internet. The fact that they have been published does not mean that all their secrets have been revealed. There are, of course, occasions when uncatalogued or inaccurately recorded documents of great significance suddenly come to light. However, most research is not about finding a document that no one else has ever seen, but about recognising the significance of certain details in that document to your own interests. It is perfectly possible to do major original research without actually needing to visit an archive. So, if you are not confident about reading fifteenth-century handwriting you can very definitely still get involved. Although the documents are often in Latin, there are also very many in Middle English which, in its fifteenth-century form, is not all that difficult to read (there are online Middle English dictionaries). Many of the sources are actually published with translations anyway.

The local studies section of your library may stock published original (primary) sources – it’s worth checking there first. County libraries have a wide range of subscription-only online resources (e.g. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) available to ticket holders. The library associated with your local record office will also be useful – make sure you check their website for information on how to visit. The most useful libraries are those associated with academic institutions, many of which allow bona fide researchers to consult their books on site (regulations vary, so check their website or phone). Unfortunately, they are increasingly keeping their more obscure documents in storage and relying heavily on electronic resources, which may mean that to access their most useful material you would have to apply to join the library (sometimes this option is only open to former students and usually it is expensive).

You may find that simply browsing through the volumes of a record society publication will fire your imagination with a project worth pursuing. Some of the most useful of these include the Surtees Society (which focuses on publishing manuscripts relating to north-eastern England) and the Camden Series (more than 325 volumes of source material from all periods of British history, now published by the Royal Historical Society).

There is also a wealth of material available on the internet. Useful sites for examining other sources include:

http://www.british-history.ac.uk/ (the section ‘Using BHO’ has further information on using this site as well as recommending other sites)
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/sbook.asp (click ‘help’ under ‘supplementary documents’ for advice on using this)
http://www.medievalgenealogy.org.uk/ (click on ‘sources’ for links to sources on other sites. This site includes a very helpful calendar to make sense of dates)
http://aalt.law.uh.edu/ (includes links to published sources online as well as photographs of many manuscripts from The National Archives).

Some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century documents are available on Google Books, the Internet Archive and elsewhere. They can be found simply by searching for the relevant title (check the footnotes in the introductory books you have been reading to find ones that look relevant).

If you do decide to try looking in the archives, there is a very helpful guide at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections/researchguidance/usingarchives

Reading the documents

It is very important to take careful notes, both to share your information with the projects and for your own research. This should always include precise details of the source of our information:

website – not just ‘British history online’ but the exact URL
title of the book or article, author’s (and/or editor’s) name, publisher, date and place of publication, relevant page reference
manuscript location, reference number (or name) and folio/membrane number if applicable.

Always be conscious that all manner of motives and misrepresentations can exist behind seemingly clear texts. This is perhaps most obvious in works like chronicles that may be ill-informed or making a political point. Accounts of ceremonial events are sometimes modelled on protocol documents rather than what really happened, pedigrees may be ‘enhanced’ to impress, financial documents might conceal fraud. Many surviving records are ‘fair copies’ of earlier notes and subject to copying errors. So, wherever possible, find ways to corroborate the information you have, to get a sense of how accurate the material is.

Writing up the material into some form as soon as possible will help you form a sense of where your project is going and direct the next stage of your reading.

Biographies

Identifying the names of people who come up in your research is often impossible but it is always worth checking for biographies in:

The Oxford Directory of National Biography (easiest to access online)
The History of Parliament (the modern version is a vast project in print and online but unfortunately the late fifteenth-century entries are still in progress, so check Wedgwood’s Biographies volume too)
A.B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to 1501/to 1540 (Oxford, 1974)

Emden and Venn both produced registers for Cambridge but the easiest to access is online at https://venn.lib.cam.ac.uk/Documents/acad/2018/search-2018.html

P.W. Hammond and R. Horrox (eds) British Library Harleian Manuscript 433 (1980) includes many brief biographies in its index.

www.girders.net provides sources linked to many fifteenth-century names.

It can also be useful to check names in the indexes of the Calendars of the Patent Rolls and Close Rolls (summaries of some administrative documents in The National Archives).

www.englandsimmigrants.com is useful for foreign visitors and residents.

When trying to establish a date it is important to remember that although the beginning of the year Anno Domini was usually 25th March (the feast of the Annunication and therefore Christ’s conception), it could sometimes be 25th December, 1st January or Easter; and very often the king’s regnal year was used, or a mayoral year. Usually internal evidence in the document will eventually reveal which system is being used if it is not 25th March.

Research & Sources