PASE

Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England

[Image: Witness list of a royal diploma, S 497 (extract); Aelfwine]

Location:

News

Publication of a new version of PASE

A new version of PASE containing a substantial quantity of new data collected during the PASE 2 research project was published online using the existing web interface on 23 December 2009. This material was published using a new web interface on 18 August 2010.

What is new in PASE

The PASE 2 research project has resulted in the following enhancements to PASE:

  1. A substantial quantity of new data (see here for a statistical analysis). The database now captures:
    • the major contemporary or near-contemporary primary sources (chronicles, charters, saints lives etc) covering the period from 1042 to the late eleventh century
    • selected twelfth-century sources covering the entire Anglo-Saxon period, including William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum and his Gesta Pontificum
    • the original core of the Durham Liber Vitae
    • coins from the Early Medieval Corpus of Coin Finds, 410-1180, a database all of the single finds of coins minted 410-1180 found in the British Isles, based at the Fitzwilliam Museum
    • a major dataset of landholders recorded in Domesday Book
  2. A new web interface which provides enhanced access to the entire database. This enables users to perform a greater variety of searches with greater precision. Users can now:
    • search the database for both persons and factoids
    • perform free text searches
    • define searches relating to specific criteria using the structure of the database to identify specific words, persons, sources, possessions, events, and date ranges
    • decide whether to include or exclude two major data sources, coins and Domesday Book, in searches
    • view search results in a more convenient formats, for example by opening all the factoids at once
  3. PASE Domesday. This is a major new collection of resources which are specifically designed to enable users to identify pre-Conquest landholders in Domesday Book more efficiently than has ever been possible before. It comprises a large (approximately 27,000-row) database of landholdings which can be explored in the form of tables and maps either directly online, or offline using freely-available GIS software.

  4. Revised Help. This provides detailed instructions on how to use the new PASE resources.

A major new research project to build on PASE

The Leverhulme Trust has recently awarded a large research project grant to King’s College, London, to be led by Dr Stephen Baxter, Reader in Medieval History at King’s. The grant, of just over £250,000, will enable King’s to employ Dr Chris Lewis, one of the world’s leading authorities on eleventh-century England, and to appoint a new post-doctoral research fellow, for the duration of a two-year project. The project will be implemented and published online by the Centre for Computing in Humanities (CCH) at King’s.

The project is ‘Profile of a Doomed Elite: The Structure of English Landed Society in 1066’. It will build on the PASE Database and PASE Domesday to survey the whole of English landed society on the eve of the Norman Conquest in 1066, identifying landowners at all levels of society from the king and earls down to the parish gentry and even some prosperous peasants.

Click here for more information on this project.