Person display
To search for persons in the database, select one of the seven general categories on the left of the screen.
Selecting a term from one of these categories will cause a list of persons who match this term to be displayed in the middle column. For instance, if you select Person > Office > King, a list of all persons asserted to be kings in the database will be shown; if you select Possession > Animals, all persons recorded as having owned animals will be displayed. In addition, it is possible to combine search terms — so that selecting the previous two terms in succession will display a list of all persons recorded as being kings who own animals.
To find out more detail about one particular person, click his or her name as listed in the middle column, and a full database record will appear on the right of the screen.
The categories
- Persons lists terms that directly characterise individuals, such as Name, Occupation, and Education.
- Source provides an alphabetical list of the sources from which PASE data is drawn — so that it is possible to view, for example, only persons recorded in Domesday Book.
- Possession provides information about people's possessions, e.g. their land, money, or other belongings.
- Location lists all localities, by shire or settlement, with which persons in the database are associated.
- Event provides a list of events in which the persons in the database are involved, organised into five smaller sub-categories.
Date lists all the dates covered in the database, by subdivisions (early, middle, and late) of centuries (vi - xii). The dates given are all floreat dates, so that, e.g., 'l ix' indicates persons known to be alive during the late ninth century.
- Contains text is slightly different from the other categories presented here. Rather than providing the user with a list of values for selection, clicking on 'Text contains' causes a text search box to appear; the list returned will then be that of all persons whose records contain the text entered into the search box.
Additional controls
- View Persons / Factoids: It is possible to use the categories listed above to select not persons, but the individual assertions ('Factoids') made about them in our sources and recorded in the database. To change mode in this way, select 'Factoids' rather than 'Persons' in the left-hand column.
- Include coin data / Domesday data: The PASE database contains extensive data drawn from Domesday book and from numismatic sources. Very often, however, these sources provide us with very little information beyond the fact that an individual existed. To exclude these two types of sources from the result list, untick the boxes provided above the categories.