What this is
Medieval Toolbox is a small collection of free tools for students and scholars working with the records of medieval England. It grew out of the everyday problems of archival work: turning a regnal year into a date, finding which saint’s day a document was dated by, adding up accounts in pounds, shillings and pence, and tracking down where a class of Crown records has been printed and where the originals can be seen.
It is an independent, not-for-profit project. There are no adverts, no accounts to create, and nothing to pay.
The tools
- Regnal Year Converter Anno Regni
Converts regnal years to modern dates and back, from William I to Charles III, down to the day and month, and helps date earlier documents by the indiction, the Easter reckoning and the kings reigning in each kingdom before 1066. - Medieval Calendar Calendarium
Saints’ days, moveable feasts, law terms and return days for any year. - Money & Units Nummus
A pounds, shillings and pence calculator, with converters for coin denominations and medieval weights and measures. - Sources Fontes
A guide to the records of the medieval English Crown and Church to 1509, from Chancery, the Exchequer, the courts, the Special Collections, and papal, episcopal, monastic and clergy records, with links to free scans of the printed calendars, images of the original rolls, and searches of The National Archives’ catalogue.
More tools are in development and will be added here as they are ready.
Who made it
Medieval Toolbox is built and maintained by Jacob Newbury (LinkedIn), a PhD researcher at the University of Winchester studying a gentry family in fifteenth-century Dorset, and documentary researcher.
Using what you find here
The toolbox is a finding aid. Dates, values and references should be checked against the original documents and the printed editions they come from, and it is those you should cite in your own work. The Sources pages give the full details of every edition they link to.
The tools draw on standard reference works, chiefly C.R. Cheney, A Handbook of Dates for Students of British History, revised by Michael Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and R.E. Zupko, British Weights and Measures: A History from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977).
Acknowledgements
The Sources pages would not be possible without the work of others in making the records available, and link out to them throughout:
- The National Archives, whose catalogue descriptions and series references underpin every entry
- Anglo-American Legal Tradition (University of Houston), for its images of the original rolls
- British History Online, Internet Archive, HathiTrust and Google Books, for digitised calendars and editions
- The List and Index Society and the record societies whose volumes are listed
- Medieval Genealogy, whose guides to printed rolls and inquisitions were a valuable starting point
The typefaces are EB Garamond and Source Serif 4, both under the SIL Open Font License.
Privacy
Medieval Toolbox does not use cookies and does not ask for any personal information.
Visits are counted with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which records anonymous totals (pages viewed, the site you came from, country, and browser and device type) without cookies and without identifying or following you across other sites. The Sources page remembers which tab you last had open; this is kept in your own browser and is never sent anywhere.
Links to other websites, such as The National Archives or the Internet Archive, take you to sites with their own privacy policies.