Medieval English genealogy: updates: 30 June 2025

This page contains brief details of the latest batch of updates to the site, and includes newly added and updated links. For brief details of these and older additions - without links, to make site maintenance easier - see the what's new page.

If you'd like to receive a notification by email when this site is updated, please let me know by email at cgp@medievalgenealogy.org.uk.

Contents:

• News
• New material
• New links
• Updated links

News

An update on the forthcoming third edition of the Complete Peerage. Perhaps inevitably, there has been some slippage of the publication timetable, and the first three volumes are currently expected to appear in September. The publisher's original prospectus is available here. I'll add more information here when it becomes available.

New material

Some further additions have been made to the two searchable databases of material on the Anglo-American Legal Tradition website. In the AALT Lists and Indexes database database, 6 new indexes of King's Bench (KB 27) plea rolls by Vance Mead have been added, from the period 1461-1466. Also, the Plea Roll database, which originally covered only the Court of Common Pleas (CP 40), now also contains all 93 of Vance's indexes for KB 27, from the period 1460-1564. The Plea Roll database offers a more powerful search facility than the AALT Lists and Indexes database, because surnames, forenames and place-names can be specified, rather than just keywords.

The following items have been updated in the Corrections and additions to the Complete Peerage section:

• Devon, volume 4, pages 309, 310 and note a of page 310 (edited for clarity).
• FitzAlan, volume 5, page 393, note d (as modified by volume 14) (another correction added).

Photographs of three files of Herefordshire feet of fines (CP 25/1/83/45-47), covering 1363-1377, have been uploaded to the Anglo-American Legal Tradition website, and links to them have been added from the abstracts on this website.

New links

• Medieval source material on the Internet:
  • County and local history:
    • Stephen Swailes, Wellingborough [Northamptonshire]: Life, work and society to the early twentieth century (2022) (Internet Archive - Text Archive)
      Detailed account of the history of Wellingborough, including several chapters on the medieval manor and town.
  • Probate records:
    • Edward Alexander Fry, ed., A calendar of wills and administrations relating to the county of Dorset ... (1900) (FamilySearch Digital Library)
      British Record Society, volume 22. See also volume 53. Includes Consistory court (Dorsetshire division) of the late diocese of Bristol, 1681-1792 ... Archdeaconry court of Dorset, 1568-1792 ... peculiars, 1660-1799 [and earlier and later dates]
    • George S. Fry, ed., Calendars of wills and administrations relating to the county of Dorset (1922) (FamilySearch Digital Library)
      British Record Society, volumes 53 and 45a. Indexes for a large number of courts in addition to those in volume 22, including the archdeacon's and consistory courts of Sarum and the court of the archdeacon of Taunton.
  • Heralds' Visitations and the College of Arms:
    • J. L. Vivian, The Visitations of the County of Devon, ... 1531, 1564. and 1620. With additions. (HathiTrust Digital Library)
      N.B. Todd Farmerie (in soc.genealogy.medieval postings) points out that some of the material in Vivian's edition is inaccurate - particularly the earlier parts of the pedigrees and those immediately subsequent to the visitation records.
      [Other copies at: Nigel Batty-Smith, UK Genealogy Archives.]
  • Miscellaneous:
    • The Corpus of Anglo Saxon Stone Sculpture (Durham University)
      Online version of a published 13-volume survey of surviving Anglo-Saxon sculpture, arranged geographically.
• Victoria County History:
  • Other:
    • William Page, The Victoria History of the County of York. Volume 1. (1907) (FamilySearch Digital Library)

Updated links

• Medieval source material on the Internet:
  • County and local history:
    • Colchester Archaeological Trust Online Report Series (Colchester Archaeological Trust and University of Essex)
      Collection of archaeological reports relating to Colchester, produced by the Colchester Archaeological Trust and others, including the Essex Archaeological Society.
  • Heralds' Visitations and the College of Arms:
    • Frederic Thomas Colby, ed., The Visitation of the County of Devon In the Year 1564, with Additions from The Earlier Visitation of 1531. (1881) (Nigel Batty-Smith, UK Genealogy Archives)
• Links:
  • Modern ordinaries:
    • Joan Corder, A Dictionary of Suffolk Arms (1965) (Suffolk Records Society)
      Suffolk Records Society, volume 7. An ordinary of arms compiled from various sources.