| About this site | Controls | Page Images | Legend | Map | The Itinerary of King John, and the Rotuli Litterarum Patentium |
The TimelineThe timeline above displays the itinerary of King John of England for nearly every day of his seventeen year reign. Like most medieval kings, John's government was relentlessly itinerant. The places he visited are plotted on the map, changing dynamically, reflecting the places displayed in the lower band of the timeline. The timeline can be scrolled left and right by clicking and dragging, and you can observe John's progress as he traveled throughout England, Wales, Ireland, and France. The top band displays contextual events of general interest for the period, and the highlighted bar in the middle of the band represents the period of time pictured in the lower band.The data displayed in this timeline was published in tabular format in the Rotuli Litterarum Patentium in Turri Londinensi Asservati, edited by Thomas Duffus Hardy, and published in 1835. This essential source for students of the period is a large folio volume not widely available and rather awkward to use. Both the itinerary and the text of the patent rolls themselves are presented here in a more convenient form as a service to historians and students. The point of this site is to visualize historical and geographical information in context: the more context the better! But if you're working with a laptop, or your monitor at low resolution, you will find a more compact version here. For a more detailed description of the structural elements of the timeline above, consult the information under the 'Legend' tab. The Patent Rolls: Rotuli Litterarum Patentium in Turri Londinensi AsservatiThe letters patent of the English crown are a foundational source for the study of medieval English government. These letters, "patent" because they were transmitted open and intended for all to see, constitute the primary instruments of royal government in the time of King John and his successors. They are the essential starting point for any study of medieval England, and indeed medieval Europe.Letters patent from the medieval period touch upon every conceivable aspect of royal government, from treaties and diplomatic correspondence to fiscal matters and family politics. The best introduction to the patent rolls, their content and historical utility, is Hardy's own introduction beginning on page i and available under the 'Page Images' tab. The text of the Rot. Lit. Pat can be used independently from the timeline. Under the 'Page Images' tab you will find a paging mechanism that will allow you to consult the indexes of names and places, and go directly to pages of the introduction or the roll itself. The ItineraryThe publication of the patent rolls alone was a boon to historians of medieval England, but Thomas Hardy went further. For the 1835 edition, Hardy collated information from the teste and dating clauses of the patent letters themselves with information drawn from the charter and close rolls, the wardrobe accounts, and the praestita rolls. Based on this collation, Hardy was able to determine the exact itinerary of the king for nearly every day of his reign. This was a remarkable feat of scholarship, and Hardy's itinerary has been an invaluable resource for historians ever since. (The pages of Hardy's original itinerary tables begin here.)Included below Hardy's tables was a gazetteer of the places mentioned, with the dates for each place listed. The data displayed in this timeline and map was captured by scanning the gazetteer, processing the image with OCR software, and parsing the result with a python script to produce a JSON formatted object for the timeline software. Unfortunately, the Rot. Lit. Pat. exists only in the folio edition published in 1835. This is a fairly uncommon volume, available only in extensive research libraries. The purpose of this site is to offer the data of Hardy's itinerary in a more convenient and widely accessible format, and link it more closely with the patent letters themselves. Clicking on any of the events in the lower band of the timeline above will bring up an information bubble which contains links to the pages of the Rot. Lit. Pat that contain dated letters for the relevant period. Because the data in the itinerary was drawn from a variety of sources, not all of the events on the timeline will have links, and not all of the events will be represented in the patent letters at all. The MapPlace-names have always been a problem for students of medieval records. Places change their names; the same place-name is sometimes applied to more than one location; places, once important, sometimes disappear altogether and are known only by their names in the records.The place markers on the map were derived by querying the Google geocoding interface using Hardy's place-names. This was a pretty crude first pass at providing geographical data for the timeline events. The procedure results in many errors since Google knows nothing of medieval places. The place markers on the map should therefor not be regarded as authoritative. The research and disambiguation of all the 600 or so places mentioned in Hardy's itinerary is a research project that will go forward using this first pass as a starting point. Record Type When Hardy published the Rot. Lit. Pat. in 1835, it was thought that in order to preserve potential ambiguities present in the rolls, an effort should be made to reproduce the text including the system of scribal abbreviation in use during the thirteenth century. To that end, a typeface called "record type" was used, and an example drawn from the text is shown here. In practice, record type tends to obfuscate rather than illuminate. And for our purposes here, this specialized typeface has the added unfortunate effect of rendering the text opaque to ordinary OCR techniques. That is why the text of the rolls is not digitized and indexed as it should be. To improve the readability of the abbreviations, the aspect ratio of the page images for the body of the text has been slightly altered, elongating the images somewhat.
Record type takes some getting used to, but the Latin of the rolls is so highly formulaic that reading it is not too challenging. Fortunately, an excellent guide to the system of abbreviation is available: Martin, Charles Trice. The Record Interpreter: A Collection of Abbreviations, Latin Words and Names Used in English Historical Manuscripts and Records. London: Stevens and Sons, 1949. This work is still in print, has been through many editions, and is readily, and inexpensively available. Construction Zone
Contact & ContributionThe Itinerary of John is an ongoing, open-sourced research project. This site was created by integrating the open-source timeline API from MIT's SIMILE project with the publicly available mapping API from Google. The content of the site, similarly, is intended to be open-sourced. Plans for the future include deploying this project in the context of a wiki so that interested scholars may contribute:
The Itinerary of King John project is intended to be collaborative. Comments, corrections, and questions can be addressed to me at jjcrump [at] myuw.net until such time as the wiki framework is in place. Acknowledgement & RightsGreat thanks and kudos belong to David Huynh, the principal author of the SIMILE timeline API. He has created a tool that will be a great boon to historians, and without his direct assistance, this resource would not have been possible.Thanks also to the Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington for allowing me to scan the full text of their copy of the Rot. Lit. Pat.. Also thanks to the Suzzallo Library office of Digital Initiatives for allowing me to use their scanning equipment and software (principally ABBYY FineReader OCR software, and Photoshop) for capturing the data and preparing the page scans for display on the web. So far as I know, the Rotuli Litterarum Patentium is in the public domain. Unless otherwise noted, all other text on this site, the RDF encoded data, and the software code that enables the site (exclusive of the SIMILE timeline and Google Maps APIs) are offered under the following license: The Itinerary of King John Project by J. J. Crump is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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