Archdeaconry of Nottingham Presentment Bills
Heritage Lottery Fund award (2002-2004) for cataloguing and conservation of Archdeaconry of Nottingham Presentment Bills
The historic Archdeaconry of Nottingham was an extensive ecclesiastical jurisdiction within the diocese of York. It comprised almost the whole of the county of Nottingham, and was divided into the four deaneries of Nottingham, Newark, Bingham and Retford. It ceased to exist in 1913. Its records (1556-1942) were transferred to the care of the University of Nottingham in 1943. (See collection level description on the Manuscripts Online Catalogue, and further details within the Archdeaconry Resources web pages.)
The archive had suffered considerable physical damage, with whole series unavailable for consultation. As the papers contain much of relevance to local people and communities, there is increasing interest in access. The catalogue in use had listed the series only at series level, with no detail on individual papers.
To address both conservation and cataloguing needs, several projects were funded and a programme of work was supported by volunteers. In 1994 the National Manuscripts Conservation Trust matched local funding to support conservation work on an Act Book and a series of the seventeenth-century Presentment Bills, identified as a key resource for local researchers.
Almost 4,000 items were conserved. The project served as a pilot. The work employed leaf casting techniques, and successfully established procedures which have since been incorporated into the Department's regular conservation programme.
A more extensive project began in 2002, aiming to provide detailed catalogue records for the whole of the 17th century Presentment Bills, and to deliver these on the internet. The funding also supported conservation of many of the Presentment Bills hitherto unfit for research use.
Presentment Bills
The Presentment Bills form a sub-series within the ecclesiastical court records of the Archdeaconry of Nottingham archive. They contain reports from each parish, made as required at regular intervals, in which the churchwardens named individuals who were accused of specified offences. They were then required to answer at the next meeting of the court. Such records offer a valuable snap shot of community life, and for particular periods - such as the mid-17th century - enable historians to see how local patterns reflected national changes in religious observance.
An extensive series of Presentment Bills survives for the Nottingham, Bingham, Retford and Newark deaneries. The records were kept in bundles by officials of the ecclesiastical court, with the papers stabbed for filing and held together by a string or parchment thong. In common with the rest of the archive, many of these bundles suffered damage from damp and mould and were extremely dirty. A significant proportion was too fragile to handle and their physical condition had prevented any detailed cataloguing. In general the records had not therefore been accessible to researchers.
The documents follow a standard legal form and are well suited to analysis for statistical purposes by historians. They also provide a rich source for local historians researching particular places and individuals. They are, however, difficult for many people to read, requiring palaeographic skills and some understanding of ecclesiastical court procedure. Their only filing order is chronological and in their bundle state there is no easy way of identifying which documents might be relevant for a particular researcher.
The Project
In previous years work had been undertaken by volunteers to extend access to individual documents within different series such as Marriage Bonds. Abstracts and indexes supplied answers to many research enquiries and limited the need to handle the original documents. Building on this, the Heritage Lottery Fund supported a major project to deliver online access to descriptions of the Presentment Bills, with extensive indexes enabling researchers to trace particular people, places and subjects.
The Heritage Lottery funded project aimed to make 16th- and 17th-century records in the series accessible for use for the first time, through linked conservation and cataloguing programmes.
All bundles of documents were cleaned, processed and appropriately repackaged. Documents dated up to 1679 which had been too fragile to be handled were repaired using leaf casting and hand repair techniques. Assessment of the need for full conservation was guided by the assumption that the detailed cataloguing and analysis of the papers would help to limit requests for access to large runs of original documents. During the course of the HLF project, over 7,000 documents were fully conserved, and are now able to be handled by researchers for the first time.
The cataloguing programme started with the series which had already been given conservation attention in the pilot project. The series were listed at item level, with details extracted of persons (individual parishioners and church officers), places, offences and other elements. The cataloguing project began in June 2002. By the end of November 2004, when the HLF project ended, details from over 21,000 Presentment Bills had been entered onto the department's cataloguing system, representing all those dated from 1587 (the earliest surviving documents) to 1679.
By 2005, Manuscripts and Special Collections staff had completed cataloguing all Presentment Bills dated up to 1699. Volunteers then continued to work on the remainder of the bills under the supervision of Manuscripts and Special Collections staff. For bills after 1700, it was decided that only details from bills which contained at least one presentment of an offence would be added to the electronic cataloguing system. This work was completed in December 2010. The total number of Presentment Bills up to the end of the series, dated 1756, is around 41,000. The cataloguing system contains details of 27,000. The remaining 14,000, dated 1700-1756, were submitted as 'Nothing to Present' and are not individually catalogued.
The resulting data is available for electronic access from the departmental web site through the Manuscripts Online Catalogue. It is expected that the high level of indexing will give adequate access to the original evidence for many of those interested in the material and will thus limit the need for researchers to consult the original documents at Nottingham.
Index of Marriage Bonds held in the Archdeaconry archive
Marriage bonds and allegations record applications by couples to be married by licence. They survive in the Nottingham Archdeaconry, with gaps, from the late 16th century to the 19th century.
A variety of published sources provide information and indexes for the greater part of the series. Further details are available in the guide to marriage bonds on the Archdeaconry Resources web pages. For some years, volunteers assisted staff in indexing the main outstanding series, 1781-1790 and bonds after 1801. The extracting of data from the original documents is now complete and the indexes are available through the Manuscripts Online Catalogue.
Next project: Access to Archives (A2A)