Trials and Tribulations of the RCHME Commissioners

A guest post from the Permissions Controller for the digitisation of RCHME volumes:

As announced earlier in the year, the IHR is undertaking a project funded by English Heritage to digitise the 43 volumes produced by the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments of England.(1) The volumes date from 1910 to 1985 and concern earthworks and ecclesiastical and secular buildings in England constructed prior to 1850. The team at IHR is making good progress in preparing the text and images for online publication and we expect the volumes will begin to go live towards the end of October. In the meantime I thought it would be interesting to post some observations on the difficulties faced by the men and women who carried out the original work on the print volumes.

Insights into the problems encountered by Commissioners over the years can be found in the prelims of the volumes. The prelims usually consist of a preface by the Chairman, the Royal Warrants, and the official report by the Commission to the reigning King or Queen. A frequent gripe, especially in the volumes published between the wars, is the lack of funds provided by the Treasury limiting, both the scope of the work and the speed at which it could be achieved. (2) I’m sure many civil servants today would empathise!

Perhaps some of the toughest challenges were presented by the First World War. Before war had even broken out, work on the Essex and London volumes was interrupted by the frequent arrests of Commissioners whose activities were deemed highly suspicious by the local constabulary and military police.(3) In the later years of the conflict staff from the Commission were seconded to the war effort. Some of these men and women received awards for their service on return, but some were killed in the line of duty. Others survived serious physical and mental trauma, but were not capable of returning to work for some years, if at all, due to the injuries they sustained.(4) Mr E. A. Rahbula lost his right arm in battle but taught himself to use his left arm in order to continue his work for the Commission as a draughtsman(5):

© English Heritage

Decades later, disaster struck with a fire in the Cambridge office of the Commission. This necessitated a repeat of many of the surveys which had already been carried out for Cambridgeshire - a reminder of the perils of research in the pre-digital age.(6) In 1970 a tragedy occurred during the preparation of the York volumes. One of the Commission’s Senior Investigators, Mr Jeffrey Radley F.S.A., was accidentally killed when part of the defences collapsed during an excavation.(7)

These events, all briefly sketched in the opening pages of the volumes, provide glimpses into the workings of the Commission over the course of the twentieth century.  Anyone using these volumes will be able to appreciate the herculean task of amassing so much information and preparing it for publication; I am that bit more appreciative now having read about the hardships faced by the people who were responsible for that task.

In the coming weeks we will post further updates on the project, including a piece on the illustrations which accompany the text.

Rachael Lazenby


(1) This post describes the scope of the volumes in more detail.
(2) See for example Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England): An Inventory on the Historical Monuments in Herefordshire Volume I (London, 1931) p. xviii.
(3) Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England): An Inventory on the Historical Monuments in Essex Volume I (London, 1916) p. xvii.
(4)  A full list of staff involvement in the war is provided in Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England): An Inventory on the Historical Monuments in Essex Volume II (London, 1921) p. xxi-xxii.
(5)  Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England): An Inventory on the Historical Monuments in the City of York Volume I (London, 1962) p. xxvii.
(6)  Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England): An Inventory on the Historical Monuments in Dorset Volume I (London, 1952) p. xxx.
(7)  Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England): An Inventory on the Historical Monuments in the City of York Volume II (London, 1972) p. xvii.

Consultation on Eighteenth Century Texts

At BHO we are considering the possibility of republishing some of the transcriptions produced by Eighteenth Century Collections Online Text Creation Partnership (ECCO-TCP). Our aim would be to select texts that work particularly well with current BHO content, but we would be delighted to hear the views of BHO users.

The list below is not a list of proposed candidates, but simply illustrates the range of texts that ECCO-TCP has to offer:

• John Arbuthnot: An Enquiry into the Connection Between the Present Price of Provisions and the Size of Farms
• Madame d'Aulnoy: The History of the Earl of Warwick, Sirnam'd the King-Maker
• John Brown: A Compendious History of the British Churches in England, Scotland, Ireland and America
• Daniel Defoe: A Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain
• Charles Dibdin: A Complete History of the English Stage
• Robert Douglas: The Peerage of Scotland
• John Hawkins: Observations on the State of the Highway
• David Hume: The History of England: under the House of Tudor
• Maiden Hospital: Statutes of Maiden Hospital
• Joseph Moxon: Mechanick Execises: or the doctrine of handy-works
• William Oldys: The Life of Sir Walter Ralegh
• Thomas Paine: Common Sense
• Thomas Pennant: A Tour of Wales
• Adam Smith: An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
• Horace Walpole: Anecdotes of Painting in England

Please do comment if you have an opinion on which kinds of ECCO-TCP texts you'd like to see on BHO. Please note, though, that ECCO-TCP is only a small subset of the much larger ECCO resource.

Assessing hidden savings in using British History Online

During June 2012, we undertook a survey of British History Online's registered user base looking at their opinions towards the issue of sustainability. This is the first in a series of blog posts in which we explore the results and deals specifically with the issue of hidden savings.

We asked our users the following question:

Thinking about when you have used British History Online, has it ever saved you making a journey from your home to a library?

If they replied 'yes', we asked a series of follow-up questions to ascertain how many journeys were saved, their mode of transport, the distance travelled, the duration of the journey and cost of any ticket. By combining these figures, we have estimated the level of saving in terms of time and cost achieved by researchers who use the service.

Our methodology is at an early stage; in its draft form, it shows that, on a conservative estimate, we save the United Kingdom Higher Education community interested in history approximately £1.2 million per annum. This equates to around 71k individuals, just over the average number of users which visit BHO in one week.

The methodology also allows us to look at reducing carbon emissions which have to be reported by universities to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) from 2013. We'll be publishing this methodology in full over the coming weeks.

Journal of the House of Lords: new volumes

We have just published four new volumes of the Journal of House of Lords on British History Online. These are volumes 31-34, which cover the period 1765-76, and thus are a useful source for, among other things, the British reaction to increasing tension and hostility between the American colonies and the British government, as well as the War of Independence itself. As an example of the colourful rhetoric, here is a motion for an address from October 1775

That the Powers which they have assumed, and the arbitrary and oppressive Acts which they have done, leave no Doubt of their traiterous Purpose to induce the Colonies to shake off the Controul of the Supreme Legislature, and to bury in an ungrateful Oblivion the Remembrance of the great Industry with which they have been planted, the softening Care with which they have been nursed, the many Advantages which they have enjoyed, and the Expence of Blood and Treasure with which they have been protected by this Nation.

The publication of these volumes fills a gap in BHO's digitisation of the Lords Journal and we are pleased to say that we now have 42 volumes available in this series, all of them freely available.

Trial Browse Feature

We are trialling a new feature on the browse page of British History Online and would be grateful for any comments from our users on what they think of it. At present the feature does not work with Internet Explorer.

If you select any of the checkboxes under Regions, Subjects or Periods you will now be shown a network diagram of the group-level connections to your choice of topics. Below is an example showing the groups that are connected to the selection Midlands, Economic History, 16th century and 17th century:

Below the diagram you can still find the list of relevant publications that you will probably be familiar with. Please try out the new feature and let us know what you think.

Alumni Oxonienses

The Alumni Oxonienses, 1500-1714, is now complete on British History Online.

This series lists all known members of Oxford University from 1500 up to 1714. A second series, covering 1715 to 1886, was compiled by the same editor, Joseph Foster: we very much hope to add the later series to British History Online in the future.

Foster painstakingly worked through the University Archives, cross-referencing with other reference sources of the time, such as registers of the Inns of Court, ecclesiastical and political records. The entries vary in length; for example, here is that of Simon Laude:

Laude, Simon, s. Lewis, of Tamerton, Devon, sacerd. Exeter Coll, matric. 18 Feb., 1626-7, aged 16; B.A. 26 Jan., 1629-30.

Whereas the next entry, for Archbishop William Laud, is quite a bit longer. For many obscure people, such as Simon Laude, this is probably the only printed biographical summary of their lives, and so the Alumni is a particularly valuable resource.

We have tried to make it even more useful for users of British History Online by splitting the text into two columns, with names in the left-hand column to make them easier to scan; we have also put occurences of Oxford and Cambridge college names in bold.

New resources for architectural history

We're just about to begin work on a new digitisation project: of the inventory volumes of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England. The definition of a monument is widely drawn, to include historic buildings and structures of all kinds, and the volumes give accounts of their history and structure, based on a detailed measured survey. Before 1946 only monuments created before 1718 were recorded, but after 1946 coverage was extended to record all 18th and 19th century sites. The project is generously funded by English Heritage, of which the Royal Commission became part.

The 43 RCHME volumes form the counterpart to the publications of the slightly older Survey of London, which was taken over by the RCHME in 1986, the volumes of which are already on BHO. Together they offer a record of England’s monuments unrivalled in range, coverage, detail and accuracy. They also form a counterpart to the architectural content of the Victoria County History, with which the Commission’s history is intertwined. Architects, such as (Sir) Charles Peers, contributed surveys to the volumes of the VCH published before 1908 and went on to contribute surveys to both series for a short time. But the founding of the RCHME soon led to the VCH abandoning detailed survey and record, and to the two series being seen as complementary, with the VCH concentrating on using built evidence for tracing the history of settlement. Cross-searching all three series (a task often undertaken using the books) will be immeasurably enhanced by having all the volumes of the VCH, Survey of London and RCHME available online.

We expect the first volumes to appear this summer, with the set being complete by August 2013.