'We Built a Database of 290,000 English Medieval Soldiers'

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Conversation, written by authors Adrian R. Bell, Anne Curry, and Jason Sadler: When you picture medieval warfare, you might think of epic battles and famous monarchs. But what about the everyday soldiers who actually filled the ranks? Until recently, their stories were scattered across handwritten manuscripts in Latin or French and difficult to decipher. Now, our online database makes it possible for anyone to discover who they were and how they lived, fought and travelled. To shed light on the foundations of our armed services -- one of England's oldest professions -- we launched the Medieval Soldier Database in 2009. Today, it's the largest searchable online database of medieval nominal data in the world. It contains military service records giving names of soldiers paid by the English Crown. It covers the period from 1369 to 1453 and many different war zones.

We created the database to challenge assumptions about the lack of professionalism of soldiers during the hundred years war and to show what their careers were really like. In response to the high interest from historians and the public (the database has 75,000 visitors per month), the resource has recently been updated. It is now sustainably hosted by GeoData, a University of Southampton research institute. We have recently added new records, taking the dataset back to the late 1350s, meaning it now contains almost 290,000 entries. We hope the database will continue to grow and go on providing answers to questions about our shared military heritage. We are sure that it will unlock many previously untold stories of soldier ancestors.

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