The Henry III Fine Rolls Project

The Henry III fine Rolls Project is a three year
project which aims to publish a series of legal
documents, known as ‘fine rolls’, which chart offers of money made to King Henry III of England in exchange for
a wide range of concessions and favours. There is a fine roll for each of his fifty-six years on the throne (1216–1272) and they offer significant insight into the political,
governmental, legal, social and economic history of the day. Based at King’s College London and the UK’s
National Archives, the project aims to publish the rolls up to the year 1248 in both book and electronic form.
The electronic version will enable the indexing and
searching of a wide variety of legal terms relating to office, finance, witnesses and the nature of the legal
documents themselves, as well as more general terms
relevant to the period, such as those associated with
social status, ethnicity and family structure.
Our use of TEI inevitably involves a large degree of
customisation: partly due to the specific legal nature of the fine rolls (hence the addition of new elements), partly due to the practical needs inherent in any multi-editor collaborative environment (which have made us examine
ways to simplify markup structures) and partly due to the rich ‘subject’ terms which are being encoded
(leading to our tailoring the attribute values permitted
for a given term). I will assess the impact on this
project of the new customisation facilities available in P5,
describing the customisation itself, the consequences for work-flow in an ever-evolving scholarly process, the production of documentation, and the wider benefits for the publication process