How to search

The basics

Type this	To get
pardon westminster	entries containing both words (in any order).
"safe conduct"	the exact phrase, words adjacent and in order.
pardon -marks  or  pardon NOT marks	entries with pardon but not marks.
Sakeville OR Saukevill	either word, broadens to catch spelling variants. This is what the “also try” chips add.
pilgrim*	a wildcard: pilgrim, pilgrims, pilgrimage…

Tip: the “also try” chips under the box add their word with OR, so accepting a suggested spelling widens the net rather than narrowing it.

Precision: “Mark” the name vs. “marks” the money

By default the index is stemmed, searching mark also finds marks and marked, which is usually what you want. When you need a name and not a near-spelling, tick “Whole word only” under the search box: mark will then match only the standalone word Mark, never marks (currency) or marked. Combine it with an exclusion for the strongest filter: Mark -marks with whole-word on.

Matching modes

Mode	When to use it
Smart (recommended)	The default. Tries exact words first, then close spellings, then known people, so you rarely miss anything.
Exact phrase	Treats everything you typed as one phrase.
All words	Every word must appear; no fuzzy fallback.
Fuzzy / close spelling	Substring/close-spelling recall for badly varying or mis-scanned words.
Sounds-like (spelling variants)	Expands each word to its spelling variants in this corpus (e.g. Sackville → Sakeville, Saukevill) and searches all of them. Best for surnames and place-names.

“Also try” suggestions

Below the search box we surface spelling variants drawn from the actual corpus and, for common research themes, related terms and Latin equivalents. These are never applied automatically, click a chip to add it, or ignore them. This is how you make sure a search for pilgrimage also reaches peregrinatio and going beyond seas.

Filtering & counting

Open ＋ More filters to narrow by king, roll type, county, date range, act type (pardon, grant, licence, mandate…) and date confidence. Each result set reports three separate figures, because they answer different questions:

• Documents, calendar entries matched.
• Discrete acts, individual recorded acts within those entries (one entry often bundles many: “Pardon to X… Grant to Y… The like to Z”).
• People named, distinct individuals our index links to those entries.

Reading one entry

On an entry page, multi-act entries are broken into their separate acts, each tagged by type. Arriving from a search or a person, use “Show only acts mentioning…” to collapse an entry down to just the sentences about your subject. Every entry links the people named (with their other appearances), other entries at the same place, and the canonical source page for citation.

Build a topic dossier

From any result set, choose Full topic analysis to get a single page with frequency over time (year / decade / reign), a map of where, a breakdown of act types, co-occurring people counts, completeness suggestions, and one-click CSV export, everything you need to characterize a theme like pilgrimage or safe conduct at a glance.

People, families & relationships

Each person page shows their active date range, a timeline, the places and act types they appear in, who they are named alongside, any titles or offices (earl, bishop, steward, nun…), and extracted relationships.

• Biographical events, death, marriage, dower and inheritance clauses are pulled out and highlighted separately, because they pin down a life.
• Inferred names, a woman named only as “the wife of …” is given her husband’s surname and badged name inferred; when she is named in her own right (e.g. Margaret de Umframvill, late the wife of Bartholomew de Badelesmere) we keep her own name and note the married one too.
• Uncertainty is shown, not hidden, anaphoric or weak links (“William his son”) carry an uncertain badge.
• Same-person & family hints, the profile suggests others who may be the same individual (same forename, overlapping dates) and similarly-spelled families (Warenna/Warenne) without merging them, look-alikes such as Clare and Claver stay separate until a human confirms.
• Date-window refine, narrow a profile to a year range to separate a father and son who share a name.

Searching for people directly

The People page is a dedicated person search: type a name (modern or medieval spelling) to search every extracted individual, far more than the most-attested few shown by default. Close-spelling matches appear in their own panel. From a profile you can jump to every family the person holds (a woman keeps links to her natal family and each marriage), refine by date window, and follow the people she is named alongside.

Curating spellings, families & places

• Family spellings, on a family page, open “Curate these spellings” to suggest a spelling belongs to another family, or flag one as wrong.
• Similar families / places, suggestions (Molis/Molyns, Notingham/Nottingham) are shown but never auto-merged; preview combines them on screen, and a merge request sends them for human review.

Themes, connections & roles

• Themes, entries are auto-tagged by subject (pilgrimage, trade, crime, church, land, war…). Theme chips on an entry, and the Theme filter under ＋ More filters, jump to everything on that subject. (When the volume indexes are added, their curated subject headings will feed the same tags.)
• Connections, each profile lists who the person is named alongside and their extracted relationships. (A visual connection graph exists behind the scenes and will return once the layout is polished.)
• Roles in transactions (low confidence), who complained, who received a grant, who served whom (“steward of …”), pulled from the wording.
• Merge preview, on a family page, “+ preview” combines a similar-sounding family on screen so you can judge a match; nothing is saved unless you request a permanent merge for review.

Disambiguation and merges are curated in data/person_overrides.json (merge two records, split one by date, declare two spellings one family, or attach an authority description), see docs/PEOPLE.md. Spotted an error? Use the “Flag an error” link on the profile.