This map of Medieval England contains a wealth of historical information and sites as well as beautiful illustrations. Published in October 1979 as a companion to the modern map "British Isles".>> Order print map <<

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner. This research project aimed to fill a major lacuna militating against the effective exploitation of many post-medieval to mid-Victorian historical sources collected by local administrative areas: the lack of information on the boundaries of those administrative areas, the so-called 'historic' or 'ancient' parishes of England and Wales. It is known that these districts came into being during the Middle Ages, that the map of these ecclesiastical parishes was essentially complete by the fifteenth century, that these ecclesiastical boundaries were adopted during the early modern period for secular and judicial purposes, and that boundaries remained essentially unchanged until a number of reforms from the mid-nineteenth century onwards reorganised the local administrative geography of the country. The project aimed to reconstruct those boundaries as they were before the post-nineteenth century changes.

This dataset is based on material published online at https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/ by the History of Parliament Trust.

R code and research dataset of medieval coins recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme in England and Wales (https://finds.org.uk/) used in the article:

Oksanen, Eljas and Brookes, Stuart (2025). 'The afterlife of Roman roads in England: insights from the fifteenth-century Gough Map of Great Britain', Journal of Archaeological Science.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2025.106227

The coin finds data dump was obtained by the PAS website (https://finds.org.uk/) on 28.03.2025 under CC-BY licence and was filtered to contain only medieval coin findspots that have coordinate values. The R Code for analysis is included and was developed by Eljas Oksanen.

The Mapping Manuscript Migrations (MMM) project was funded from 2017 to 2020 by the Digging into Data Challenge of the Trans-Atlantic Platform. The project partners were the University of Oxford, the University of Pennsylvania, Aalto University, and the Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes. The project's goal was to bring together data from different sources relating to the history and provenance of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, enabling large-scale browsing and searching through a semantic Web portal as well as by direct access to the data. Three separate datasets covering more than 200,000 manuscripts, were combined into a unified knowledge graph, using Linked Open Data technologies. This approach includes a unified data model which is based on the CIDOC-CRM and FRBRoo ontologies, as well as more than 20 million RDF triples. Overlapping vocabularies for persons, places, and organizations in the source datasets were reconciled against identifiers from VIAF, GeoNames, and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographical Names. Works and manuscripts were reconciled by semi-automatic matching techniques based on string similarities. The three source datasets were: (1) Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts from the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, University of Pennsylvania; (2) Bibale database from the Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes (IRHT-CNRS, Paris) and (3) Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries catalogue from the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. To test and demonstrate its usefulness, the MMM Knowledge Graph is in use in the MMM Semantic Portal. Based on the Sampo-UI software developed at Aalto University, the portal enables browsing, searching, and filtering across the project's triple store, together with map-based visualizations of the results.

ArcGIS shapefile of 288 polygons providing boundary and attribute data for the fifty-five ancient counties of England and Wales as given in the 1831 census for England and Wales. As such this represents the counties of England and Wales as they were before the boundary changes caused by the Counties (Detached Parts) Act, 1844 (7 & 8 Vict. c. 61) which led to the elimination of some of the detached portions of counties.These data were created as part of a research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century. These data derive from the 173 digital maps of the boundaries of English and Welsh parishes and their subdivisions produced by Roger Kain and Richard Oliver based on the listing in the 1851 census. The maps were subsequently converted into a single GIS by Burton et al. The GIS attribute data were checked, edited and enhanced with extra data from the census by Max Satchell, Tony Wrigley and a small army of research assistants with technical support from Peter Kitson and Gill Newton. Max Satchell checked and in some cases edited the GIS polygon data using a variety of cartographic and documentary sources. Of these the most important were digital scans of the Ordnance Survey first edition 1:2500 and 1:10560 maps from the Landmark Group distributed by Edina , the series of maps of registration districts and sub-districts boundaries prepared for the Registrar General prior to the censuses of 1861, 1871 and 1891 and the description of enumeration district boundaries given in the Census Enumerators Books for the censuses from 1851, 1861 and 1871. The 1:63,360 maps and Census Enumerators Books are held in The National Archives, Kew (TNA, RG 18/3-155, 198-227, HO 107, RG 9, RG 10). The work involved changing one or more elements of information about place, parish, county, or three figure census number for 2,461 (10.8 per cent) of 22,729 lines of data in the Kain and Oliver GIS. This editing process saw the redigitisation of 644 of the 22,729 polygons, the deletion of 81 polygons, and the digitisation of 525 new polygons. The original Kain and Oliver parish and place dataset did not give details of which counties its units belonged to in 1831, though the authors did note some units had changed county under the auspices of the act of 1844. Max Satchell with help from Geoffrey Stanning and input from Peter Kitson and Tony Wrigley added the 1831 census counties as an attribute to the parish GIS primarily by systematic comparison between the censuses of 1831 and 1851 - the latter's footnotes being particularly informative concerning changes in the county boundaries. In situations where the 1831 county boundary deviated from the post-1844 alignment the polygons from the Burton et al. GIS were subdivided. At the end of this exercise all 23,177 polygons of the enhanced parish GIS could be assigned an 1831 ancient county. This attribute was then used to generate the shapefile of ancient counties.

The Ancient Woodland Inventory identifies over 52,000 ancient woodland sites in England. Ancient woodland is identified using presence or absence of woods from old maps, information about the wood's name, shape, internal boundaries, location relative to other features, ground survey, and aerial photography. The information recorded about each wood and stored on the Inventory Database includes its grid reference, its area in hectares and how much is semi-natural or replanted. Guidance document can be found on our Amazon Cloud Service Prior to the digitisation of the boundaries, only paper maps depicting each ancient wood at 1:50 000 scale were available.Full metadata can be viewed on data.gov.uk.

This data was created as part of a project studying the Register of Pope Gregory VII (d. 1085), funded by the Department of History at the University of Sheffield over the summer of 2020. The data was collected and analysed by George Litchfield with the assistance of Tom Stafford and Charles West. There is a CSV dataset, a project readme.txt and a project description, as well as numerous data visualisations.FindingsDuring the process of collecting this data, we discovered a likely mistake in the German historian Caspar’s 1920’s edited version of the register, which has then subsequently been carried across to Cowdrey’s translation, and the wider historiography. From Book 4 letter 13 to 15, in early March 1077, Gregory is stated to be in Carpineto. However, on the 21st and 23rd of March, Gregory is stated to be in Carpi and Bianello respectively, both of which are over 500km away from Carpineto Romano according to Google maps. It is therefore more likely that in March 1077 Gregory was in Carpineti, which is only around 50km away from both Carpi and Bianello. These same entries may also shed light on Gregory’s travels and travel more widely at this time. On the 21st of March, two letters are recorded, issued from different locations. The first, letter 16, is written from Carpi, while the other entry is written from Bianello. These locations are approximately 44km apart, and so may show us the distance Gregory and other messengers could cover per day (another instance of this occurs in Book 3 letter 3).The disorganisation of the register as it approaches its book 9 is well known, which suggests that the declining number of letters was another symptom of disorganisation in the papal chancery. However, while the data does show the overall trend of letters declining from 1074 to 1084, the average amount of words per letter generally increases over the course of his pontificate, with the exception of downward spikes towards 1082 and 1084, although the lack of entries for these years may be the cause of this. It could be suggested that though Gregory’s output really did decrease, rather than being purely a result of disorganisation, Gregory was simply trying to get more done in fewer letters.The data suggests that time of year was taken into account when deciding when to send letters. This is not immediately clear from the coloured mapping of letters by season. However, by looking at the average distance letters covered by month, it can clearly be seen that in the months of March, April and May, letters covered a greater distance than other months, especially the winter months of January and February. This could be said to show Gregory’s consideration of the weather and travel conditions when conducting business. One thing that may seem strange is the fact that the extremity locations such as in England and Norway were sent in the winter; presumably this was to enable them to complete the more dangerous and remote legs of their journey in the summer.Another notable set of results involving the month of sending is seen when the number of letters sent in each individual month is examined. Gregory’s correspondence tended to spike around April. This trend may be due to Easter, which would have been an important time for Gregory, and is also when he held a number of councils. This adds another important consideration into the mix when examining factors that influenced Gregory’s correspondence through letters.The superimposing of Roman roads onto a map of Gregory’s letters also help us visualise an aspect of his pontificate. As would be expected, the overwhelming majority of Gregory’s letters are sent to areas part of the old Roman Empire. However, this visualisation also neatly demonstrates that Gregory wasn’t limiting his diplomacy to just the old Roman Empire, and sought to bring influence of the Roman areas where this was perhaps lesser felt, especially the northern areas of eastern Europe.The extent of this communication becomes even more notable if we look at the most commonly written-to individual locations in the register. Bohemia and Hungary are first and sixth most written-to locations in the register. Although counting another region like Italy’s letters as a whole would result in a larger number, the letters to Bohemia and Hungary are highly concentrated on a specific group of people, whereas there would be larger variety in Italy’s letters. This provides statistical backing to some of Cowdrey’s arguments in his work on Gregory, namely that Gregory was attempting to enforce papal authority in the German-subject that was Bohemia, and assert the independence of Hungary from Germany, both of which were part of his larger strategy to contain Henry IV’s power in the east.Another argument of Cowdrey is that Gregory was ‘flexible’, and that the idea he ‘acted upon a number of sharply defined and clearly formulated principles of papal action’ is misleading. Yet this does not necessarily show data-wise in the strategy of his letter writing. As can be seen, the amount of clerical and secular recipients generally changes fairly proportionately with one another, with only a slight change where secular overtakes as 1082 approaches. So while the content of letters may change, there does not seem to be any big shift in what part of society Gregory is writing to.This work has suggested the possibilities of using modern data analysis to provide a fresh look at primary material that has already been extensively studied such as Gregory VII’s letters. There are many more possibilities, and it is our hope that someone will take this data set and do just that. One such idea could be breaking down the letters into zones of distance from Rome, and analysing whether this affects the content and tone of the letter. This could lead to a better picture of whether politics or earthly constraints were more of a determining factor in the writing of the letters.BibliographyH. E. J. Cowdrey, The Register of Pope Gregory VII 1073—1085: An English Translation (Oxford, 2002),H. E. J. Cowdrey, Pope Gregory VII, 1073–1085 (Oxford, 1998)Alexander Murray, ‘Pope Gregory VII and His Letters’, Traditio 22 (1966)

ArcGIS shapefile of 1194 polygons providing boundary and attribute data for the 624 registration districts of England and Wales as given in the 1851 census.These data were created as part of a research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century. This shapefile derives from the 173 digital maps of the boundaries of English and Welsh parishes and their subdivisions produced by Roger Kain and Richard Oliver based on the listing in the 1851 census. The maps were subsequently converted into a single GIS by Burton et al. The Burton et al GIS data were checked, edited and enhanced with extra data from the census by Max Satchell, Tony Wrigley and a small army of research assistants with technical support from Peter Kitson and Gill Newton. Max Satchell checked and in some cases digitised GIS polygon data using a variety of cartographic and documentary sources. Of these the most important were digital scans of the Ordnance Survey first edition 1:2500 and 1:10560 maps from the Landmark Group distributed by Edina , the series of maps of registration districts and sub-districts boundaries prepared for the Registrar General prior to the censuses of 1861, 1871 and 1891 and the description of enumeration district boundaries given in the Census Enumerators Books for the censuses from 1851, 1861 and 1871. The 1:63,360 maps and Census Enumerators Books are held in The National Archives, Kew (TNA, RG 18/3-155, 198-227, HO 107, RG 9, RG 10).

ArcGIS shapefile of 2433 polygons providing boundary and attribute data for the 1096 hundreds, wapentakes, wards, divisions, liberties and boroughs of England and Wales as given in the 1831 census.These data were created as part of a research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century. The GIS data originates from the 173 digital maps of the boundaries of English and Welsh parishes and their subdivisions produced by Roger Kain and Richard Oliver based on the listing in the 1851 census. The maps were subsequently converted into a single GIS by Burton et al. The GIS attribute data were checked, edited and enhanced with extra data from the census by Max Satchell, Tony Wrigley and a small army of research assistants with technical support from Peter Kitson and Gill Newton. Max Satchell checked and in some cases edited the GIS polygon data using a variety of cartographic and documentary sources. Of these the most important were digital scans of the Ordnance Survey first edition 1:2500 and 1:10560 maps from the Landmark Group distributed by Edina , the series of maps of registration districts and sub-districts boundaries prepared for the Registrar General prior to the censuses of 1861, 1871 and 1891 and the description of enumeration district boundaries given in the Census Enumerators Books for the censuses from 1851, 1861 and 1871. The 1:63,360 maps and Census Enumerators Books are held in The National Archives, Kew (TNA, RG 18/3-155, 198-227, HO 107, RG 9, RG 10). The work involved changing one or more elements of information about place, parish, county, or three figure census number for 2,461 (10.8 per cent) of 22,729 lines of data in the Kain and Oliver GIS. This editing process saw the redigitisation of 644 of the 22,729 polygons, the deletion of 81 polygons, and the digitisation of 525 new polygons. The hundreds data was created as follows. Geoffrey Stanning under the supervision of Peter Kitson added the hundreds as given in the population tables of the 1851 census to each census parish or place as given in the Burton et al GIS. The remainder of the work was done by Max Satchell who systematically checked the hundred of each 1851 administrative unit against the hundred of the same unit as it was given in the enumeration abstract volumes of the 1831 census. The hundred of the unit was then changed to its 1831 designation where necessary. Where the census listed a hundred, wapentake, division, liberty or borough as belonging to a larger unit below the level of the county, such as a lathe, rape, riding division or part, its name is given in the separate column. In some instances a parish or place lay within two or more hundreds in 1831 but was represented by only a single Burton et al polygon. In such situations the polygon was subdivided using a variety of cartographic sources of hundred boundary data where these were available. The most significant of these were those maps of the Ordnance Survey first edition 1:2500 and 1:10560 prepared from 1844 to c.1880 when hundred boundaries were still shown. Maps of boundaries prepared for the Boundary Commissions of 1832 and 1837 were also invaluable for borough boundaries. At the end of this exercise only two out of 23,177 polygons could not be assigned to any hundred, wapentake, division, ward, liberty or borough.

This GIS shapefile provides boundary and attribute data for the parishes and places enumerated in the 1851 census for England and Wales. These data derive from the 173 digital maps of the boundaries of English and Welsh parishes and their subdivisions produced to a very high standard by Roger Kain and Richard Oliver in 2001, which was expertly converted into a single GIS of some 28000 polygons by Burton et al in 2004. However, what they produced was not yet ready for the mapping of census data due to a modest number (<10%) of administrative units which either lacked boundaries, were unlocated, had labelling errors, or incorrect census numbers. The Occupational Structure of Britain c.1379-1911 research programme undertook the task of enhancing the Burton et al. GIS to provide a comprehensive shapefile of parish and places as listed in the 1851 and 1831 censuses for the mapping of demographic and occupational data with tolerable accuracy for the whole of England and Wales. To this end it was also decided to add additional attributes concerning counties, hundreds and boroughs in 1831, counties in 1851 and registration sub-districts, districts and counties in 1851 from which shapefiles of these different larger scale administrative units could be assembled.These data were created as part of a research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century. This GIS shapefile derives from 173 digital maps of the boundaries of English and Welsh parishes and their subdivisions produced by Kain and Oliver (2001), converted into a single GIS of some 28000 polygons by Burton et al (2004). The GIS attribute data were checked, edited and enhanced with extra data from the census by Max Satchell, Tony Wrigley and a number of research assistants, with technical support from Peter Kitson and Gill Newton. Max Satchell checked and in some cases edited the GIS polygon data using a variety of cartographic and documentary sources. The work involved changing one or more elements of information about place, parish, county, or three figure census number for 2,461 (10.8 per cent) of 22,729 lines of data in the Burton et al. GIS. Each polygon had the name of the ancient hundred, wapentake, borough or equivalent unit added, as given in the 1831 census. In situations where a polygon from the Burton et al. GIS encompassed two or more hundreds it was subdivided, if cartographic sources of boundary data were available. The registration subdistricts, districts and counties were also added from the 1851 census. A fuller account can be found in the associated documentation.

ArcGIS shapefile of 245polygons providing boundary and attribute data for the 55 registration counties of England and Wales as given in the 1851 census. These data were created as part of a research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century. This shapefile derives from the 173 digital maps of the boundaries of English and Welsh parishes and their subdivisions produced by Roger Kain and Richard Oliver based on the listing in the 1851 census. The maps were subsequently converted into a single GIS by Burton et al. The Burton et al GIS data were checked, edited and enhanced with extra data from the census by Max Satchell, Tony Wrigley and a small army of research assistants with technical support from Peter Kitson and Gill Newton. Max Satchell checked and in some cases digitised GIS polygon data using a variety of cartographic and documentary sources. Of these the most important were digital scans of the Ordnance Survey first edition 1:2500 and 1:10560 maps from the Landmark Group distributed by Edina , the series of maps of registration districts and sub-districts boundaries prepared for the Registrar General prior to the censuses of 1861, 1871 and 1891 and the description of enumeration district boundaries given in the Census Enumerators Books for the censuses from 1851, 1861 and 1871. The 1:63,360 maps and Census Enumerators Books are held in The National Archives, Kew (TNA, RG 18/3-155, 198-227, HO 107, RG 9, RG 10).

ArcGIS shapefile of 3,316 polygons providing boundary and attribute data for the 2182 registration subdistricts of England and Wales as given in the 1851 census. These data derive from the 173 digital maps of the boundaries of English and Welsh parishes and their subdivisions produced by Roger Kain and Richard Oliver based on the listing in the 1851 census.These data were created as part of a research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century. These data derive from the 173 digital maps of the boundaries of English and Welsh parishes and their subdivisions produced by Roger Kain and Richard Oliver based on the listing in the 1851 census. The maps were subsequently converted into a single GIS by Burton et al. The GIS attribute data were checked, edited and enhanced with extra data from the census by Max Satchell, Tony Wrigley and a small army of research assistants with technical support from Peter Kitson and Gill Newton. Max Satchell checked and in some cases digitised GIS polygon data using a variety of cartographic and documentary sources. Of these the most important were digital scans of the Ordnance Survey first edition 1:2500 and 1:10560 maps from the Landmark Group distributed by Edina , the series of maps of registration districts and subdistricts boundaries prepared for the Registrar General prior to the censuses of 1861, 1871 and 1891 and the description of enumeration district boundaries given in the Census Enumerators Books for the censuses from 1851, 1861 and 1871. The 1:63,360 maps and Census Enumerators Books are held in The National Archives, Kew (TNA, RG 18/3-155, 198-227, HO 107, RG 9, RG 10).

Townships (Welsh: 'tref', Latin: 'villa') are the smallest civil administrative unit that was used across Wales. Like many old forms of administrative unit, the formation of the townships is unknown. As the townships form the basis for the commotes, which themselves are sub-divisions of cantrefs it is certain that that are contemporary with these territorial entities are early medieval in origin. Townships usually contain some form of settlement (such as village or small town) and usually a church. Townships played a key role in the administration of the local community in matters such as taxation and legal proceedings. Townships are often the main unit referred to in medieval extents and surveys and there are even records of some townships being further divided, such as in the township of Maenan on the River Conwy, but these are rare. Townships remained in use until the mid-nineteenth century, and where used for all manner of legal and secular administration. They where even widely used in the 1851 census. The earliest large-scale Ordnance Survey (OS) mapping for Wales recorded some of their boundaries (Flintshire, eastern parts of Denbighshire and some of Glamorgan), but OS stopped recording them c.1872. Soon after they dropped out of everyday use, but they remain the single most important unit for understanding the geography of Wales. There is currently no dataset accurately depicting all township boundaries in Wales, and this is the first attempt to accurately map these areas in a digitally accessible format. This dataset was created in Esri ArcPro 3.2.1 and reflects the historical hundred boundaries that were extant in 1840 as recorded from various historical cartographical and documentary sources.