Since uploading old data and notes to Github has gone well and I’ve got some spare time, I’ve added some notes about sources for tracing the careers of parliamentarian military units and their personnel. This is very rough and nowhere near complete because it’s left over from abandoned projects and things that I noted while looking for something else.

The final Github upload for now is some notes and references about the establisment of the New Model Army’s artillery train. The army was mainly planned by the Army Committee, but the Accounts Committee objected to the establishment for the artillery and produced its own smaller establishment. These lists and the debate between the committees give some useful insights into the intended (which is not necessarily the same as the actual) size and composition of the artillery train, and into how armies were expected to operate. For example:

• Medium field guns (sakers) were not expected to be concentrated in artillery batteries, but to be split into pairs attached to foot regiments or in ‘places of advantage’.
• The role of pioneers included cutting gaps in hedges so that infantry and cavalry could march off the road, freeing up road space for artillery and transport.
• More evidence to support Stephen Bull’s argument that artillery was already using canvas cartridges in the 1640s.

During the British Civil Wars, Parliament appointed committees to collect accounts from each parish of losses and contributions to the parliamentarian war effort, including taxes, sequestration, voluntary contributions, and anything that soldiers had taken without paying. This post is about parish loss accounts from Buckinghamshire, but the accounts from Warwickshire are better known. Although I looked at many of the original Warwickshire accounts for my PhD research in the 1990s, I haven’t had anything to do with them since. Transcripts of most known Warwickshire accounts are now free to view at the Heritage and Culture Warwickshire website (although they’re missing TNA, SP 28/38/3, f. 202 which covers Ipsley). The transcripts are in PDF format, which makes it easy to publish and archive the text, but difficult to extract structured data for systematic analysis. These accounts were transcribed by a team of volunteers, who gained new skills and experience, and engaged more deeply with historical sources. This is good public engagement, which is the proper purpose of crowdsourcing, but crowdsourcing is not necessarily a quick or cheap way to get work done. According to the introduction, it took 26 volunteers 2 years to transcribe around 200 accounts (which I think added up to about 1 million words but I can’t find a reference for that now). Although the volunteers weren’t paid for their labour, the project still needed a grant of £13,800 from the Heritage Lottery Fund. As a professional transcriber, I can transcribe a million words on my own in a year or less if someone pays me to do it. At the time when the Warwickshire project started, I would have accepted £13,800 to be guaranteed work for a year, although I would charge much more now.

I haven’t transcribed the Buckinghamshire accounts, but I have compiled some catalogue data and uploaded it to Github. The files consist of:

• a catalogue of around 100 accounts that survive.
• a list of all known parishes and sub-units in Buckinghamshire with references to surviving accounts, and also to evidence that an account once existed but has been lost. Also a few incidental references to other documents covering the same place, but these are not complete.
• a link table to link IDs in the above two datasets.

There may well be more Buckinghamshire accounts that I haven’t found. The Warwickshire project found some accounts in unexpected places. Based on what I’ve found, 39% of units in Buckinghamshire have surviving accounts, 17% had accounts that have since been lost (although some might turn up somewhere), and 44% have no trace of any accounts. There is a very noticeable gap in Newport hundred, where no accounts are known to survive, and the only trace of a lost account is an individual account for one person. This doesn’t look random, but there’s no definite explanation for it.

The latest upload to my Github is a fairly large dataset about compounding cases. These relate to people whose property was confiscated by Parliament during the British Civil Wars. The system started with the Sequestration Committee, which had the power to confiscate the estates of anyone it classed as a ‘delinquent’. It’s important to note that the official definition of ‘delinquent’ changed more than once, and that it never meant exactly the same thing as the modern word ‘royalist’. For example, someone’s estate could be sequestered for not paying taxes, even if they never did anything for the King. Later, Parliament set up the Committee for Compounding, which had the power to return sequestered estates if the owner paid a fine equivalent to a fraction of the full value of the estate and swore an oath that they wouldn’t help the King in future. Later still, the rules were changed so that delinquents could compound on their own discovery. This meant that anyone worried that they might be classed as a delinquent could confess and pay the fine in advance to avoid possible sequestration in future.

The records of the Committee for Compounding are held by The National Archives of the UK in series SP 23. In the 19th century, Mary Green compiled Calendar of the Committee for Compounding, a published summary of each case with references to original documents. As the calendar has been out of copyright for a long time, I’ve compiled spreadsheets containing structured data about compounding cases, and people who were main subjects of cases. This amounts to over 6,000 cases and over 8,000 people. This was for a project of my own that has now been abandoned, so I might as well share what I’ve got. There was going to be a second pass where I recorded details of military service and which articles of surrender people claimed the benefit of, but that won’t happen now. I hope this data will be useful to someone.