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.