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.