Case Study: The Earls Colne Project

Birth of the project

Britain has had a very long tradition of local historical studies. In terms of their duration, variety and accuracy, England has possibly the best local historical records in the world, stretching back to the fourteenth century.

The growth of County Record Offices from the 1950's made these accessible in a new way. I had spent many months researching witchcraft in the Essex Record Office in the early 1960's so I was aware of the richness and diversity of the documents. Social anthropologists were showing that intensive studies of small communities could show a 'world in a grain of sand' and tell us something much more general about how a society worked and changed. Historians of population were just starting to show how valuable it was to link records together, particularly baptisms, marriages and burials - and I thought that this might be extended to other types of record.

The diary of Ralph Josselin

While I was working in the Essex Record Office I came across a typescript of the diary of Ralph Josselin, Vicar of Earls Colne from 1640 to 1683. The many references to his family and wider kin intrigued me, and later, when I was studying anthropology, I wrote a book on his family life. As a result of this I was asked to edit a full edition of his diary for the British Academy. The many references to fellow villagers made me wonder how much I could find out about them from other records. So I decided to try to gather together everything about the village of Earls Colne that might refer to Josselin and his contemporaries. I was amazed by just how much there was and I decided to use this village as an experiment to see whether it was possible to reconstruct an historical community.

De-coding the stories

This was not a simple task. Many of the documents were in Latin, some of them, for example the manor court records, were hundreds of feet long. The archives were scattered in record offices across the country and in private hands. It was clearly going to be a large task to bring together all the surviving records of a parish for a period of hundreds of years. I did not, in 1973, when this project formally began, realise that it would take twenty-seven years. It has always been a team effort. Early on we were encouraged to use computers but this was long before the desk-top and Windows revolution. We had to type data onto paper tape which was then fed into the Cambridge main frame computer. Editing for some years was a line at a time. We could not see a full screen of text to edit until we got an early free-standing computer in the late 1970's. Despite the difficulties much of the present format was developed in those years.

Our first attempt at reconstructing an historical community in a computer ended in 1981. We had hoped that other researchers would have been able to access and interrogate the data over university links, but this was not possible, so we contented ourselves with producing a microfiche version and stored the data on magnetic tape for a time when it might be possible to do what we had originally intended.

Earls Colne Online

Now that Earls Colne is on the Web it will be an enduring monument, fulfilling F.W.Maitland's hope that long periods of records for English communities be published, but exceeding his dream in that these are now accessible from all over the world. Ideally the site can be used to give an overview of the range of records one might look for in relation to many English parishes and what they will tell you. It combines long sets of records, the linked indexes of places and people, all set alongside maps and surveys, and with introductory guides to the nature of English historical records. The underside of English history, its continuous, evolving, law-soaked, highly mobile and commercialized nature shines through. We can see a tiny microcosm of an ancient yet modern world as it moves from medieval affluence, through the turbulence of the English Civil Wars, up to the mature years of the first industrial nation.

Find out more

About the author

Alan Macfarlane is Professor of Anthropological Science and Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He holds doctorates in history and anthropology and is the author of twelve books in these fields.