Shakespeare’s Henry V <\/a>was a “history play”. At the time the play was written, the events it showed were already over a hundred and fifty years in the past.<\/p>\n

Now, anyone with access to the web can go one better than Shakespeare, whose detailed knowledge of the period must have been a bit limited (Well, OK, you can only better Shakespeare in certain specified ways. Nobody’s managed to get the monkeys to tap out the Complete Works yet. ) <\/p>\n

You can find out the names and jobs of the individual men in Henry V’s armies just by searching on The Soldier in Later Medieval England<\/a> databases. Plus, you can learn any number of other details about medieval soldiers – such as the archers in the Earl of Arundel’s service.<\/p>\n

There are now 250,000 medieval service records online<\/a>, in a pilot project covering the period from 1369 to 1453.<\/p>\n

You can have hours of history nerd fun with this, such as trying to guess which were the most common late medieval peasant surnames. <\/p>\n

(Smiths are pretty rare, for instance, although maybe my search-criteron spelling was too specific. There are a mere half a dozen Taylors. Even FitzWilliams seem to greatly outnumber Smiths. There are many more chaps with the Archer surname, suggesting a possible failure of imagination by the clerks who kept these records.)<\/p>\n

People with a less frivolous interest in local or family history can search on surnames or dates or leaders and extend their knowledge, rather than their enjoyment of trivia.<\/p>\n

There are bits of the database that I can’t work out what to do with, especially the column labelled membrane which has entries like “m4d”<\/p>\n

According to the BBC<\/a><\/p>\n

The website is the product of a research project by Professor Anne Curry of the University of Southampton and Dr Adrian Bell of the University of Reading.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bravo, respect to them and everyone who worked on it.<\/p>\n

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    Shakespeare’s Henry V was a “history play”. At the time the play was written, the events it showed were already over a hundred and fifty years in the past. Now, anyone with access to the web can go one better … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

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