The National Archives is helping make accessible a financial survey of the Church ordered by Henry VIII after his break with Rome.
His inspectors counted 8,000 parish churches, 650 monasteries, 22 cathedrals and numerous chapels, chantries, colleges, schools, hospitals and poor houses as they travelled the length and breadth of England and Wales in 1535.
The resulting survey is known as Valor Ecclesiasticus.
Many of the men and women who lived and worked in these church-run communities were also counted, along with meadows and orchards, moorland and woods, waterways and a wide variety of working environments from market stalls to open-cast coal mines.
This extraordinary snapshot of Tudor England is being made available to the public thanks to almost £1.5m from UK Research & Innovation’s Arts and Humanities Research Council.
The work will be done by the University of Exeter, The National Archives, the University of Nottingham, the University of Reading, the National Trust and community groups.
A digital team in the University of Exeter’s Department of Classics, Ancient History, Religion and Theology, will transform the 500-year old Latin manuscripts into modern, searchable records. The National Archives holds the original returns for the survey.
The original record on rolls of parchment was printed once by Parliament’s Record Commission nearly 200 years ago, in an abbreviated Latin transcript so clumsy and difficult to read that generations of historians have steered clear.
Rediscovering the Tudor Domesday will see the survey translated, analysed and each location linked to current maps on a free access website. The National Archives will create archive and education resources about individual religious houses.
Project lead Prof James Clark, of the University of Exeter’s Department of Archaeology and History, says: “Valor Ecclesiasticus is second only to Domesday Book as a snapshot of the realm, even surpassing it in the impression it gives of England’s landscape and the lives and occupations of local society.”
Dr Euan Roger, Principal Medieval Records Specialist at The National Archives said: “This survey is an incredible resource for local history yet has been inaccessible to all but the most experienced of researchers for years. We are opening it to a new generation of historians, archivists, heritage professionals and anyone who wants to uncover their neighbourhood’s past.”
