Unlocking the Records of London’s Medieval Foreign Trade
Particular customs accounts recorded immense detail about trade, illuminating the medieval material world and international networks, but are extremely complex.
Unlocking Upcycled Medieval Data
'Unlocking Upcycled Medieval Data: North Sea Networks, People, and Commodities in the London Customs Accounts 1380-1560' opens up the thriving consumer culture of the fifteenth century through digital analysis of the largest surviving collection of medieval customs accounts.
About the Project
‘Unlocking Upcycled Medieval Data: North Sea Networks, People, and Commodities in the London Customs Accounts 1380-1560’ is an AHRC-DFG funded collaboration between the IHR and Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg. It will create new perspectives on late medieval trading networks, economies, and the birth of the consumer economy, through the first comprehensive analysis of the single largest surviving serial collection of medieval trade documents in Europe.
Our project will unlock and optimise the existing traditionally published London Customs Accounts for AI-assisted analysis through our methodology of data upcycling, bridging the gulf between traditional historical source editing and digital humanities approaches. We aim to combine the opportunities of digital analysis with the rigour of documentary study and diplomatics.
The project will combine important new insights on medieval trade and trans-national networks with broader methodological innovation, which will be of importance for all digital humanists working with semi-structured data.
The project has three core objectives:
- Create new insights into late medieval trade, economy and material culture through both qualitative and quantitative analysis. We will move beyond money to look at networks of people and consumer objects.
- Develop reusable methods to upcycle existing transcripts of semi-structured historical sources into machine-readable data, while respecting and reflecting on medieval historians’ relationships with their sources.
- Establish data modelling workflows for unlocking the complexity of 'medieval big data', especially the rich and varied descriptions of material objects and the units used to measure them, to trace them through time and space.
The project is funded through the AHRC - DFG UK-Germany Research Projects in the Humanities scheme. It runs for two years from 2025-2027.
Project Team
The project is jointly led by Dr Justin Colson at the IHR and Prof Werner Scheltjens at Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg. More team members will be announced shortly.
The European Hansemuseum / Europäisches Hansemuseum are project partners.
Project Updates and Articles
Blogs about the project and preliminary findings from our pilot project are available on the IHR's blog OnHistory
![A late medieval set of amber beads on a contemporary silken braid Museum of London (objects 5079 and BC72[79]<1836>)](/sites/default/files/styles/promo_mobile/public/2024-11/bc72_79_1836.jpg?h=827069f2&itok=1GDoweSW)
Paternosters and Beads: Finding Devotional Objects in the London Customs Accounts
Countless different consumer goods can be found in the customs accounts - the example of devotional objects shows the potential of studying material culture
