Meeting of the Mapping the Medieval Countryside Advisory Board

The fourth meeting of the board was held at the University of Winchester on Monday 8th September 2014. Members received reports on progress so far. All 24 volumes of the calendars for 1236-1447 and 1485-1509 will be posted shortly on British History Online. Work on the interactive interface for 1399-1447 has been proceeding slowly – all parties underestimated the manual labour of semantic markup and the scale of the complex programming required – but progress has been speeded by use of some of the overheads for automation and to buy in extra researcher time. There was a demonstration of volumes 23 principally of person and places and this aspect of the project will be completed by the end date of 31 December. The board heard about the ongoing Richard III IPM project. They also looked forward optimistically to the next project (in hopeful anticipation that the Indian Summer of English Feudalism receives AHRC funding) and the next phase of the IPM project, funded or not. Of the current board, Prof. Bruce Campbell, Prof. Nick Mayhew, Paul Spence and Dr Mark Allen are standing down, whilst Dr Rebecca Oakes, Jason Sadler (both present), Stephen Mileson and Andrew Spencer will join the board.