Researching medieval soldiers

A quickie post from me today, as I’m madly trying to do research for a seminar and paper due early in September, and I need to get a couple of weeks of skiing in between now and then.

For those of you who, like me, have to work at a distance from the major UK and US archives, I’ve just discovered ResearchBuzz. This useful-looking site aggregates new information on search engines, online databases and other sources of digital information (including maps and image databases, by the looks of it). They’re not all history-related, but a recent post advised of a new online database of 90,000-odd soldiers who served in the Hundred Years War (1369 – 1453), assembled by researchers at the universities of Reading and Southampton. Related links point to online sources for York Castle Prison records, Great Reform Act plans for Scotland and other such history-related goodies.

I’m going to have a trawl around later this week and see what the database on medieval soldiers is like, so I’ll report back on that and on any other useful links I find. In the meantime, if you’ve got any favourite online databases of historical records (especially for the fourteenth – sixteenth centuries in England or France), please share them with me!