RESEARCHERS from York hope to unravel the lives and affairs of people 800 years ago by digging deep into modern-day digital historical records.

The work aims to develop ways of exploring European medieval charters that deal with the buying, selling or leasing of property, and involves historians, archivists and computer science experts from the Universities of York and Brighton.

The team - together with colleagues from Canada, the United States, and the Netherlands - will be developing tools to enable people to work effectively and efficiently with the historic material currently being digitized.

The partnership has received more than £420,000 under the international grant competition Digging into Data Challenge for its project ChartEx (charter excavator).

Charters record legal transactions of all kinds of property such as houses, workshops, fields and meadows and describe the people who lived there.

Long before records such as censuses or birth registers existed, charters were - and remain - the major resource for researching people, tracing changes in communities over time and finding ancestors.

They also shed light on how and why places have developed, allowing researchers to track the ownership of land over centuries and connect them to the histories of those who lived there.

Dr Sarah Rees Jones, from York university’s Department of History, said: "It is both relevant and exciting to have received funding for a project to work on charters in the year that York celebrates the 800th anniversary of its founding civic charter.

"An abundance of medieval charters from the 12th to 16th centuries have survived and provide a rich source of information when studying the lives of people in the past. The ChartEx tools will enable users to really dig into these records, to recover their rich descriptions of places and people, and to go far beyond current digital catalogues which restrict searches to a few key facts about each document."

Professor Helen Petrie, from York’s Department of Computer Science, said the work would lead them to build a ‘virtual workbench’ for historians, allowing them to work more effectiveily with digital records.

The National Archives in London are supplying the digital archives for the project in the UK, together with the Borthwick Institute for Archives at York university.