The School, formerly the Keele Latin and Palaeography Summer School, returns for its 49th year. In 2025 The Ranulf Higden Society took over the organisation of the Latin and Palaeography Summer School following Keele University’s withdrawal. In 2025 the school was held entirely online, this year the School is now being organised by the Palaeography Team at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, in association with The Ranulf Higden Society and will be held at The Priory Rooms in Birmingham.
The School is for those who wish to acquire or improve their skills in reading and transcribing medieval and early modern documents primarily in Latin, but also some material in Middle English and Anglo-Norman French. The documents selected by the tutors are taken mostly from English archives (both national and local) and are those chiefly used by historians rather than literary texts. The School consists of four courses with two courses designed to provide an introduction to medieval Latin and to medieval palaeography. The other two courses are designed to meet the needs of more experienced students examining specific classes of records in detail. One of the main benefits of the School is that students can build up their knowledge and confidence during the week.
About the Summer School
The Summer School held at The Priory Rooms will be organised in a similar manner as it was at Keele University. The School will be taught in several small groups where the tutors and students engage in working through the teaching material in an interactive manner, discussing matters of interest. The teaching material may be sent to participants in advance. The emphasis is very much on learning the skills in reading and transcribing documents and so involves a lot of active participation.
The approach is serious but friendly and attracts a wide range of people from both the UK and abroad: national, local, and family historians, along with archive students and postgraduate researchers. Many return year after year, taking the opportunity to seek advice from tutors and fellow students on their own research interests and problems.
The tutors all have considerable experience in teaching adult groups and have their own expertise in a wide range of topics, beyond palaeography. They include archivists, university lecturers and specialist researchers and tutors.
Who comes to the Summer School?
Many students return on a regular basis – but not because they are slow learners; on the contrary, they have become rather skilled palaeographers but wish to experience the problems of reading and interpreting different kinds of documents. Several have published editions of documents, often as part of county record series.
Many people are actively involved in local history projects, sometimes on their own account or because they are involved with a Victoria County History project. Others need reading skills to undertake original research for university post-graduate degrees, or to enhance their career in an archive office (or prepare for an archive qualification course).
Financial assistance
Some financial assistance might be available in the form of a limited number of ‘Higden Scholarships’ provided by The Ranulf Higden Society. Those wishing to apply should contact Nigel Tringham. In past years many university students and archivists have successfully applied to their institutions to cover the costs of the summer school, which offers valuable professional training, and we strongly encourage potential students in such situations to do so.
ORGANISATION
The courses
The School is built around a series of small seminar groups of about 10 students, each led by an expert tutor. Students participate in one group only throughout the week.
There are two introductory courses: one for those with no or very little knowledge of Latin as a language (1) and the other for those who want to learn how to read and transcribe a range of medieval Latin documents (2). For those already with a good knowledge of Latin grammar and a reasonable level of palaeographical expertise, there is a choice from two subject courses which this year are of an intermediate to advanced levels.
The courses are being taught in person.
Teaching format
Each group will meet at regular intervals throughout the day, interspersed with breaks for refreshment and lunch.
Daily schedule: Morning teaching session, 9.15am to 12.45pm (with 20 minute at 10.45am).
Lunch 12.45 to 2.00pm.
Afternoon teaching session, 2.00 to 4.00pm.
The tutor – after suitable general advice and where appropriate – will usually ‘go round the group’ inviting each person to attempt a line or two and providing assistance as necessary. This approach is not meant to be intimidating but is designed to give each person a practical opportunity to do some transcribing and translating; just listening to a tutor reading a text is no substitute for doing it oneself!
- Digital images: The documents to be tackled are made available in digital form. They will be sent out to students electronically in advance where appropriate (as email attachments, or by WeTransfer). Paper copies might be made available on request, but provision is limited
- Pre-school preparation: Students are encouraged to look over at least some of the documents they have been emailed beforehand, as doing so helps to ensure that one gets the best out of the course. Some may not have the time to do so or have not yet learnt the necessary skills to make much progress on their own. This is fully appreciated by the tutors, and students will not be made to feel inadequate if they struggle somewhat! After all, not being able to read through a manuscript quickly is the main reason for coming to the School.
PART 1: INTRODUCTORY COURSES
1. Introduction to Latin (tutor Andy Fear).
This course gives an overview of the Latin grammar and syntax that are encountered in basic Latin texts. Its aim is to give a solid foundation that will allow readers successfully to understand how words fit together in Latin sentences and how to decipher them successfully. For ease of understanding printed texts, not manuscripts, are used throughout (no palaeography is involved). No prior knowledge of Latin or any modern foreign language is assumed. The recommended course text is Collins Latin Dictionary and Grammar.
It is very much recommended that students acquire confidence in Latin before they attempt to decipher medieval handwriting, as knowing how a sentence is structured and what case endings to expect is an essential first step.
2. Introduction to Medieval Documents (tutor Christopher Whittick).
This group concentrates on reading the kinds of Latin documents most frequently encountered by historians and others when they first explore medieval records, including land conveyances, manor court rolls, estate and financial accounts. Our documents will all be comparatively short but will contain a range of different handwriting forms, scribal abbreviations, and diplomatic conventions, so often considered a barrier to reading medieval texts.
As the emphasis will be on developing palaeographic skills, students ought already to have some familiarity with Latin grammar. Contact the tutor if you would like to discuss where you are in the learning process. Most students will experience a degree of difficulty with the documents if they have limited previous reading experience. But our sessions will be good-humoured and supportive. Everybody gets a turn at the wheel, reading a line or two; everybody will make mistakes and discover that someone else’s line is easier than the one in front of them. That is the point of participating in the summer school, and the tutor will go through the examples, highlighting the differences in letter-forms over time and the standard forms of abbreviations.
A few weeks before the summer school you will receive digital imagesof the documents that are going to be used, and students are encouraged to prepare draft transcriptions of those parts that they feel they can interpret. If there are documents on which you are already working do feel free to share them in advance. They may be suitable for the group, or there may be the chance to discuss them with the tutor one-to-one.
Also recommended for this course – because they have illustrations of original documents – are Denis Stuart, Manorial Records (Phillimore, paperback 2004), and Hilary Marshall, Palaeography for family and local historians (Phillimore, 2004). For words and phrases that you are likely to come across, a copy of Eileen Gooder, Latin for Local Historians (2nd edition, 1978) is worth having – although the 2013 Routledge reprint seems very expensive, so perhaps trying to locate a second-hand copy would be best).
PART 2: SUBJECT COURSES
3. ‘I leave my soul to God’: Testamentary Records c. 1300-c.1600 (tutor Shelagh Sneddon).
One of the greatest concerns of medieval Christians was that expressed for the health of one`s soul. This concern is most clearly manifested in the extensive rebuilding of parish churches and the establishment of religious guilds and chapels. But it can also be seen and explored by the surviving testamentary records of the period, and historians have long recognised the great importance of wills and testaments, and associated records, for the study of patterns of popular piety with arrangements for burial, for the saying of prayers for testators’ soul, gifts to the poor, and bequests to religious orders and institutions. However, these records also allow the study of material culture. In addition to making spiritual provision, these records also record the disposal of personal property and in some cases real also.
This course aims to examine as full a range of testamentary evidence as possible, and in addition to wills and testaments themselves, will look at the certificates attesting the proving of wills, inventories of goods, and some of the legal cases focused on testamentary records, particularly in the Church Courts. Although almost all of the material used in this course will be medieval, some of it will be drawn from early modern antiquarian copies of now lost originals, and some of the Church Court cases will also be taken from this period also. The course is aimed at an intermediate level, so is intended to be at a level where those looking to move from the introductory courses will be able to thrive, but will also be sufficiently challenging for the more experienced palaeographer.
4. Inquisitions Miscellaneous and Related Records from the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (tutor Simon Harris).
Inquisitions Miscellaneous are a class of records held at The National Archives at Kew (C 145). The class is, in effect, the bulk of inquisitions that remained after the inquisitions post mortem and ad quod damnum were removed to form their own separate classes. Over the last two year’s I have organised classes looking at the inquisitions post mortem class. The inquisitions miscellaneous class does not differ in its fundamentals from the format found with inquisitions post mortem – initiated by a writ which was returned with the inquisition when that was sent back to Chancery. However, the collection contains a much more varied body of material. Fundamentally, the records are still concerned with the maintenance of the king’s rights, and many of the records provide detailed accounts of the estates of individuals which had been, or ought to have been taken into the king’s hand, but other entries relate to accidental deaths, killings in self defence, the depredations of soldiers on campaign, rights of royal officials (especially foresters), the rights of communities particularly to commons, and, administrative abuses amongst many other things. There are also numerous records relating to the aftermath of rebellion, so that there are many inquisitions relating to the de Montfort rebellion in the 1260s, the treason trials of Richard II’s reign, and the rebellions against the new Lancastrian king, Henry IV. The records relate to all levels of society from villeins to the elite, and include a rich variety of material, and are not just the basic writs and inquisitions.
The class will look at a wide selection of the records in the class drawn from the reigns of Henry III to Henry V. Those students who have attended my classes on inquisitions post mortem will already be familiar with the administrative process, but attendance on previous classes is not necessary to undertake this class. The class will examine the different types of documents that the class holds and will engage with the rich variety of hands and language used in the records. For further information about the records, calendars in English of the records can be found in the several HMSO volumes published throughout the C20th and made available by the HathiTrust and Internet Archive:
Examples.
https://archive.org/details/calendarofinqu02grea/page/n7/mode/2up
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.30000095331678&seq=5 .
If you intend to register for this class, please do look at these volumes. If there are any particular records that you would like to look at then please let the tutor know.
This will be the final class examining inquisitions, but attendance on the classes in 2024 and 2025 is by no means important for those who wish to attend this class in 2026.
TUTORS
- Dr Andy Fear is a Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Manchester, with particular research interests in the Western Roman Empire and the Dark Ages.
- Dr Simon J. Harris is currently an independent researcher and records specialist. He has worked on a series of important national and international research projects at the universities of Durham, York, Liverpool, Oxford, Bordeaux and Keele, on material as diverse as charters, petitions, church court records and most recently the Gascon Rolls. He currently is undertaking work for the Société Jersiaise translating charters, and producing editions of the judicial assizes held between 1299 and 1331 relating to the Channel Islands and Jersey in particular, the earliest of which was published in autumn 2024. Dr Harris has run courses at the summer school since 2015.
- Dr Shelagh Sneddon is an independent medieval Latinist and palaeographer. She was one of a team cataloguing the petitions in the SC 8 class in the National Archives for the Ancient Petitions project at the University of York (led by W. Mark Ormrod) and has also worked on the Parliament Rolls of Medieval England project for the University of St Andrews, editing and translating parliament rolls from 1290 to 1509. More recently, she has edited and translated heresy depositions, working in York with Peter Biller. She currently teaches Old French for the MA in Medieval Studies at the University of York.
- Christopher Whittick served as an archivist in local government until 2019 and first taught at Keele in 1997. He has taught palaeography on the UCL archives course and written a module on palaeography and administrative history for the Liverpool University archive course. He is now a self-employed archivist, editor and teacher.
COSTS, VIABILITY AND BOOKING
The Summer School is only offered in an in person form this year and there is only one rate. The fee is £595, which covers the costs of tuition, class materials, tea/coffee and lunch each day. Students will be contacted in advance about dietary requirements. Accommodation is not included and those wishing to attend will need to their own accommodation arrangements, or travel in daily.
Please note that the School requires a minimum number of students on any course to be viable and to ensure a rewarding educational experience. If these requirements are not met The Ranulf Higden Society has the right to cancel individual courses or the School as a whole, but please be assured that in such situations full refunds will be given to those who have already booked. However, once these requirements are met refunds can only be given to those wishing to cancel on or before 30 June 2026.
Booking and payment will be available soon through Eventbrite.
ACCOMMODATION
Participants must make their own accommodation plans. These are some of the options with prices as of 18 February. All are within easy walking distance of The Priory Rooms. The details are given below as an indication of cost and do not constitute recommendations. There are many other options.
Booking.com
Conference Aston Hotel, £256
Four Points Flex by Sheraton, Birmingham Jewellery Quarter £244
Hampton by Hilton, Birmingham Jewellery Quarter £261
Holiday Inn Express £240
ibis Birmingham Centre New Street £232
ibis budget Birmingham Centre £227
Travelodge
Birmingham Central Moor Street £174.95
Birmingham Central Bull Ring £169.95
Birmingham Central Newhall Street £150.95
Birmingham Central £156.95
Premier Inn
Birmingham City Centre, Waterloo Street £254
Birmingham City Centre, Exchange Square £247
Birmingham City Centre, New St Station £267
If you have any questions about any elements of the Summer School, please contact the director, Simon Harris. Questions about the practicalities may also be addressed to lips@sas.ac.uk.
Palaeography 