Muster Rolls, Protection and Garrison database

Barrie Blake brought to my attention the following site

http://www.icmacentre.ac.uk/soldier/database/index.php

which is a project by the University of Southampton and the University of Reading to make available  three searchable databases on their project looking at: The Soldier in later Medieval England.

The Muster Roll database has 72 entries in total for Blake and Blak. The time period is as early as 1371 and as late as 1443. I have not done any further work yet on the data other than collecting it. It does tell the unit in which they served, their rank and their assignments.

The Protection database has six Blake and Blake entries in total and is for the years 1380 to 1398.

The Normandy Garrison database has 59 entries Blake and Blak and is for the years 1422 to 1444.

This is at a quick cursory glance and I hope to look at these records and the Patent Rolls to see if there is any overlap in information. There is some discussion about using the Poll Tax records to identify the archers and I will look into that. One of my projects is to extract the Blake/Blak/Blague names from Poll tax records as I have managed to collect/acquire a number of the fiche/electronic copies of Poll Tax.

Of note:

Citation

If you cite any material from this database, please ensure that you acknowledge its use as follows:

a. for single references:

The reference e.g. TNA E101/40/45 m.1, from the AHRC-funded database www.medievalsoldier.org, date of access.

b. where repeated use of the database is made:

Information on soldiers has been taken from from the AHRC-funded 'The Soldier in Later Medieval England Online Database', www.medievalsoldier.org, date of access.

Thank you to this group of researchers for making their database available online for searching and using in one name studies such as Blake. 

I have nearly completed proofreading the text of the entries taken from the Calendar of Patent Rolls. Barrie mentioned that I should give some sort of information on the Calendar of Patent Rolls and the following provides such a background (from the National Archives of the UK website):


http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/SearchUI/Details?uri=C3626

The entries are quite diverse which you can see once I put the text file up on the Blake one name study website. The 162 pages of text includes a lot of information on many early families.