Northumberland Archives has been awarded a grant of £73,100 by the National Lottery Heritage Fund for a project that will promote the usage of records of Northumberland manors. The grant will allow us to engage with a minimum of six volunteer group based across Northumberland.
Group members will transcribe core manorial documents from digital copies. Transcriptions and digital copies will be web-mounted and made available on the Northumberland Archives website. Volunteers will learn new skills in administrative history and palaeography. Workshops in venues across the county will engage new audiences with manorial records and encourage the use of these records in community and family history.
Usage of the records will be encouraged via the production of a travelling exhibition and a programme of talks across Northumberland. We will produce a series of guides to manorial documents in both physical and digital formats. We will work with a Northumberland school to research the history of a property in their community using manorial records and will develop a related arts activity and host a community day. This element of the project will be developed as a model that can be used in schools across Northumberland and beyond. The culmination of the project will be the launch of a free detailed online tutorial that will introduce researchers to manorial records and their content and format. The project will be promoted widely on social media and we will run a regular project blog.
Work on the project commenced in May 2022 and will run for 30 months. Within the project we will work closely with Northumberland Estates – the Estates hold 41% of all extant Northumberland manorial records.
Manorial Map & Key
In 2018 Northumberland Archives completed the revision of the Manorial Documents Register for the pre-1974 county of Northumberland. The Register can be found on The National Archives website at Manorial Documents Register (nationalarchives.gov.uk). Part of this work was to ‘prove’ the existence of manors in Northumberland. We did this by locating specified key documents relating to each of the proven manors. In total, we were able to prove the existence of 396 manors. This map and related key show the names and situation of the proven manors. They do not show the extent and boundaries of each manor – this information is too complex to illustrate on a map.
You can download a PDF version of the map and key here.
If you are researching a particular property or small township and need to find the name of the parish, please consult the Northumberland Farm Index, c.1860.
