Tracing Ancestors Before Parish Registers: A Guide to Medieval Genealogy

This book offers a practical guide for family historians who have researched their pedigree back to the start of parish registers, but view the Middle Ages with some trepidation. 

I’ve written for readers who are well-versed in Modern Genealogy but may have only a popular understanding of Medieval history. 

The accession of Henry VIII marks the beginning of Modern Genealogy. His reform of the English church introduced parish registers, his strengthening of local administration empowered the vestry, and his Dissolution of the Monasteries prompted a redistribution of property, accelerating the engrossment and enclosure of open fields. In short, the Tudor tyrant gave us the parish chest and instructed church wardens to fill it with documents of record that continue to inspire fledgling family historians nearly five hundred years later. Those principles just won’t do across the pre-Henrician landscape.

While the apparently barren landscape beyond the parapet of the Parish Chest might prompt a despair that a family’s history has stalled at a brick wall,  a better metaphor of the upper reaches of a faltering river is more encouraging.  Sometimes, the evidence will take us, trouble-free, from one generation to the next. Sometimes, we might draw on a source of legal standing. But, more often, we will find ourselves building a case based on circumstantial evidence and corroboration. Any researcher into Medieval Genealogy spends much energy in pursuit of corroboration. 

But genealogies which do not end in a brick wall they must prepare to fade into uncertainty. The number of generations may vary, but all well-prepared genealogies culminate in ambiguity. The genealogist’s task is to bring clarity rather than elusive certainty to that ambiguity

A template for accessing this unfamiliar world was provided by the genealogist, Horace Round, who presented a paper to London’s 4th International Congress of Historical Sciences (April 2–9, 1913)7 which is seen as a landmark event in the development of history studies, even today. 

“The scheme I propose is based upon the feudal system alone,” he wrote. “I would therefore discard the Old English divisions, the county, the hundred and even the township and would restrict myself to that newer and rival system of the manor. By working on feudal lines it will be possible to construct the great network of tenure that the system had spun about the land and to base upon the sound footing the pedigrees not only of the tenants-in-chief but of their undertenants.”

The book begins with guidance on developing research strategies,  followed by a detailed account of the English manor—the bedrock of Medieval Genealogy. From there, we move through a sequence of  sources,  from which fragments may be drawn into a synthesis of evidence, building on a knowledge of the time, place and people (a three-legged-stool) and defined by triangulation or other corroboration. 

Thus, the research pathway becomes implicit in his definition. By opening up his method in this way, he hands the tools to his audience—not so much to challenge his position, but to pick up the cudgels and further the research.

Check out  A Practical Introduction to Medieval Genealogy by Malcolm Noble