Court of Common Pleas plea rolls (CP 40): Search help

The Anglo-American Legal Tradition website provides photographs of the plea rolls of the Court of Common Plea (CP 40) from the reign of Edward I to the Commonwealth period, made available by Robert Palmer, Elspeth Rosbrook and Susanne Brand. Indexes to selected rolls from the period 1349-1596 have been compiled by two volunteers, Vance Mead and Rosemary Simons. There are 144 indexes in total, covering nearly 700,000 entries in the rolls, which mention more than 2 million personal names. For each entry, the indexes give the county, the nature of the plea and the names and places of residence of the people concerned.

In order to facilitate searches, these indexes have been combined to form a single database, which is searchable by personal names, place-names, counties and years. Each search result gives the reference number and the date of the roll, together with the county and lists of the personal and place-names mentioned in the entry. There are also links to the relevant index and to the photograph showing the original entry.

There are two search forms. For the Index-order search the names are listed in the same order in which they occur in the index (omitting duplicates). For the Alphabetical-order search, the order of surnames and place-names is alphabetical (this may be useful when searching for particular surnames, for example). In both cases, personal names and place-names duplicated within the entry are listed only once.

Note that the fields for forenames, surnames and place-names all accept single words only.

For all names, the use of either wildcards or soundex is recommended to allow for variations in spelling. Soundex tends to produce a longer list of results to be checked, but may pick up unexpected spelling variants.

Forenames. In compiling the database, the spelling of common forenames has been standardised, but for uncommon ones an attempt has been made to index both the original Latin spelling and a standard form if one is available. In some cases there may be more than one forename. When all are standard forenames, all are indexed. But otherwise anything after the first is treated as part of the surname. This includes Welsh patronymic names where several generations of ancestry can be mentioned.

Surnames. Peerage titles are indexed as surnames.

Place-names. The names of counties and dioceses within the body of entries are indexed as place-names only when no more specific location is given. Where a person is described as a sheriff, escheator or similar, the county or place associated with the office is not indexed. But where a person is described as a bishop or archdeacon, the diocese or archdeaconry is indexed as a place-name. The dedications of parish churches and religious houses, where given, are indexed as place-names. The names of countries other than England and Wales are also indexed as place-names.

Counties. The drop-down list of counties restricts searches based on the county identified in the margin of the roll. Note that sometimes no county is identified in the margin. Other counties may be mentioned in the body of the entry, but these are indexed as place-names only when no more specific location is given.