A Comprehensive Study of Historical Sources in Medieval and Early Modern Britain : From Analysis of Historical Sources to Interpretation of History

该项目旨在全面分析中世纪和近代早期英国的各种历史资料，并通过对历史资料的解释来重建英国历史。历史来源暂定分为以下几种方式。首先，它们按其性质分为：政府和行政文件、庄园记录、宪章、叙述来源和私人文件。第二，按其发布主体划分：皇家司法、宪法和巡回审判文书，皇家法院文书，国家财政文书，领主府文书和士绅文书。每位调查者都收集了自己负责处理的史料，并尽可能地查阅了手稿。他们在每年举行两次的大会上报告了他们的情况。在大会上，每一个历史来源都从它们的形式、模式、功能和流传方式的角度进行了比较。这样，所有的研究者就可以共同拥有关于历史来源的各种信息。在项目期间，每年有三名调查员访问英国，收集历史资料，并与英国学者讨论或阅读有关论文。

This project has aimed at analyzing comprehensively various historical sources in medieval and early modern Britain and at reconstructing the British history through interpretation of historical sources. Historical sources are tentatively divided in the following way. In the first place, they are divided by their nature : governmental and administrative documents, manorial records, charters, narrative sources and private documents. Secondly they are divided by the subject by whom they were issued : documents concerning royal justice, constitutions and assizes, documents concerning royal court, documents concerning state finance, documents concerning seigniorial household and gentry's documents.Each investigator has collected every information about historical sources which he or she were responsible to deal with and tried to consult manuscripts as far as possible. They have reported about them at general meetings which were held twice a year. At general meetings each historical sources were compared from the viewpoint of their forms, patterns, functions and the way they have been handed down. In this way, all investigators could have various informations about historical sources in common. During the term of the project, three investigators visited Britain every year in order to collect historical materials and discuss about them with British scholars or read a paper upon them.