The Duke of Northumberland’s archive
Household inventories from 1703 and a duchess’s travel diaries, scanned, transcribed and made searchable, with software we wrote to help read them.
- Book and register scanning
- Transcription
- Online hosting
In the news
- The household inventory, digitised room by room
- 1703
- Every inventory entry and diary page
- Searchable
- Software written to help read the diaries
- Bespoke
The collection
The Duke of Northumberland’s archive, kept at Alnwick Castle, is one of the great private archives of England. It is owned and funded by the Percy family and opened to researchers by appointment.
Among its papers are household inventories reaching back to 1703, and the diaries of Elizabeth Percy, the first Duchess of Northumberland, who travelled Europe’s great houses in the eighteenth century and wrote down what she saw. One of her tours, of Holland in 1771, was printed anonymously in 1775.
What we did
We scanned the inventories and the diaries, and transcribed them so every entry and every page can be searched.
The Duchess’s diaries needed a great deal of interpretation: a quick private hand, her own abbreviations and the spellings of the day. So we wrote software to help our transcribers read them, keeping each reading tied to its place on the page so it could be checked against the original.
What it made possible
The archive can now say in a moment what the household owned in 1703, room by room. It makes surprising reading: the drinking glasses in the Duke’s dressing room were valued above the paintings by Titian.
The Duchess stayed in fine houses across Europe and made her own inventories of the treasures she saw. When the young British Museum needed treasures of its own, she was instrumental in suggesting what it might hold. Searchable, her diaries can now be followed by place, house and object, without handling the originals.
