Historical Data Sets – The Privy Purse Expenses of Henry VIII 1529-32
Analytics can generate exciting insights from any source of data, including historical data sets. Ideally, the data will have been digitised (e.g. the original text has been transcribed or has been captured using OCR), will have some ‘quantitative’ data (e.g. spending) and a time element (e.g. daily records).
Such an example is The Privy Purse Expenses of Henry VIII 1529-32, which Casacolori Consulting is currently working on. The daily records of money paid from the personal account of Henry VIII to his then mistress Anne Boleyn and other courtiers, plus to a wide variety of ordinary members of the public (including apothecaries, carpenters, carters, clockmakers, drapers, falconers, gardeners, jewellers, minstrels, tailors, and watermen), were first recorded by the royal treasurers who noted down the names and amounts spent. These handwritten sources were later transcribed and published in 1827 by Nicholas Harris Nicolas, Esq, and then digitised as part of Google’s Project Gutenberg in 2014.
The project is bringing these sources to life by creating a database which generates a modern translation (both text and spending) and allow analysis of such topics as:
- Where was Henry VIII each day, what was he doing, and who was accompanying him?
- What were his favourite pastimes?
- What was he spending his money on – both in the money of the time (relative to, for example, a typical worker’s wage) and in today’s money?
- On what type of goods and services did he spend the most money?
- What trades were involved in the day-to-day functioning of the royal court?
- What can we learn about the ordinary people who came into contact with the King?
- What was Henry VIII buying for Anne Boleyn?
