The Northern Way: The Archbishops of York and the North of England, 1304 – 1405
The Northern Way was a research project funded by the AHRC and based at the University of York in partnership with The National Archives and with the support of York Minster.
Running from February 2019 to October 2021 the project was designed to make the administrative records of the archbishops of York more accessible to both students and the general public, and to provide a history of the role of the Archbishops in governing the region over that period.
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Who were the medieval Archbishops of York?
Aims and outcomes of the project
The project completed a searchable online index of all relevant primary sources in the registers of the archbishops held at the Borthwick Institute for Archives, as well as in other northern archives.
The Northern Way project builds upon an earlier project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, York's Archbishops' Registers Revealed, which made high quality images of all the surviving registers of the archbishops available online.
The Archbishops of York were also national figures, often holding senior royal office and charged with governing the north. Many of the archives documenting those national activities are held by The National Archives, providing an online calendar and guide to those previously undiscovered records was a particularly important aspect of the project.
With very few exceptions the original manuscripts are in Latin. This new project was designed to make their essence available to those without Latin or the other skills needed to read the original, as well as providing an index to their contents.
The project team
- Sarah Rees Jones, Professor of Medieval History at the University of York, Project Investigator (retired)
- Paul Dryburgh, The National Archives, Co-Investigator
- Helen Watt, Research Fellow
- Jonathan Mackman, Research Fellow
- Marianne Wilson, Research Assistant
- Gary Brannan, Keeper of Archives and Special Collections, Borthwick Institute for Archives
- Professor Philippa Hoskin, University of Cambridge (Chair)
- Dr Sophie Therese Ambler
- Dr Sean Cunningham (The National Archives, archivist)
- Professor Christian Liddy (Durham University, urban history, northern history)
- Dr Sethina Watson (University of York, ecclesiastical history)
- Dr Rosemary Hayes (independent scholar, Canterbury and York Society)