STAC About this project

From Waalt

This project gives the lists of documents in STAC 5 taken from the 1740s manuscript list, and roughly sorted into what may well turn out to be cases. For anyone with better information, or who wants to join in, mail@helengood.com will find me, or you can apply for wikki priviledges to elspethrosbrook@gmail.com and start changing the pages, Help with HTML and STAC sandpit may be of use. I would advise you to put your contribution at the end rather than in the middle of a page. I am maintaining a master copy of the Catalogue, Names, Dates and Places pages and I may otherwise inadvertently overwrite you, which would be a shame.

Star Chamber Elizabeth, currently TNA STAC 5, consists of perhaps 100,000 documents under about 40,000 references, how many cases this represents is anybody's guess, I usually say about 15,000. By my count there are 16,646 Bills of Complaint; the Bills for some cases are missing and some cases have more than one Bill.

In the early eighteenth century the documents were divided alphabetically by the surname of the first plaintiff and listed. This was not always successful. The manuscript lists are in four volumes, at present held on open shelves in the Map Room.

Documents in each letter were divided into bundles of forty references. This does not mean forty documents, but forty groups of between one and ten documents, with the same reference. Each bundle was given a number and each document or group of documents has a number within the bundle

STAC 5/C6/18 is Star Chamber Elizabeth, The “C” bundles. Bundle number 6, group of documents within C6, number 18

Document types B = Bill of Complaint. Dr = Demurrer. A = Answer. C = Commission. Rn = Replication. Rr = Rejoinder. I = Interrogatories. D = Deposition

The data was added to the TNA catalogue (currently called Discovery) as STAC 5, but the listing is neither complete nor accurate. Don’t take my word for it, have a look for yourself.

The Problem has been that (unlike the other Star Chamber classes) there are no county names in the list. This means that the local historians have left them untouched and the county record societies have not published them. Ascribing a county to every case may change this. It is of course not as easy as that; a case may be between two City of London merchants but relate to inheritance (and riotous entry) of a property in Hampshire. A number of Welsh cases have already been identified (A Catalogue of Star Chamber Proceedings Relating to Wales compiled by Ifan ab Owen Edwards, Cardiff U P 1929), but there are plenty more to find. A very rough estimate is that Edwards found between ten and twenty percent of Welsh cases.

Amanda Bevan of TNA has taken my data from my own first pass at the Catalogue and used it to create her own case index. We are sharing any new insights, but using the data in very different ways. My own plan is still to discover as many county names as possible and then wave the lists in front of the local historians and county record societies and stand back as they rush to transcribe and publish. Then one can make a real index. My own case list is being built in the Cases by County section.

The pages of this Star Chamber part of WAALT should change radically and often. When visiting, refresh your pages every time.
Helen Good
List of other Contributors to STAC 5

  • (dk) Dave King
  • (sp) Susan Pittman
  • (kk) Krista Kesselring
  • (rp) Robert Palmer
  • (mg) Melissa Glass
  • (cm) Caroline Michaud
  • (rc) Richard Carruthers