The Manchester Eleventh-Century Spellings Database (C11DB), developed under the leadership of Professor Donald Scragg, with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, launched in 2004. The database had been unavailable for several years when I contacted Don in October 2014. With his help, and that of Bob Nutter of IT services at Manchester, I recovered the original data from Manchester’s servers in March 2015. With Don’s permission, I am now making it available here.
While C11DB was originally in Sql format, for ease of use I have extracted the text of each of the 978 items from the database as a separate .txt file (downloadable as a zip file here), which can be searched using third-party software of the user’s choice (e. g. AntConc). The extensive metadata assembled in the database is available in a large (20 MB) Excel spreadsheet, zipped here. To open the .zip files you will require the freeware program 7-Zip.
Data from the follow-up project, ‘English Glosses in Eleventh-Century Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts’ also survives. This, in the form of 48 PDFs tabulating annotations in different manuscripts, can be downloaded here.
A full description of both projects and my reconfiguration of the data is available in this summary, produced for the Medieval Big Data colloquium I organised in Dublin in June 2017.
Mark Faulkner 