BUNDLE 2: ARMY AND NAVY

This section contains mostly documents concerning the conduct of war and defence, both on land and at sea, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It includes both details of expenditure, and documents relating to muster and array, and to the impressment of ships. It includes also some fiscal returns relating to musters; surveys of castles; writs of prohibition of tournaments; and a small number of documents dating from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Like other documents in C 47, the records are those of the Chancery, the Council, the Wardrobe and the Exchequer. In some instances the administrative provenance of an individual document or file is readily apparent from the lists or supplementary finding aids; in other cases it must be worked out by the user from an examination of the document itself.

The files of C 47/2 have been formed from the break-up, from about 1890, of older sortations of the miscellaneous files and records of the Chancery, and from further sortations of the substantial residue of the unsorted writ files which is one of the major achievements of medieval scholarship within the Public Record Office in the second half of the twentieth century.

Former references include the Royal Letters (RL), a series formed before 1800 and broken up about 1890; Diplomatic Documents (Chancery), formed about 1890 and broken up in 1908, with substantial additions being made to C 47 under various subject heads; and the series of Diplomatic Documents, Portfolio Series, which contained similar material under a different numeration; Chancery Miscellaneous Rolls; Petty Bag writ files, Series C (C 202/C); and from the break-up and resortation, in the 1960s and 1970s, of the 'Writs and Recorda' section of C 47 itself.

The file numbers follow an approximate chronological sequence, beginning with the reign of Henry III in C 47/2/1, to C 47/2/48, documents temp Edward III and undated. C 47/2/49-C 47/2/51 continue from the reign of Richard II to the early seventeenth century, but the chronological sequence within these files is disturbed, and it is necessary to look through the entire sequence for records of any particular date.

The remaining files, C 47/2/52 to C 47/2/63 range in date between the reigns of Edward I and Edward IV, with most documents belonging to the reigns of Edward II and Edward III. The interruptions in the chronological order within and between these files is a consequence of piecemeal additions over time from various previous sortations of records of the Chancery, and from the unsorted miscellanea.