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Outgoing links to the British Library, Ordnance Survey, and BCW Regimental wiki are broken because of temporary problems with those sites. See Project:Known issues for more information.
Main Page
By The Sword Linked is an experimental project to make a new finding aid and reference work about Great Britain from the 1630s to 1660s using Linked Open Data. The main focus is on linking records through military units and their personnel in the British Civil Wars, giving more context for individual soldiers' experiences. Data from military records can be useful for many other things as well as military history.
For finding aids for British Library Manuscripts, see:
- British Library#Interim catalogues and finding aids: links to finding aids and catalogue data at other sites.
- British Library, Western Manuscripts#Contents: drill down from here for wiki pages on this site giving catalogue data about British Library manuscripts, and links to entries in printed catalogues at the Internet Archive.
This site runs on MediaWiki (like Wikipedia) with Semantic MediaWiki (like Marine Lives), so if you're familiar with either of those sites you should be comfortable here.
Account creation is disabled because this is still an experimental project.
The licence has changed to CC-BY-SA. See Project:Copyrights for more information.
Search suggestions
If you start typing in the search box in the sidebar on the left, it should show suggestions that match what you've typed.
Some things to remember about search suggestions:
- they only match the start of a page name.
- they now have case folding and accent folding, which means you can type lower case ASCII characters into the search box and the suggestions will also match upper case and accented characters. For example, if you type 'sir fon' it will match 'Sir Fôn'.
- surnames usually come first in page names for people and military units.
- place names usually replace hyphens with spaces, eg 'Stratford upon Avon', not 'Stratford-upon-Avon'. But this does not apply to Scottish counties.
- some suggestions are redirects. This means they are alternate names for a page, and if you follow the link it will forward you to the correct page and tell you that you have been redirected.
- there are redirects for some Welsh, Gaelic and Scots place names, but these are not complete.
Example pages
These pages give an idea of how it works:
- George Willingham: a historical person linked to sources and organizations
- Holles's Foot Regiment, Essex's Army: a military unit linked to sources and with a map of locations
- Symonds - Diary: a written work that brings together different versions of the diary of Richard Symonds
- Battle of Edgehill: a battle with a map of its location, and links to people and units present
From these pages you can follow links to queries, categories, sources and other entities.
Some large batches of pages have now been imported. See Project:Progress for an overview of what we have and haven't got so far. Examples:
- The following serials have linked contents for all publications relevant to the British Civil Wars up to the end of 2023:
- All known Buckinghamshire loss accounts in TNA now have pages and are linked to the settlements they refer to.
- All regiments of the original New Model Army have pages.
- England and Wales have all counties, parliamentary constituencies, shrievalties, ecclesiastical jurisdictions down to deanery level, and landscape character areas.
You can also drill down through GLAMs to get an overview of their collections:
- British Library: we now have pages for many volumes of British Library manuscripts, often with links to printed catalogue entries at the Internet Archive.
- The National Archives of the UK (TNA)
This site can also represent manuscripts that no longer exist or whose locations are unknown. For example:
- Lost MS (1) is a letter from Lord Wilmot to Prince Rupert which was printed by Warburton but has since disappeared.
See Help:Create a page for a list and brief descriptions of basic entity types, or Help:Data structures for a more detailed overview of the semantic data.
Dates
This wiki can store and display dates in both the Julian and Gregorian calendars. The Julian calendar was used in Britain and Ireland before 1752 but many European countries switched to the Gregorian calendar in the 16th century. See Help:Dates for more information.
