London Lives

London Lives is a website which makes available, in a fully digitised and searchable form, a wide range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners. This resource includes over 240,000 manuscript and printed pages from eight London archives and is supplemented by fifteen datasets created by other projects and provides access to historical records containing over 3.35 million name instances.

The lives of plebeian Londoners most often intersected with institutional records when they were caught up in the criminal justice system, or sought poor relief or medical treatment. The choice of sources was designed to capture this pattern of interaction, but the website also seeks to include comprehensive archival collections.

For criminal justice, the site includes the already digitised Old Bailey Proceedings, the largest printed source detailing the lives of non-elite people ever produced. This is supplemented with the most descriptive related records about serious crime available, including all surviving examples of the:

• Ordinary's Accounts (OA): biographies of executed criminals written by the chaplain of Newgate Prison.
• Sessions Papers (PS): manuscript documents which provide additional evidence about the crimes tried at the Old Bailey and other courts, as well as documents concerning poor relief.
• Criminal Registers (CR): lists of prisoners held in Newgate Prison.
• Coroners's Inquests (IC): documents relating to deaths thought to be suspicious, but which did not result in a formal prosecution.

Official responsibility for poor relief lay with London's parishes, of which there were more than one hundred, many of which have left very rich archives. The records of three parishes have been comprehensively digitised for this project:

• St Botolph Aldgate (straddling the eastern boundary between the City of London and Middlesex)
• St Clement Danes (Westminster)
• St Dionis Backchurch (City of London)

These parishes were chosen for the quality of their records, and the extent to which they exemplify different parts of London. Each of the selected parishes had a distinctive social and occupational composition. These are supplemented with the records of three parishes with externally created datasets of settlement and workhouse records from two further parishes:

• St Martin in the Fields (Westminster)
• St Luke Chelsea (just to the west of the built up area of London)

Charity for the poor also came from the guilds and associational charities. Included are the records of one London guild, the Carpenters' Company. This was one of the less prestigious companies and included a number of plebeian members. It also distributed considerable charitable funds to its members. Also included are partial transcriptions of the registers of the Marine Society, a charity which provided training at sea for poor boys.

Medical care for the poor was provided in parochial workhouses, reflected in the parish records, and hospitals. The database contains the records of one of the royal hospitals, St Thomas's Hospital, including its detailed admissions and discharge registers.

So take a look through London Lives and see what it can tell you about the lives of your ancestors.  Even if there are few (or no) specific records for your family, they provide an invaluable insight into the social conditions and attitudes of the time.