August 2008

More “On this day” information

Some time ago I added the average monthly temperature and links to the House of Commons and House of Lords journals to the side of each diary entry. I’ve now added links to information at the Records of Earls Colne.

The site includes the diary of Ralph Josselin, the vicar of this Essex village, which have been posted in annotations here in the past. I’ve now added links from Pepys’ Diary pages directly to Josselin’s diary entries for the same days, where available.

The Earls Colne site also includes many church records — of baptisms, marriages, burials, etc — plus various documents from court proceedings. I’ve now added links from the relevant days to these sources.

Pepys didn’t have any direct connection to Earls Colne (a village forty miles north east of London) as far as I know, but I thought these contemporary documents would help provide some extra atmosphere and background reading. Here’s an example.

1 comment | Permalink | Thursday 7 August 2008 | New features

New maps of places in the diary

I’ve just added a new feature to the site: maps showing many places at once. They allow you to, for example, see all the churches in London Pepys has mentioned in one glance. Or London streets, or places outside Britain, and more.

Although we’ve had maps showing the locations of individual buildings, roads, etc for some time it seems more interesting and useful to be able to compare many on one map. It gives a better impression of the size of Pepys’ day-to-day world.

To help with these maps I’ve re-organised the categories of places in the Encyclopedia, particularly around what is defined as “within” and “outside” London. I’ve settled on defining London as being roughly what Pepys would have called London. Places beyond this, but still within what we think of as London today, are in London environs.

There are a lot of places listed in the Encyclopedia that don’t have location information and so aren’t shown on these maps at the moment. I hope to add more of them. If you come across a place in the Encyclopedia that doesn’t show a Google map when you view its own page, and you know where it is (or was) located, try using something like Get Lat Lon to find out the latitude and longitude and email them to me.

You should find links to these maps from appropriate places throughout the Encyclopedia. Thanks to those from the discussion group who suggested improvements on some early maps.

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to test these maps fully on Windows, so do let me know if you find anything that doesn’t work as expected. And any other suggestions for improvement (whether about the maps or not) are always appreciated.

10 comments | Permalink | Thursday 21 August 2008 | New features