Calendar of the Gascon Rolls, I: Reign of Edward II (1317–1327) , ed. Simon J. Harris and Guilhem Pépin

This volume, intended as the first of five, is the outcome of the Gascon Rolls Project. The project, which ran from 2009 to 2019, saw successive teams of historians from Britain and France calendar the Gascon Rolls (series C 61 of The National Archives), which contain enrolments of letters, writs, mandates, confirmations, safe-conducts and various other documents pertaining to the English royal government’s management of the duchy of Aquitaine in the late Middle Ages. The complete calendar has been published as an online database, which can be found here: https://gasconrolls.org/index.html. As with so many online repositories of historical material, the Gascon Rolls website offers quick easy access to this important material. It also benefits from a search function that allows information to be found rapidly. But this does not mean that a physical copy of the information is any less welcome. As recent cyber-attacks on the British Library have reminded us, digitally stored information can be insecure. Websites also require ongoing maintenance and money to pay for this. As the foreword to this edition makes clear, then, ‘it is far from certain that [the website] will be maintained in the future, which means that this important work, which has been difficult to produce, cannot be safeguarded in the long term’ (p. 5). The decision to publish a paper copy of this material is thus a sensible step in ensuring future generations of historians benefit from this work.