West Frisian Court Archives from Before 1811 Covering Civil and Criminal Cases

Archives from West Frisian courts prior to 1811, known as the 'Old Law'. The dataset includes records of civil cases, criminal cases ranging from minor offenses to serious crimes, real estate transfers, mortgage loans, notarial deeds, and guardianship supervision of orphan goods. It is provided by the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations in XML format under a CC-BY-SA-4.0 license.

Use Cases

• Analyze trends in criminal sentencing and offense types based on the described criminal case records.
• Study historical property ownership and mortgage lending patterns based on real estate transfer and loan records.
• Research the legal and financial management of orphan goods based on the described guardianship supervision records.
• Compare the functions of early modern courts and notaries based on the inclusion of notarial deed-like documents.

Strengths

• Covers a defined historical period (pre-1811) for a specific region (West Frisia).
• Includes multiple legal domains described: civil law, criminal law, property law, and guardianship.
• Data is provided in a structured, machine-readable XML format.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties (Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations)

Collection Method

Archival digitization of historical court records.

Time Range

Records prior to 1811.

Freshness

Last updated: unknown

Geography

West Frisian region (Netherlands).