Historical English

The following table lists some useful corpus resources for the history of English. Most are available either on a fileserver at Manchester or on the web, in some cases with their own search engine; see the notes below the table. Resources not actually designed for linguistic work but of interest nevertheless – newspapers, literary texts, manuscripts – are listed at the foot of the page. See also the PDE page for the ‘Brown family’ of corpora, which now have a historical dimension extending backwards into the 20th century. 

Name	Period	Variety	Words	Tag/Parse	More information
Helsinki Corpus of Old English	pre-1150	–	413k	N/N	On server. Part of ICAME collection
Helsinki Corpus of Middle English	1150-1500	–	609k	N/N	On server. Part of ICAME collection
Helsinki Corpus of Early Modern English	1500-1710	British	551k	N/N	On server. Part of ICAME collection
Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots	1450-1700	Scots	834k	N/N	On server. Part of ICAME collection
Corpus of Early English Correspondence sampler	1418-1680	–	450k	N/N	On server. Part of ICAME collection
Zurich English Newspaper Corpus	1661-1791	news	1.6m	N/N	On server. Part of ICAME collection
Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts	1641-1732	prose	1.1m	N/N	On server. Part of ICAME collection
Toronto Corpus of Old English	pre-1150	–	3m	N/N	Web (protected). Details here
York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose	pre-1150	prose	1.5m	Y/Y	On server. Part of Penn Historical Corpora series
York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry	pre-1150	poetry	71k	Y/Y	On server. Part of Penn Historical Corpora series
Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English 2	1150-1500	–	1.2m	Y/Y	On server. Part of Penn Historical Corpora series
Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English	1500-1710	–	1.74m	Y/Y	On server. Part of Penn Historical Corpora series
Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Modern British English	1700-1914	British	949k	Y/Y	On server. Part of Penn Historical Corpora series
Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence	1410-1681	letters	2.16m	Y/Y	On server. Part of Penn Historical Corpora series
Glossarial Database of Middle English	ME	Chaucer	?	Y/N	Web (open). Access here
Middle English Grammar Corpus	1350-1500	–	450k	N/N	On server. Details here
Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse	ME	–	?	N/N	Web (open). Access here
Middle English Medical Texts	1375-1500	medical	495k	N/N	CD in library. Details here
Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose (sampler)	1100-1500	prose	4m	N/N	Part of ICAMET
Letter Corpus of ICAMET (sampler)	1386-1698	letters	?	N/N	Part of ICAMET
Corpus of Irish English	1100s on	Irish English	?	N/N	On server. Details here
ARCHER: A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers	1600-1999	British, American	3.3m	soon	More on ARCHER
Image to Text	1764-1815	letters	122k	N/N	Details here
Corpus of late 18C Prose	1761-1790	NW British, letters	300k	N/N	Details here
Corpus of late Modern English Prose	1861-1919	British, letters	100k	N/N	Details here
CLMET 3.0: The Corpus of Late Modern English Texts	1710-1920	British	34.4m	Y/N	On server. Details here
COHA: The Corpus of Historical American English	1810-2009	American	406m	Y/N	Web (need to register). Access here
Old Bailey Corpus	1674-1834	British, trials	134m	N/N	Web (protected). Details here
19th Century U.S. Newspapers	1800s	American, news	?	N/N	Web (protected). Details/access here
The Google News Archive search	?	news	?	N/N	Web (open). Details/access here
Time Magazine	1923-2006	American, magazine	100m	Y/N	Web (open). Access here
The Salamanca Corpus (English dialects in literature)	1500-1950	British, literary	12m	N/N	Web (open). Still growing. Access here

Note

Most historical texts held at Manchester are stored together on one fileserver, accessible on campus or via the VPN.

• In Windows you can navigate using Windows Explorer or My Computer or within MonoConc Pro to
  \\nask.man.ac.uk\share$\fs_shared_01\Hum1\ALC\LEL_corpora.
• On a Mac, in the Finder, from the Go menu, choose Connect to Server. Enter the server address
  smb://vdm02-g1.ds.man.ac.uk/fs_shared_01$/HUM1/ALC/LEL_corpora and then click Connect.
• Authenticate with your university username and password.
• Subfolders containing the corpora are subdivided in a rough-and-ready way by period: OE, ME, eModE, lModE, PDE.
• Manuals (many of them from the 1999 ICAME CD) are stored in the folder corpora-manuals under English_corpora. Click on the link to see the ICAME manuals.

Notes on specific corpora

• ICAME Corpus Collection on CD-ROM
  Mostly copied to fileserver April 2003. This contains the following historical collections, samples of which can also be accessed on-line, together with various concordance programs. (See also PDE corpora.)
  • Helsinki Corpus (OE, ME and eModE)
    The manual is available online.
  • Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots
  • Corpus of Early English Correspondence sampler (1418-1680)
  • Zurich English Newspapers (1671-1791)
  • The Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts (1641-1732)

• Complete Toronto Corpus of Old English (OE)
  A convenient local version, from ca 1994, is available through MonoConc Pro or other concordancers in the OE folder of English_corpora;  it is not quite complete or up-to-date, however. We are subscribed to the current online version, available on campus or using the VPN, from Library databases under ‘Dictionary of Old English Corpus’. For a handy, hypertext index of texts and editions, click here.
• The Penn-York-Helsinki series of parsed historical corpora
  These corpora all use the CorpusSearch 2 software, a command-line search engine with a very specific syntax.  Once mastered, however, it enables extremely well-focused grammatical searches to be made. The program can now also be accessed via a web-based interface.
  • The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose
    100,000 words of OE prose texts selected from the excerpts in the Helsinki Corpus. Acquired December 2003.
  • The York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry
    71,000 words of OE poetic texts selected from the excerpts in the Helsinki Corpus. Acquired August 2009.
  • PPCME2: Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (2nd edition)
    1.3 million words. Licence fee paid June 2002. Installed Feb 2003. NB: the version we have is the 2nd edition, release 3.
  • PPCEME: Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English
    1.8 million words. Licence fee paid December 2005, acquired March 2011. NB: the version we have is release 2, and on the web interface we currently only have the Penn 2 supplement files, not the whole corpus.
  • PPCMBE: Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Modern British English
    950,000 words, 1700-1914. Acquired March 2011. NB: the version we have is the much smaller 1st edition.
  • PCEEC:  The Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence
    2.2 million words (c. 1410-1681).  Acquired August 2009.
• ICAMET: Innsbruck Computer Archive of Machine-Readable English Texts
  Full details here. We have the sampler version of the Prose Corpus 1100-1500, 108 works (in 131 files, about 4 million words) and the Letter Corpus 1386-1688 (containing 254 complete letters from different sources, arranged diachronically). DD is authorised to supply the texts and manual (in pdf form) to users from the Department on receipt of a signed copy of the ‘Declaration of fair academic use’ for sending to Professor Manfred Markus, who has kindly provided the CDs.
• ARCHER: A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (1600-1999), version 3.2
  Full details here. 3.3 million words of British and American English in a number of genres. Available for personal use only on signing of user agreement. For copyright reasons, the corpus can only be used at Manchester, Salford or Lancaster in the UK or at specific universities in the USA, Germany, Sweden, Spain and Finland.

Literary texts and collections

We have at least the following in-house (stored in the appropriate folder on the server) and can get others for you from the Oxford Text Archive and elsewhere:

• Letters of Jane Austen
• Austen novels
• Milton texts
• Paston Letters of the 15th Century
• Lollard Sermons
• Chaucer’s Boece and Treatise on the Astrolabe
• Layamon’s Brut
• etc.

There are hundreds of texts – of varying degrees of reliability and legitimacy – available over the internet. Try one of these sites (EEBO is British-based, Literature Online Anglo-American, the rest American-based):

• Middle English Compendium
  Access to Corpus of ME Prose and Verse, ME Dictionary and bibliography.
• Early English Books Online (EEBO)
  Available via Library Databases, containing ‘most of the books printed in the English Language between 1453 and 1700 in full-text’.
• Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
  ‘Every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom and beyond in the period 1700-1800, and with multiple full-text search options across all 33 million pages’, available via Library Databases.
• JISC Historic Books allows semantic search of EEBO, ECCO and 19th-century British Library books from a single interface.
• Literature Online (LION)
  Available via Library Databases, containing such Chadwyck-Healey databases as the Bible in English, Early English Prose Fiction, English Drama, English Poetry (searchable by word or phrase).
• Bibliomania
• Great Books Online (searchable by word or phrase)
• the Gutenberg Project
• Literary Resources on the Net (Jack Lynch)
• Voice of the Shuttle

 Other resources

• In the bigynnyng: The Manchester Middle English Digital Library ‘The University of Manchester Library’s Middle English manuscripts are of paramount importance to key subject areas, including literature, history, theology, linguistics and art history.’ There are over forty Middle English manuscripts digitised at very high resolution. Undergraduate and postgraduate students have used them as the basis of dissertation projects under the supervision of Nuria Yáñez-Bouza and David Denison.
• Parker Library on the web
  ‘Corpus Christi College and the Stanford University Libraries welcome you to Parker on the Web – an interactive, web-based workspace designed to support use and study of the manuscripts in the historic Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.’ The extraordinarily rich medieval manuscript collection at CCCC.

 This page last updated 10th January 2017.