The Anglo-American Legal Tradition (AALT)
This website displays digitised court records from medieval and early modern England. They are of documents kept at the National Archives and provide over 11 million images free of charge. Unfortunately, the Discovery catalogue does not flag up the individual items that are available on the AALT site, so it is usually necessary to check AALT's Homepage and its offshoots to discover whether particular groups of documents are included there.
Only some of the names and places that appear in its images are indexed by AALT, but the following indexes can also help in locating references to those of interest. They allow searches by surname, forename and place. Indications of their potential value for Northamptonshire history are that the word 'Northampton' (with the soundex option) produces 7,498 references from the 'Places' field of the first index. There are different options for searching the second index; a search for the same word in its 'Keyword 1' field leads to 4,721 references.
- Court of Common Pleas plea rolls (CP40, KB27 and KB9) Based on indexes for selected records from the Court of Common Pleas and Kings Bench.
- AALT Lists & Indexes Based on a wide range of primary sources including material from the Courts of Chancery, Common Pleas, Exchequer, Kings Bench, Requests and Star Chamber as set out in a Schedule of Contents.
Mike Kipling's article Historical research without leaving home: the Anglo-American Legal Tradition archive [2022] (page 196) explains in detail the scope of the project and how the range of information it unlocks can be used for local historical research.
Court of Chancery
Chancery Records Shed Light on The Past includes a link to a video which introduces this court, its records and what we may be able to discover from them.
Quarter Sessions
Quarter Sessions Records of the County of Northampton 1630, 1657 & 1657-8 edited by Joan Wake [1924] covers the earliest years from which such documents from the county survive. Transcriptions are accompanied by indexes of person, places and subjects. An introduction discusses the historical development of the Quarter Sessions.
Northampton Fire Court
The Book of Inrolments regarding the rebuilding of the town after the Great Fire of 1675 can be consulted at Northamptonshire Archives.
The English Fire Courts and the American Right to Civil Jury Trial by Jay Tidmarsh [2016] (PDF) contains many references to the Fire Court and to other relevant publications.
Probate courts
Visit the Probate section for information about records from the courts that were authorised to prove wills and grant letters of administration.
Registry of Deeds in Ireland
Registry of Deeds Index Project Ireland contains a vast amount of information from records created in 1709 onwards, with three indexes. A search in the Residence field of the main index leads to 20 entries containing the word 'Northants' and 41 for 'Northampton'.