Sacramental Token Books

The Token Books of St Saviour Southwark
an interim search site
William Ingram, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Alan H. Nelson, The University of California, Berkeley

How To Use This Site

Browsing or Searching?

Browsing. At the top of the search page you can click on 'See token books by year' or 'See token books by number'. Clicking on either link will bring up a list of all the token books. At the far right of the list, whichever list you choose, will be a column containing three links.
- Description will take you to a physical description of the book.
- Transcription will take you to a transcription of the entire book, which you can browse.
- Book-Image will take you to a PDF file containing page-images of the entire book. This may be slow to load, as the image files are large.
Additionally, you can click on 'See descriptive list of token books'. This will take you to a page describing the characteristics and make-up of each book.
Searching. Lower down on the search page are options for specific searches across all the books. You may search in as many or as few fields as you wish. You may search in only a single field, e.g. all persons with forename 'Obadiah', or all persons with prefix 'Sir', or all persons in a given year (select 'year' only), or all persons identified as 'schoolmaster' (in Suffix/Office) or 'bricklayer' (in Suffix/Trade), or all persons living in Winchester House (in Location). The more fields you enter, the narrower the search. NOTE: notations about trades or offices are infrequent in the token books; mostly the entries are just names and locations. The page produced as a result of your search will display, at the far right of the page, a column containing two links.
- Context will take you to a segment of the transcribed page containing the search item you desire, with the five names immediately before and after it on the page.
- Page-Image will take you to a JPG image of the manuscript page containing the search item you desire. Clicking on this image will open a new image which can be clicked on to enlarge for better viewing.
Auto-Complete. After you type the second letter into either the Forename or Surname box, an auto-complete list will appear showing you the available normalized (but not literatim) options for names. Type a third and fourth letter and the options are narrowed. You can click on any option at any point to make it your selection; or you can simply enter whatever letter sequence you wish. Then click on the 'GO' button to initiate your search.

Normalized Surnames. For ease of searching, the surnames in the token books have been given a normalized form in addition to their literatim form. For example FythJohn, Fee John and ffytzjohn are all normalized to Fitz John. Normalizing is an imperfect art, and there are many inconsistenties in this part of the data. It's the normalized form that appears in the auto-complete box. But in the search results, the literatim form of a surname is given in addition to the normalized form, and a search for either form will produce results.