Digging Into Old Dusty Archives
Started simple. Grabbed my laptop, opened up some regular modern map sites first. Typed in “Saracen settlements” and got… nothing useful. Tourist spots, restaurants, vague history pages. Felt stuck already.
Pivoted to hard stuff. Drove downtown to the big central library archive. You know, the place smelling like old paper and quiet. Told the librarian what I needed – real old property records, medieval land charts, anything pinpointing where people lived centuries back. She looked skeptical but pointed me towards the “Local History & Rare Documents” room. Dusty boxes awaited.
- Spent hours flipping pages. Found ancient parish registers listing names – Saracen families mixed in. Cool, but addresses? “Near the west gate” or “by the river mill”. Uselessly vague.
- Pulled crumbling land surveys. Maps drawn on parchment! Mostly showing fields, lord’s manors, church lands. Actual houses? Tiny dots, no labels. Frustrating.
- Stumbled on tax rolls! Jackpot! These old parchment lists recorded who paid taxes on what property. Names listed alongside locations. Finally had some streets, specific landmarks (“the house adjacent to the tanner’s yard”). Scribbled down every “Saracen” entry.
Connecting the Dots (Literally)
Needed visuals. Tax rolls gave addresses, but I needed to see it. Library had microfilm of really old city maps – like, 14th-century-old. My eyes crossed scanning blurry black-and-white film trying to match street names from the tax rolls.
Time for paper & pen. Printed out the clearest old map I could find. Got tracing paper. Started overlaying it onto the printout. Using the tax roll details, I marked every single location tied to a Saracen name.
- “The Butcher’s Row”: Found three Saracen households clustered here listed on taxes.
- “St. Michael’s Lane”: Another concentration near the churchyard – maybe craftsmen?
- “By the city wall, south gate”: Several entries mentioning workshops.
The tracing paper became messy with my scribbles and circles. Started seeing clear clusters forming near market areas and the old city gates, not scattered randomly. Looked less like dots, more like neighborhoods.
Seeing the Patterns Emerge
Double-checked the mess. Went back through the tax rolls, verifying each mark on my tracing paper overlay. No way was I trusting my blurry-eyed microfilm session entirely. Found a few errors, fixed them.
The picture cleared. It wasn’t just dots anymore. Clear residential areas emerged, concentrated along specific streets near major trade routes through the gates. Seemed like these folks settled where the business was – markets, workshops. Not ghettoized, but definitely clustered together near key city spots.
Finally mapped it! Carefully transferred my messy tracing paper clusters onto a clean copy of the old map. Used colored pencils to shade the main areas where the records consistently showed Saracens resided. Boom. There it was – a rough but informed map pinpointing their historic heart in the city. Felt satisfying after all that digging. Real detective work pays off.
