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Duration 00:23:34

Cataloguing Projects 2016, part 8: Sorting the Prize Papers: Tales from the Depths

An overview of the cataloguing projects that took place at The National Archives in 2016.

Randolph Cock and Andrew Little discuss the process of sorting The High Court of Admiralty (HCA) Prize Papers, a major collection of ships’ papers and many thousands of undelivered private and business letters which were on board vessels that were captured by British ships during times of war. The papers, which mainly cover the 17th to 19th centuries, are written in over a dozen languages and come from captured ships of many nationalities, mostly French, Spanish, Dutch and American.