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Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.One of the most important series of medieval and early modern records of central government in the Public Record Office is the collection of tax records with the reference E 179. It includes all the surviving detailed records of taxation of lay people in England from about 1190 to 1690, well over 30,000 in all, covering a variety of taxes levied by the monarchs. The records comprise a wide variety of types of document, from summaries of accounts, exemptions, abatements, petitions, receipts, inquisitions and schedules of arrears to long, detailed assessments giving the names of taxpayers and the sums with which they were charged. As well as being a prime source for the history of taxation, E 179 records are used for a wide variety of other purposes by social, economic and local historians, historical geographers and others. Before 1995 the documents in the collection had never been systematically examined, and accurate information about their date, type and tax never recorded, so the catalogue used by researchers to access them was woefully inadequate. From 1995, as part of the Records of Central Government Taxation Project, work was done on fourteen counties, and this project was begun to make a comprehensive and detailed examination and re-appraisal of the records in respect of six further counties (Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire), and as before to record the information in a database and output the data in several different formats, to facilitate the use of the records by researchers in a number of fields. Within each county the procedure was to systematically examine the surviving documents in chronological order, as far as it was already known, recording the details discovered about them in a database. The first step was to examine each one to establish and record its physical characteristics: the material of which it was...