Governing on the Move: Where England's Kings Slept. Itineraries of Henry II, John, Edward I and Elizabeth I as Data

Medieval English government had no fixed seat: the king's council, household and writing office travelled with him, and royal letters were dated at the place where he was. Victorian and earlier editors turned those dates into printed itineraries, which survive as public-domain scans with messy optical character recognition (OCR). I parse four of them into open data: T. D. Hardy's itinerary of King John (1835), Henry Gough's itinerary of Edward I (1900), a sample of dated stays of Henry II from R. W. Eyton (1878) and the progresses of Elizabeth I from John Nichols (1823). After matching old and Latin place forms to modern gazetteers, I can place John on 3,887 of the 6,356 days of his reign and Edward I on 5,690 of 12,648, and eight of eight independent fixed points are recovered. John slept in 421 places and moved on 42% of consecutive recorded days, against 23% for Edward I; in a typical year John covered 5,046 km in straight lines and Edward 1,807 km. 78% of John's recorded days before December 1203 were spent on the continent and 13% afterwards. Edward I's nights follow his wars in Wales, Gascony, Flanders and Scotland, yet he also spent 841 nights at Westminster, 15% of those I can place, against 67 for John. The data show a court that moved constantly and a capital slowly forming around it. Itineraries parsed from the public-domain books of T. D. Hardy (1835), R. W. Eyton (1878), H. Gough (1900) and J. Nichols (1823), via Internet Archive OCR. Places from OS Open Names (OGL v3), GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) and Wikidata (CC0); royal forest list from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0). Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/royal-itineraries/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/royal-itineraries. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/28/royal-itineraries/.