The main owners of property in Gloucester over the centuries were the Borough Council, the Dean and Chapter of Gloucester Cathedral, Llanthony Priory and various charitable organisations such as St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Records exist for these sources but they are not indexed, not easy to access unless you can get to Gloucestershire Archives and definitely not online.

This resource, based on Gloucester Borough Copy leases provides a spreadsheet containing name, address, status and/or occupation of each tenant, the owners ( who were usually but not always the Mayor, Burgesses and Citizens of Gloucester), the date of each lease and the type and location of each property. The latter can be precise but is more often a general description of the area. More recent leases may contain a plan of the location.

We have now completed the extraction of data and have Volumes 1 to 17 plus 9a available online. You can browse, sort and search the data by clicking the button below

Gloucester Borough Copy Leases are held at Gloucestershire Archives, Reference GBR/J3. There are 18 volumes of copy leases dating from 1524 to 1881. All volumes were filmed creating nearly 5000 images

A few years ago, Gloucestershire Family History Society was left a legacy of just over one thousand pounds and it was decided to use that money to pay for the copy leases to be photographed. Once this was done, we recruited volunteers, each being given a set of images at a time and a template to use to put the data in.

Having extracted the information from the leases – there were approximately 3750 of them altogether – the whole process was repeated, this time by a second volunteer. The resultant files were printed out so a paper check could be done to look for any discrepancies between the two transcriptions. Any differences found were checked against the original copy. If necessary, a second opinion was sought. Included in the 3750 leases were 700 schedules – just the table of information without all the legal jargon – these were much easier and quicker to deal with. There were also many ‘stray’ documents written into the books that were not leases at all: many bonds beginning with the Latin word ‘Noverint’, Mr Gythen’s case, dated 1715, to go before the Court of Chancery and a copy of John Hayward’s will that has not been found elsewhere. These other documents were also indexed so they could be located but obviously could not provide the same items of information.

In all, the project has taken the best part of 2800 hours but has produced a table of 3750 names of tenants plus many more names of trustees, neighbours and former lessees. We also included the names of all the fields that were mentioned, a useful resource for local historians who may be more interested in the land use than in who lived where.

Our thanks go to our volunteers: Pat Ponter and Sue Capener who joined the project towards the end, but particularly to the three stalwarts, Jane Wood, Michael Beacham and Jan Broadway who did the bulk of the work between them and to Liz Jack for leading the project and checking the data.