British Sources

British History Online is a digital library of key printed primary and secondary sources for the history of Britain and Ireland, with a primary focus on the period between 1300 and 1800.
How to search British History Online

Contains full text articles from the late 1600s to the 1900s, and covers literature, philosophy, history, science, music and art, and more.

Contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700.

Biographies of figures in British history, with extensive internal cross-referencing, access to articles from the original DNB, navigation by themes and multiple other search options.

Provides a guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. Demonstrates the background on the current and historical usage of words through over 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of English-language sources.

Provides access to both the British House of Commons and the House of Lords Sessional Papers from the 19th century. Also includes the Hansard Parliamentary debates from 1803 to 2005.

Collection of early-modern historical documents from the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I/VI. More than 150,000 pages have been digitized in full color to create a definitive online archive of almost 30,000 manuscript documents written by some of the most significant figures of Elizabethan and Jacobean history. These are accompanied by the complete Calendar of the Cecil Papers, featuring summaries and/or transcripts of many documents and two eighteenth-century volumes of selected transcriptions.