Deeds, or charters, dealing with property rights, provide a continuousdocumentation which can be used by historians to study the evolution of social,economic and political changes. This study is concerned with charters (writtenin Latin) dating from the tenth through early fourteenth centuries in England.Of these, at least one million were left undated, largely due to administrativechanges introduced by William the Conqueror in 1066. Correctly dating suchcharters is of vital importance in the study of English medieval history. Thispaper is concerned with computer-automated statistical methods for dating suchdocument collections, with the goal of reducing the considerable effortsrequired to date them manually and of improving the accuracy of assigned dates.Proposed methods are based on such data as the variation over time of word andphrase usage, and on measures of distance between documents. The extensive (anddated) Documents of Early England Data Set (DEEDS) maintained at the Universityof Toronto was used for this purpose.
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