Please note that subscriptions are activated manually. Therefore it may take up to ONE working day between payment being received and your subscription being activated. You will receive a confirmation email when this has been done.

We regret that we cannot provide personalised answers to general historical questions nor can we give guidance on specific research projects or essays.

The National Archives provides a directory of independent personal researchers who may be engaged to research on your behalf in the TNA collections.

British History Online exists to provide accessible digital versions of previously printed books. As such, we make a general rule not to correct errors that were printed in the original book. To do this would be to create a quite different type of resource, and such silent emendation makes it impossible for users to rely on our site as an exact reproduction of the original.

However, if we know that the author of a book is still active, we may occasionally forward corrections on for the purposes of the production of later new editions. Please check the date when the book concerned was published – if it was 1850, then the author will obviously not be alive.

If, however, you believe the mistake to be an error of transcription on our part, then please let us know via our feedback form, giving the URL of the page concerned.

British History Online does not, as a rule, act as a linking site to external resources.

New academic online resources for history may be listed by Intute.

Academic history events, such as seminars and conferences, are advertised by the IHR's own pages.

Yes, you may provide hyperlinks to the website and its pages. Such hyperlinks must display the relevant page in the same form as this Website, without amendment or framing. To create a link copy this HTML code into your web page:

This depends on how much you would like to cite.

As long as the article does not use direct quotations of more than 3 or 4 lines each, the citation form at the top of the page you consulted will be sufficient to acknowledge our material. It will be in the form:

'The Diary of Thomas Burton: 25 April 1657', Diary of Thomas Burton esq, volume 2: April 1657 - February 1658 (1828), pp. 45-6. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=36826. Date accessed: 03 August 2006.

If you require more than this, please let us know the web address of the page and the exact portions of text you require (via the feedback form) and we will take the matter further. We cannot guarantee that we will be able to grant permission to reproduce text.

Unfortunately we are not able to provide hard copies of our Ordnance Survey maps.

If a book is available for purchase in printed form, either a 'Buy this book' link or an option to 'Print on demand' will be displayed at the top of the list of contents. This so far applies to only a minority of those books we hold.

Paper and electronic copies of the Ordnance Survey series maps may be purchased from Landmark Information Group Limited.

The links on index pages generate a search for that string in the relevant volume. Since the original printed indexes were compiled by a human being, index items may refer obliquely to that item and so your search will not then be successful. For example, a search generated for Fane, Thomas, will not work if the page refers only to "the Earl of Westmorland". Therefore for best results you need to try various strings to ensure you get all possible hits, such as "Thomas Fane" "Earl of Westmorland", or simply Fane Westmorland.

Similarly, index terms may represent a standardized spelling. To get best results, read a sample of the volume in question to get a sense of its orthography, and then enter variant spellings in your search.

To make location of hits easier, we have enabled hit highlighting. The individual word matches for your search are highlighted in bold and with a green background.

No. The username is the unique identifier we use to keep track of accounts; no two accounts are permitted to use the same email address.

As we have over 40,000 registered users, it is often the case that another user will already have used your first choice. Try registering again using a slightly varied name, perhaps adding a numeral to the end (eg. johnsmith76).

As the site launched in 2003, you may have previously registered but misplaced the details. To find out, go to the forgot your password page, enter your email address in the relevant box and click Next. You'll automatically be sent an email with your username in it, as well as a link to reset your password.

Go to the forgot your password page, enter your email address in the relevant box and click Next. You'll automatically be sent an email with your username in it, as well as a link to reset your password.

Log in, click Update your personal details, edit the email address field and click Save.

Follow the link to the forgot your password page, enter your username or email address into the relevant box and click Next. You'll automatically be sent an email (with your username in it), as well as a link through which you can reset your password.