PREVIOUSLY inaccessible court records dating back to the Middle Ages will be compiled into an online database after a university was granted nearly $750,000 US.

The records include marriage, slander and defamation cases that came before the church courts and contain a wealth of information valuable to social, economic and legal historians.

The documents constitute one of the most extensive collections of ecclesiastical papers in Europe and take up 540 metres of shelf space.

They include two million case papers containing information on more than 13,000 cases dating from 1300 to 1858.

And as they have to be accessed manually they have never been fully catalogued, which renders vast amounts of information inaccessible to researchers.

Currently, the archive, which covers the York Diocese, is housed at the University of York's Borthwick Institute for Archives.

But a $744,000 grant from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation means an online database can be compiled. Work begins this month and will take more than three years to complete.

The former head of the Borthwick Institute, Canon John Purvis, created basic indexes for the collection in the 1940s. Much of the work was done while he was on fire watch duty in the Second World War.

The new database will be compiled jointly by the Borthwick Institute and the university's department of history and will make information more accessible across the full range of papers.

The university's vice chancellor, Brian Cantor, said: "It is both an honour and a privilege to receive this grant from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation. Their generosity will enable us to unlock a hitherto untapped resource of enormous value to the research community. It will give an extraordinary insight into social history across more than six centuries."

Head of the department of history, Mark Ormrod, said: "This major award from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation recognises the extraordinary scholarly importance of the archival resources in the Borthwick Institute for Archives and attests to the University's exceptional record of achievement in humanities research."

The Borthwick Institute carried out a successful pilot study to develop a format for the database with support from the foundation in 2005.