The archive of the Parker - Hore Collection is a family story covering the period from the 1840s to the onset of World War II in 1939. It is a portrait of a granddaughter's dedicated completion of a task started by a grandmother whom she never met. These two women inspired many contemporaries in their quest for tracings of decorative medieval paving tiles in England, Wales, Ireland and northern France.

TileWeb affords an opportunity to examine the subject designs within individual buildings, to set these in the context of their county, to look at the trends of patronage and discover the medieval world, where the church lay at the heart of contemporary life.

Decorative tiles were part of the elaborate furnishings used in royal households, cathedrals, churches, monastic buildings and occasionally merchant's houses in the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The use of such tiles reflected the wealth and power of the building's patron: kings, queens, bishops, abbot's and merchants chose the designs to be used in a floor or on a wall.

The Sharing Museum Skills Millennium Award has been an enabling grant to bring together a catalogue of watercolour paintings in electronic form with a fascinating historiography that lends itself to further exploration of the remarkable Parker family and their archive of paving tiles which will in turn, enchant and instruct the wider community.

This is a sister project to PotWeb - Ceramics online @ the Ashmolean Museum (http://www.potweb.org).