T history of courts has too often focused on individuals who knew the king, wrote for him or painted him. While such work is of obvious value, it neglects one of the most important and interesting of the implications of Norbert Elias's The Court Society: that courts were societies or communities in their own right, however inter-connected with the larger societies over which they presided. To understand how courts worked and what it was like to attend them, to evoke the experience of those who served in them, it is necessary to understand courts from top to bottom. It is necessary, in short, to confront the experience of all those who served at courts, from lords chamberlain and steward to stable groom or chamber maid. Unfortunately, this is easier said (or urged upon others) than done. Stable grooms and chamber maids are unlikely to have left collections of correspondence, diaries or personal account books. They figure in official documentation, household ordinances or advice books, much as they figure in contemporary painting: as part of a necessary, but ultimately anonymous and undifferentiated, cast of characters, lurking in the background, the individual members of which were virtually interchangeable. Is there no way to engage with their experience and use it to enhance our understanding of the court as a whole? I would ,submit that, within the British historiographical tradition, at least, the way forward was shown long ago in the work of scholars like Sir Lewis Namier and his successors at the History of Parliament; Gerald Aylmer in his two great books on the personnel of seventeenth-century government, The King s Servants and The State s Servants; 1 and the army of demographic, social and local historians who have, over the last half-century, attempted to reconstruct the English metropolis, county, town and village. Each of these historians or groups of historians has sought to understand the structure, the experience and even the ethos of particular communities or institutions, through a composite picture built up from the biographical details of the individuals who composed them. In short, each has sought to understand the whole through the particular experiences of its individual parts. The purpose of this article is to inform readers of The Court Historian of a project currently in progress, which attempts to apply some of the techniques of the demographic, social and local historian, not to a county or a village community, but to the English Court in the period 1660-1837. The Database of Court Officers (DCO) is a computer database which will, upon completion, contain the career particulars of every officer and servant of the royal household who was sworn into service between the restoration of Charles II and the accession of Queen Victoria. Before explaining what this means and assessing its potential to enhance our understanding of the English Court, it is necessary to explain the genesis of and sources for the project.