Why visit the PRO?

Following a mention that I planned a trip to the PRO in Kew I got a
private email which raised an interesting point that I thought the
group would benefit from a short discussion on this board.

The message read
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I hope I'm not insulting an experienced researcher of medieval
manuscripts, but I thought I ought to mention, before you arrange a
visit to the PRO, that like all medieval documents this petition will
be in Latin, with many words difficult to interpret due to
abbreviation to just a few letters, written in a medieval hand which
differs substantially from early modern hands, and in an extremely
formulaic style which can be difficult to decipher. If you haven't
worked with original medieval records before you might find the visit
frustrating and the journey wasted.

If you've done this before then I do apologise for mentioning these
matters.

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Now I must be honest (or my Grandmother will come back to haunt me)
and say I don't have a dickybird's chance of reading more than the odd
word in latin, and I'm not that good on really old handwriting either.
But I did know that in advance.

So why waste time going to the PRO to see documents? Easy - to judge
if they are worth ordering high quality digital copies and to find out
just how large the file is.

One of the problems with the PRO site from the day they started it is
that they give no idea of the number of pages, their quality or state
of preservation. Now I understood that when the site was first
launched the details were just a copy of pre-existing index/catalogue
files. But I always found it hard to understand that a count of pages
was never included in that information.

At the moment the only way to find out what is there is to ask for an
estimate for printing/digitizing, but you still don't actually know
what is there. So you have to order their jpeg images which helps....
sometimes but costs yet more money :)

So, a day out in Londinium with an afternoon at the PRO sounds like a
very good idea to me.