National audienceThis article describes an exploratory study on historic manuscript sources structured following the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines. The analysis has been conducted on a corpus of 100 "lettres de rémission" of the 16th century that has been processed in four phases: transcription, lexical tagging, semantic tagging and analytical tagging. From this last tagging level, we applied a set of automated processes to simplify historian works, i.e. studies of social history topics raised by the corpus. With this work, we show that structured documents in history goes beyond remote access and digital libraries. It also enables processes that simplify historic analysis and turn it into more a method more formal, refutable, r...