The Material Culture of Wills, England 1540-1790

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Month: April 2024


Will of the Month: a fashionable lady and her Cloath of Gold shoes

Our third will of the month, that of affluent fashionable lady Helen Spratt (d.1726), is as long and as detailed as that of the Lincolnshire farmer Ralph Wrighte [link], and is full of rich detail about Helen’s possessions and what they meant to her. She itemises silk dresses, crimson quilts, and chinaware, and sets out […]


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Digitising 25,000 wills: method and accuracy

Harry Smith  In this blog post, Research Fellow Harry Smith provides an overview of some of the innovative digital methods used by our project. Read on to find out more about the digitisation of manuscript sources, and how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automatic transcription can be used to improve access to handwritten documents such as […]


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