Posted by Laura Sangha
3 February 2026Laura Sangha and Min Wild. All photographs courtesy of Tom Hurley, Devon Digital.
‘What a brilliant night! Wills: dry, formal, boring? This was story telling at its best: intriguing, engaging, human!’
‘We really didn’t know what to expect but we were blown away by the talent on show! So many musical genres, beautiful lyrics and music all delivered with skill and humour.’
‘What a fabulous evening. Educational, witty material, thoroughly researched and transposed by Chris into a musical feast.’
Audience members on ‘A Time of Minding: Singing the Wills of England’.
What does an early modern historian dream of? How about being seated in the front row of a sold out Topsham Folk Club gig, hearing and watching as your research is transformed into a series of stunning musical arrangements on stage, to the delight of a spellbound crowd?
Well, I’m thrilled to report that some dreams do come true, even in January, since I found myself in just this situation a couple of weeks ago, in a packed Matthews Hall, Topsham, watching Chris Hoban and The Executors perform his extraordinary show ‘A Time of Minding’.
Regular readers of this blog will know that Chris is a composer, arranger, lyricist and performer that I have been working with since our 2025 Arts and Culture Creative Fellowship. These are exploratory placements that bring artists and academics together to use current research as a springboard for conversation and collaborative development of ideas. We both found the experience of working in this way transformative. Chris tuned my ears to the rhythms and ritual in wills that I realised I tended to overlook, while he discovered a rich vein of material that has inspired an album’s worth of new music. Find out more about what we did here.
Chris’ Topsham performance allowed us to bring the fruits of our collaboration to a wider audience – so we must extend huge thanks to Topsham Folk Club for hosting an event that probably sounded rather idiosyncratic on paper! For each of the songs performed at ‘A Time of Minding’ has its roots in one of the sixteenth-, seventeenth- or eighteenth-century wills housed in The National Archives.
The cast of characters we were introduced to included an Elizabethan lady in waiting, a Devon mariner, a doting mother and a cuckolded husband. As this suggests, it was an evening of awe inspiring variety – Chris’ lyrics are infused with the lives, language and perceptions of the testators, while his mastery of an exceptional range of musical styles and modes lends each song a distinctive character and mood. Chris’ band for the evening, the brilliantly named ‘Executors’ included an array of talented musicians, and they were also joined on stage by actor Martin Reeve who read extracts from the wills themselves. Hearing Martin give voice to our long dead subjects was a new thrill for me, conjuring them into the very room.
Suffice to say it was a brilliantly crafted evening, reflected in the audience responses at the start of this post. Topsham Folk Club have generously allowed me to repost their review of the event in full, so please do keep reading.
**Chris Hoban Album Release**
For those not lucky enough to be there, we have some very exciting news! Follow on funding from Arts and Culture means that Chris has been able to spend time in the studio, recording his wills songs and is even now putting the final touches to an album titled ‘A Time of Minding’.
The album will include all of the music inspired by the wills project, and features appearances of Miranda Sykes, Paul Downes and other musicians.
If you would like to receive an email notifying you when the album is released, with a link to purchase, please sign up here. The online form also includes a further bonus – a link to the complete lyrics to the album.
Topsham Folk Club Review, by Min Wild
Put the pigeonholes in your pockets – there’s nothing quite like this new show. Chris Hoban is well known to Topsham as a superb singer and songwriter, appearing often with Show of Hands, writing brilliantly about Devon and the Exe. This, though, is different. Imagine an evening of songs written around people’s wills, from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, recovered from the archives. Could be a bit dry, even from a master songwriter? Really not, when you’ve a string quartet (with some depping on woodwind), brilliant electric guitar, a hurdy gurdy, and the driving rhythm of Paul Downes on banjo, mandocello, guitar – and when the songwriter is also a brilliant composer and arranger in modes across folk, jazz, blues, rock, and the classical canon.
We met a variety of people from long ago, including a Powderham ship’s trumpeter (‘Blow His Old Trumpet’), a grumpy Whitelock Bulstrode (‘Naughty Nasty Persons’), an Exeter widow forking out from the estate for a Mayoral bunfight (‘Month’s Mynde’), and, under the sign of Bow Bells, a mother with three daughters and three rings to bequeath (‘The Rings on My Fingers’). Each person and their song had a different, unexpected mood, and an accompaniment that was often counterintuitive, but turned out to be genius. Chris set the scene for the next new testator as they arrived, and actor Martin Reeve read from the wills with impeccable empathy – and comic timing.
A capacity audience at Topsham weren’t sure what to expect of the evening, but trusted in Chris’s abilities to entertain. They came away, though, with much more than that, having been delighted, gobsmacked and blindsided. What had they just seen and heard? It wasn’t folk, it wasn’t classical, it wasn’t a musical or an opera or a play; it wasn’t shanties, or the blues, or ballads – it was all of those.
Chris’s terrific supporting musicians were ‘The Executors’. They should have included singer and double-bassist Miranda Sykes, who was also going to play as support for Chris but illness intervened, so Paul Downes took over splendidly, at almost no notice, with his trademark version of Tom Lewis’s ‘All at Sea’ and superb guitar tunework reaching new listeners. Huge thanks to him, and wishing Miranda better soon!
Finally, and most importantly as the genesis for this project, the songs arose out of a collaboration with Professor Laura Sangha at Exeter University’s Archaeology and History department – Chris worked with her there as Creative Fellow in the department.
~ For more great live music in Devon, visit the Topsham Folk Club website.
~ You can also find out more about Topsham Folk Club activities on their Facebook Page.
The Executors
