Will of the Month: A Suffolk ‘Scrivener’ and his second-best trousers

Posted by e.m.vine@exeter.ac.uk

21 May 2024

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Emily Vine

In this month’s post we explore the will of John Tylney, a man who had made his living from writing the wills of others. Tylney had lived and died in Bury St Edmunds, and when his will was proved in 1552, his profession was described as ‘Scrivener’: someone who wrote and copied legal documents, including last wills and testaments. Tylney’s will shows all the care and consideration of a man who had spent his life drafting such documents. As we will see, alongside the dispersal of possessions including gold rings, velvet night caps, and leather jerkins, Tylney also included an unusual but fitting final bequest.

Scriveners in Early Modern England

Keith Wrightson’s study of the Newcastle scrivener Ralph Tailor suggests that scriveners were increasingly necessary from the mid sixteenth century, with the expansion of the commercial economy, and the need for trades and transactions to be underpinned by formally written documents. Craftsmen and tradesmen may not have had the literacy, legal knowledge, or time to draft such documents, and would accordingly employ the services of a scrivener.[1]

People like John Tylney would therefore have been much in demand in regional centres such as Bury St Edmunds. Indeed, his own methodical will shows a deep familiarity with the genre and reflects a desire to do everything by the book: to account for all his worldly possessions, and to leave no legal ambiguities.[2] The will accordingly begins with Tylney confirming that he was ‘Renownsinge and Revoking all other willes and testaments heretofore made by me eyther by wryting or nuncupative’. This signals Tylney’s confirmation that this document was to be taken as his final will, and also acknowledges different forms of written and nuncupative (oral) wills. Nuncupative wills were formally recognised, but often made by those who were mortally wounded or likely to die quickly or unexpectedly, and who needed to hastily make their final wishes known.

Tylney’s will

Tylney ostensibly had a longer period of time to set his affairs in order: the will was proved after his death at the beginning of October 1552, but it had been written two months earlier on the 10^th of August. As was very common at the time he appointed his wife ‘Cicelye’ as his sole executrix, which made her responsible for settling his debts and fulfilling the contents of the will. He also appointed John Howe as supervisor, he was tasked with assisting Cicely in implementing the terms of the will, and was given three pounds ‘for his paynes’.

Many of the bequests made in the main body of the will follow a fairly standard pattern and are reflective both of Tylney’s profession and local standing. On the day of his burial, he asked that six pounds be distributed ‘amonge the poore people in Bury aforesaide’. The provision of funeral doles – the dispersal of money to the poor of the parish or town – continued to be popular after the Reformation, even as some stricter Protestants expressed concern about the link between this form of charitable giving and prayers for the deceased. As David Cressy has suggested, the local poor ‘defined themselves by their willingness to accept’ these charitable provisions, which could include the dispersal of food as well as money.[3] So too could testators define themselves as being of certain status in their provision of these doles. This charitable bequest solidifies Tylney’s place amongst the established middling or professional class, indicating a scrivener’s relative standing within Bury St Edmunds.

Material Culture

Many of the material possessions listed in Tylney’s will were items of clothing and jewellery. He left to his brother, Nicholas Tylney, ‘my gown furred with black lambe’, my ‘doublet of lether’, and ‘my seconde payre of hoses’. Black lambs’ fur was a cheaper alternative to the use of ermine tails or sable as a fur trimming to clothing, and was often used by those who aspired to more fashionable or expensive styles. It also appears in the wills of other upper or established middling East Anglian men, including a Norwich Alderman who died thirty years before Tylney, who also bequeathed gowns trimmed with mink and black lamb.[4] The description of this item perhaps indicates that Tylney’s black lamb fur gown was prized by him; equally the description may also have been a means of ensuring that the correct item of clothing was identified amongst his possessions and given to his brother.

Tylney’s brother was to receive only his ‘seconde payre of hoses’, whereas John Howe, the aforementioned supervisor of the will, was to receive his ‘best peyre of hoses’, along with his ‘best doublet’, his ‘best felt hatte’, his ‘night cappe of velvet’ and his ‘Jerkyn of Chamlet’. John Howe’s wife, Elizabeth, and his widowed mother, Agnes, were also left ‘one golde ringe’ each. In the absence of further detail, we can only speculate as to why Tylney’s brother received only the second-best doublet and jerkin, whilst John Howe got the best, or why Howe’s female relatives were left some of the most valuable items listed. It is possible that Tylney had a closer kinship connection to the Howe family than can be discerned from the will alone. In a methodical will such as Tylney’s, such decisions were carefully thought out, and point to both the different values attributed to different personal possessions, the differing relationships between testator and beneficiary, and the debts owed to those who assisted in the process of executing a will.

The clearest example of the latter is Tylney’s unusual final bequest. He left ‘to Nicholas Legg the wryter hereof all and singular my presidentes and books’. Legg was a fellow scrivener of Bury St Edmunds, and evidently he was also the man who penned Tylney’s will. Tylney’s bequest was presumably in recognition of the work taken to write up the document. As is common with bequests of this nature, we don’t know how many books this legacy comprised, or their titles and contents, but we can presume that many of these texts were related to their shared line of work. The reference to ‘presidentes’ likely denotes legal precedents, another allusion to their trade.  In a similar vein it was common for clergy for example to leave bequests of theological texts to other men of the church (for one example of this, see one of our earlier ‘Will of the Month’ posts). John Craig has noted that bequests of books and papers between fellow scriveners exemplified the close associations and local networks within this profession. Indeed, Nicholas Legg’s own daughter, Margaret Spitlehouse, would go on to work as a scrivener of Bury St Edmunds in her own right – one of few female scriveners working at this time.[5]

John Tylney’s will therefore exemplifies the life of a man who had valued professional associates, who was deeply integrated within the life of his local town of Bury St Edmunds, and whose work as a scrivener led him to be deeply methodical in the dispersal of his own worldly goods. It is also poignant to think about the mutual professional respect between John Tylney and his fellow scriveners like Nicholas Legg: men (and women) who ostensibly spent their days writing the wills of others, and who were occasionally called to perform that same final obligation for one of their own.

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^[1] Keith Wrightson, Ralph Tailor’s Summer: A Scrivener, His City and the Plague, (Yale University Press, 2011), pp.66-67.

^[2] PROB 11/35/311 3, Will of John Tylney, Scrivener of Bury Saint Edmunds, Suffolk, 3 October 1552.

^[3] David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, And Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England, (Oxford University Press, 1997), p.444.

[4]  Elspeth M. Veale, ‘VII. Fashions in Fur’, in The English Fur Trade in the Later Middle Ages, (London, 2003) pp. 133-155. British History Online https://www.british-history.ac.uk/london-record-soc/vol38/pp133-155 [accessed 16 May 2024].

[5]  John Craig, ‘Notes and Queries: Margaret Spitlehouse, Female Scrivener’, Local Population Studies 46 (1991) p.56 http://www.localpopulationstudies.org.uk/PDF/LPS46/LPS46_1991_54-57.pdf