Resources

Arkell, T., Evans, N., and Goose, N., eds, When Death Do Us Part: Understanding and Interpreting the Probate Records of Early Modern England (Leopard’s Head Press, 2000). Excellent place to start research into wills, chapters explain the process of probate and look at the different documents generated by it: wills, inventories, probate accounts etc.

Houlbrooke, Ralph, Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1480-1750 (OUP, 2000), espec. chapters 4 &5. Houlbrooke uses a large set of wills to explore the history of the family.

James, Susan E., Women’s Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485–1603: Authority, Influence and Material Culture (Taylor & Francis, 2016). A study of a large set of women’s wills.

Wrightson, Keith, Ralph Tailor’s Summer: A Scrivener, His City and the Plague (Yale University Press, 2011). A microhistory focused on the activities of a scribe in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in 1636, a plague year – Tailor is called upon to write the wills of many plague victims, and these are used by Wrightson alongside other records.

Arkell, T., Evans, N., and Goose, N., eds, When Death Do Us Part: Understanding and Interpreting the Probate Records of Early Modern England (Leopard’s Head Press, 2000). Excellent place to start research into wills, chapters explain the process of probate and look at the different documents generated by it: wills, inventories, probate accounts etc.

Asquith, Richard, Piety and Trust: Testators and Executors in Pre-Reformation London. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Royal Holloway, 2022 [embargo ends 25/07/24].

Brooks, C.W., Helmholz, R.M., Stein, P.G., Notaries Public in England since the Reformation, Society of the Public Notaries of London (London, 1991).

Brooks, C.W., Law, Politics and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000).

Camp, A. J., Wills and their Whereabouts (London, 1974).

Cox, Nancy, Dannehl, Karin, Dictionary of Traded Goods and Commodities 1550-1820 (Wolverhampton, 2007). [avaliable at British History Online].

Gibson, J., and Raymond, S., Probate Jurisdictions: where to look for wills (The Family History Partnership, 6th edition, 2016). [you can order this from TNA shop].

Takahashi, M., ‘The number of wills proved’, in G.H. Martin and P. Spufford, The Records of the Nation: The Public Record Office, 1838-1988 (Boydell, 1990).

Milward, Rosemary, A Glossary of Household, Farming and Trade Terms from Probate inventories, 3rd edition  (Derbyshire Record Society, 1986) [available from the Record Society.]

Munby, L.M., Thompson, K.M., et al. Short Guides to Records, First Series – Guides 1-24 (The Historical Association, 1994). [articles on Probate Inventories and Wills.]

Rosenthal, J. T., ed., Understanding medieval primary sources: using historical sources to discover medieval Europe (London, 2012), Barron chapter, ‘Sources for medieval urban history’ and Wray chapter ‘Wills and Primary Sources’.

Skeat, Walter W. and Mayhew, Anthony L., A glossary of Tudor and Stuart words, especially from the dramatists (OUP, 1914). [available at The Internet Archive].

Spufford, Margaret, ‘Religious Preambles and the Scribes of Villagers’ Wills in Cambridgeshire, 1570-1700’, Local Population Studies, 7 (1971). Revised discussion in Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 320-44.

Thompson, K.M., Short Guides to Records, Second Series – Guides 25-48 (The Historical Association, 1997). [article on Probate Accounts.]

Whyman, S., The Pen and the People (Oxford, 2009). [on people writing their own wills after 1660]

Ainsworth, Sarah-Jayne, ‘Willing Women: Wills as constructs of female self-identity in the seventeenth-century south west (1625-1660)’. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Exeter, 2019.

Alsop, J.D., ‘Religious Preambles in Early Modern English Wills as Formulae, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 40.1 (1989).

Appleton, Stephanie, ‘Women and Wills in early modern England: the community of Stratford-Upon-Avon, 1537-1649’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Birmingham, 2017.

Attreed, L. C., ‘Preparation for Death in Sixteenth Century Northern England’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 13.3 (1982), 37-66.

Barnett-Woods, Victoria, ‘‘Bequeathed unto My Daughter […] Slaves’: Women, Slavery and Property in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 44.4 (2021).

Becker, L., Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman (Ashgate, 2003).

Benadusi, Giovanni, ‘Investing the Riches of the Poor: Servant Women and their Last Wills’, American Historical Review, 109.3 (2004).

Bertram, M. A., ‘“Renaissance Mentality” in Italian Testaments?’ Journal of Modern History, 67 (1995), 358-69.

Biggs, Carmel, ‘Women, Kinship, and Inheritance: Northamptonshire 1543-1709’, Journal of Family History, 32.2 (2007).

Bonefield, Lloyd, Devising, Dying and Dispute: Probate Litigation in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2017).

Charles, Laura, “Will doe all in her power”: the role of women in the contested will of Henry Cavendish’, The Seventeenth Century, 39.1 (2024).

Cohn, Samuel, ‘Renaissance Attachment to Things: Material Culture in Last Wills and Testaments’, Economic History Review, 65.3 (2012), 984–1004.

Coppel, S., ‘Will making on the deathbed’, Local Population Studies, 40 (1988), 37-45.

Cross, C., ‘Northern Women in the Early Modern Period: the female testators of Hulls and Leeds 1520-1650’, The Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 59 (1987), 83-94.

Cuesta, Julia Fernández, ‘The Voice of the Dead’, Journal of English Linguistics, 42 (2014).

Davis, Lloyd, ‘Women’s Wills in Early Modern England’, in N.E. Wright, M.W. Ferguson and A. Buck, eds, Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England (University of Toronto Press, 2016).

DeBold, Elizabeth, ‘But by the Eyes of His Trustees’: the Emotions and Post-Mortem Strategies of Will-Writing in Restoration London, 1660–1700’, Cultural and Social History (2023), DOI: 10.1080/14780038.2023.2298529

Duffy, E., The Stripping of the Altars (Yale UP, 1992). [chapter 15 on wills].

Erickson, Amy, Women and Property in Early Modern England (Routledge, 1995) [contains extensive discussion of women’s wills, and their role as executrixes].

Formby, Oliva, ‘The emotional evidence of early modern English plague wills’, Historical Research, 94. 266 (2021), 782–805.

Fudge, Erica, Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes: people and their animals in early modern England (OUP, 2019).

Helt, J.S.W., ‘Women, memory and will-making in Elizabethan England’, in B. Gordon and P. Marshall, eds, The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2000).

Hoffman, Philip T., ‘Wills and Statistics: Tobit Analysis and the Counter Reformation in Lyon’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 14.4 (1984), 813-834.

Holland, Lynda, ‘An investigation into the testamentary content of Stafford wills 1761–1860’, Family and Community History, 21.1 (2018).

Houlbrooke, Ralph, Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1480-1750 (OUP, 2000), espec. chapters 4 &5. Houlbrooke uses a large set of wills to explore the history of the family.

Howell, M.C., ‘Fixing Movables: Gifts by Testament in Late Medieval Douai’, Past and Present, 150 (1996).

Jakobiec, Katie, ‘The Architecture of Benefaction: The Last Will and Testament of a Grain Merchant’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 47.4 (2017).

James, Susan E., Women’s Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485–1603: Authority, Influence and Material Culture (Taylor & Francis, 2016). A study of a large set of women’s wills.

Jordan, W.K., Philanthropy in England 1480-1660 (George Allen & Unwin, 1959).

Korpiola, Mia, and Lahtinen, Anu, eds, Planning for Death: Wills and Death-Related Property Arrangements in Europe, 1200-1600 (Brill, 2018).

Lambert, Miles, ‘Death and Memory: Clothing Bequests in English Wills 1650–1830’, Costume, 48.1 (2014).

‘Writing Inheritance in European Literature’, issue 35.1 of Law and Literature (2023).

Marsh, C., ‘In the Name of God? Will Making and Faith in Early Modern England’, in G. H. Martin and P. Spufford, eds, The Records of the Nation (Woodbridge, 1990).

Merwick, D., Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York (Ithaca, NY and London, 1999)

Orlin, Lena Cowen, ‘Empty vessels’ in Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson eds, Everyday objects: medieval and early modern material culture and its meanings (Ashgate, 2010).

Prior, Mary, ‘Wives and Wills 1558-1700’, in Chartres, John, and Hey, David, eds, English Rural Society 1500-1800 (Past and Present Publications, 2006).

Richardson, C., Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy (Manchester UP, 2006).

Richardson, R. C., ‘Wills and will-makers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: some Lancashire evidence’, Local Population Studies, 9 (1972), 33-42.

Salter, E., ‘Women’s Last Wills and Testaments in Hull, England (c. 1450–1555)’, Early Modern Women, 12.2 (2018), 33–53. https://doi.org/10.1353/emw.2018.0002

Staves, Susan, ‘Resentment or resignation? : dividing the spoils among daughters and younger sons’, in Brewer, John, and Staves, Susan, eds, Early modern conceptions of property (Routledge, 1995).

Thomas, Keith, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (2009).

Vann, R.T., ‘Wills and Family in an English Town: Banbury 1550-1800’, Journal of Family History, 4 (1979).

Wall, Richard, ‘Bequests to Widows and their Property in Early Modern England’, History of the Family, 15.3 (2010).

Wilson, Marianne, ‘A Reformation of Remembrance? Devotional Practices of Female Testators in Lincolnshire 1509-1558′, Midland History 44.2 (2019), 176–189. https://doi.org/10.1080/0047729X.2019.1667105

Wrightson, Keith, Ralph Tailor’s Summer: A Scrivener, His City and the Plague (Yale University Press, 2011). A microhistory focused on the activities of a scribe in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in 1636, a plague year – Tailor is called upon to write the wills of many plague victims, and these are used by Wrightson alongside other records.

Zell, M., ‘The Use of Religious Preambles as a Measure of Religious Belief in the Sixteenth Century’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 50 (1977).

Zigarovich, Jolene, ‘Matriarchal Economies: Women Inheriting from Women in Eighteenth-Century Wills, Courts, and Fiction’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 52 (2023).

The National Archives. How to look for wills and administrations before 1858. Focus is on TNA wills proved in the highest and busiest probate court, the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC) in London. By the late 1850s it was proving about 40% of all wills.

GENUKI: UK & Ireland Genealogy. A virtual reference library organised by county. Use the map to navigate to information about each county, then choose the ‘Probate Records’ link to see information about that county’s documents. In many cases this includes links to online transcriptions, indexes and published editions of wills (depending on what is available for each place).

North East Inheritance. Lots of really useful material, including:

• North East Inheritance database (pre-1858 Durham Probate Records: searchable images of documents)
• An extensive list of useful texts relating to pre-1858 probate records
• Explanations of different types of diocesan probate records

British History Online: London Consistory Court Wills, 1492-1547. London Record Society, volume 3. Contains 245 transcribed London wills of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Nearly half are taken from the register Palmer (1492-1520), with the remainder being additional separate wills for the period up to 1547.

British History Online: Calendar of Wills Proved and Enrolled in the Court of Husting, London: Part 2, 1358-1688. Originally published by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, London, 1890.

Quaker Family History Society. Transcribed quaker wills and other testamentary documents. You can also donate your own transcriptions.

The Programming Historian: Publish novice-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching.

Parish List: a spreadsheet listing all the parishes in England and Wales and giving various additional information: parish church, county, diocese, arch-deaconry, deanery. The list has been created by a team led by Dr Valerie Hitchman, and is part of a project to provide a complete list of all surviving churchwarden accounts in county record offices, local history libraries and museums. Click on the ‘County List’ link and you can (1) access maps of each county showing the parishes (2) access individual spreadsheets for all counties. Click on the parish names at the bottom to see total spend for each year (according to the surviving churchwarden accounts). The main page also contains links to look at separate lists of deaconries and archdeaconries.

Billingsley, Martin, The Pens Excellencie or The Secretaries Delight (London, 1618). [Copy book.]

Burn, R., Ecclesiastical Law (London, 1763-5) [Available online at NEI]

Coote, H.C., The Practice of the Ecclesiastical Courts, with Forms and Tables of Costs (Butterworth, 1847). [Available online at NEI]

Chesne, John de Beau, A Booke Containing Diverse Sortes of Hands (London, 1571). [Copy book.]

Godolphin, John, The orphans legacy, or, A testamentary abridgement in three parts (London, 1674).

Hill, R., The Pathway to Prayer and Pietie (London, 1613). [Section ‘an instruction to die well’].

Swinburne, H., A brief Treatise of Testaments and Last Wills (London, 1611).

Wentworth, Thomas, The office and duty of executors (London, 1703).

West, William, Symbolaeographia … or The Notarie or Scrivener (London, 1590). [Contemporary guide to the duties of scriveners and notaries.]

A many-headed monster blog post with links to online tutorials and other key resources.

Marshall, Hilary, Palaeography for Family and Local Historians (Phillimore, 2010).  You can buy this from TNA shop.

Harry Smith and Emily Vine, ‘Material and Digital Archives: The Case of Wills’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Published online, 24 September, 2024). Available open access.