The Material Culture of Wills: England 1540-1790 is a four year Leverhulme funded project that began in November 2023. The project team will transcribe, index and analyse the contents of a very large sample of 25,000 English wills from the Prerogative Court of Canterbury. The project is a partnership between researchers at the University of Exeter and The National Archives and explores the key question: how did people’s relationship with their possessions change in an era of rapidly increasingly trade and commercialisation?
We have a complex relationship to the material culture with which we surround ourselves. Objects serve practical functions, but they also denote status, gender, and cultural milieu. They are a store of wealth, but also of memories and sentiments. As gifts and bequests, they create and strengthen relationships. The accumulation of personal possessions evokes strong emotions from intense desire to moral repugnance. Unlike other historical documents which merely list goods owned, wills allow an analysis of attitudes to material culture. Wills are also the only type of personal document to survive in their hundreds of thousands for the period before 1800. It was not necessary to describe material objects in wills: testators could simply refer to the ‘residue of goods’ unbequeathed. But most took the trouble to describe in detail some possessions and leave them to a particular relative or friend. It is the element of choice in selecting and describing objects that makes wills so revealing of people’s values.
Please explore the sections below to find out more and to view our newsletters that provide updates on how the project is progressing.
To tackle the mammoth research challenge of transcribing tens of thousands of manuscripts we are using Artificial Intelligence as well as working collaboratively with the public. We will first create a Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) AI model which can be applied to our manuscripts to generate automated transcriptions of the wills. After this we will work alongside our volunteers to carefully check these transcriptions for accuracy and to correct errors, before the data is entered into our database ready for analysis. Since it takes about 45 minutes to transcribe a will by hand, this will enormously accelerate the transcription process.
The project will therefore produce a range of resources that will be valuable to a very broad range of people interested in early modern history, from academics and students to local historians and genealogists.
For more on how we will co-create our data alongside the general public and to get involved, see Volunteers.
The project is partly a study of economic change: of how new goods made available by expanding global trade and technological innovation were adopted into English society and culture and given meaning; and of the balance between goods and money or other financial devices as a means of storing and transmitting wealth. But it is also an exploration of varied and changing cultural values: of the meanings embodied in different types of objects, and of the relationships expressed in their transfer via bequests. Positioned on the cusp of death, wills reveal how material culture was used to commemorate people’s lives.
This project uses an unprecedented quantity of wills to examine changing attitudes to goods as possessions in the 250 years before the Industrial Revolution. Although a study of this scale could not have been attempted before, in fact we are still only transcribing and analysing a sample of the wills that survive from this period – there are more than a million pre-1853 wills in The National Archives’ collection alone. To create our sample we are taking 5,000 wills from five evenly spaced periods, listed below. Since more wills are made over time, the more recent sample periods are shorter:
Sixteenth century – made during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI
1538-1552
Seventeenth century – made during the reign of James I, and the reign of Charles II
1604-1608
1664-1666
Eighteenth century – made during the reign of George I, and the reign of George III
1725-26
1785-86
The project introduces a new measure of change over time (types of goods bequeathed), but most innovatively, demonstrates how economic change was experienced and integrated into people’s lives through the adoption and assimilation of new goods, contributing to the history of trade, consumption, and living standards. It therefore reframes the question, asking not ‘how was wealth created?’ but ‘what did that wealth mean?’ when it was embodied in a wide variety of objects and integrated into people’s lives.
RESEARCH PRESENTATIONS
13 February 2024: Laura Sangha, ‘The Material Culture of Wills, England 1540-1790‘. Combined University of Plymouth & Plymouth HA Branch Seminar Paper.
26 February 2024: Laura Sangha, ‘The Material Culture of Wills, England 1540-1790‘, Online seminar for Reading Early Modern Research Centre, University of Reading.
28 February 2024: Laura Sangha and Emily Vine, ‘The Material Culture of Wills, England 1540-1790‘, University of Exeter, Centre for Early Modern Studies seminar series, hybrid.
17 April 2024, Emily Vine, online Talk to Quaker Wills Committee.
23 November 2024: Emily Vine, ‘In Search of… the Inheritance: Understanding Wills, Probate, and Related Records for Family History’, Society of Australian Genealogists conference.
18 November 2024: Emily Vine, ‘The Material Culture of Wills, England 1540-1790’, Trinity College Dublin Centre for Early Modern History Research Seminar Series.
8-9 January 2025: Laura Sangha, Emily Vine, Jane Whittle: Panel at ‘Integrating the Image: Visual Culture, Material Culture and Early Modern British History’, Newcastle University.
22 January 2025: Emily Vine, Quaker Family History Society, Online Presentation.
24 February 2025: Emily Vine, Association of Genealogists and Researchers in Archives (AGRA) Lunchtime Lecture, Online Presentation
25 February 2025: Laura Sangha, ‘Wills as Windows onto past lives in Tudor and Stuart England’, talk to U3A Exeter Branch, Digital Humanities Lab, University of Exeter.
4 – 6 April 2025: Harry Smith, ‘The Material Culture of Wills: Preliminary Findings’, Economic History Society Annual Conference, University of Glasgow.
2 – 5 July 2025: Laura Sangha, ‘”Her Mother’s Maryage Ringe”: Interconnections in English Wills c.1540-1790’, Society for Renaissance Studies Biannual Conference, University of Bristol.
PODCASTS AND WEBINARS
12 November 2024: Material Culture of Wills Webinar marking launch on Zooniverse, with Laura Sangha, Emily Vine and Jane Whittle.
24 December 2024, Ecclesiastical History Society podcast, ‘Talking with … Dr Laura Sangha’.
Spring 2025: That Shakespeare Life podcast – episode on Tudor wills with Laura Sangha.
WORKSHOPS
14 November 2024: Wills Project Team visit to The National Archives.
23 March 2024: Online Expert Volunteers Workshop 1 with Laura Sangha, Harry Smith and Emily Vine.
15 May 2024: Online Expert Volunteers Workshop 2 with Mark Bell, Laura Sangha, Harry Smith and Emily Vine.
17 June 2024: ‘What’s in a Will? Using Wills in Historical Research’. Workshop led by Mark Bell, Laura Sangha, Harry Smith, Emily Vine, Jane Whittle. The National Archives, generously funded by Exeter’s Public Engagement with Research fund.
21 June 2024: ‘What’s in a Will? Using Wills in Historical Research’. Workshop led by Laura Sangha, Harry Smith, Emily Vine, Jane Whittle. Digital Humanities Lab, University of Exeter, generously funded by Exeter’s Public Engagement with Research fund.
17 September 2024: Expert Volunteers Workshop 3 with Mark Bell, Laura Sangha, Harry Smith and Emily Vine.
9 December 2024: Wills Project Team Workshop at University of Exeter.
6 February 2025: Wills Project Team visit to The National Archives with Project Creative Fellow, Chris Hoban.
During the early stages of the project the team will blog about our progress and will highlight interesting wills and objects on this website. In time, we will publish articles in a series of academic journal articles which we will list below.
Journal articles
Harry Smith and Emily Vine, ‘Material and Digital Archives: The Case of Wills’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, December 2024 (published online September, 2024).
Harry Smith and Emily Vine, ‘Research note – The Material Culture of Wills: England 1540-1790’, Local Population Studies 113 Autumn 2024, (published online 7 December 2024)
Edited Volume
The centrepiece of the project will be an edited volume The Material Culture of Wills that will showcase the range of issues relating to early modern material culture that can be explored using the 25,000 wills. Alongside contributions by the project members, a range of other historians will be given access to the database and invited to contribute chapters on their own areas of research expertise. It is likely that the themes explored will include types of bequests (textiles; books; global goods); types of testators (e.g. gentry; urban elites; mariners); as well as patterns relating to gender, kinship and geography.
We send a members of our mailing list an occasional newsletter summarising what the project team have been up to. Click on the images below to view pdfs of past newsletters.
Spring 2024
Autumn 2024
