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 peopleās 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 Unlike other historical documents which merely list goods owned, wills allow an analysis of attitudes to material culture.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 āresidue of goodsā 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 peopleās values.
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 peopleās 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. This 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 peopleās 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 āhow was wealth created?ā but āwhat did that wealth mean?ā when it was embodied in a wide variety of objects and integrated into peopleās lives.
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 ā to find out more about the focus of individual researchers please see the Team page.
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.
