Tagged: 16th Century

For this blog we gratefully acknowledge the help of our Bluesky community, particularly Dr Helen Newsome-Chandler, Professor Laurie Johnson, and Professor Tracey Hill, who tackled our palaeography conundrum and identified our ‘Eyrye of Swannys’. This month’s testator is John Spurstowe ‘esquier’, whose will was proved in 1540. This document provides an insight into the life […]

Laura Sangha As a bit of Christmas fun I decided to search The National Archives wills catalogue for people with festive names. As usual, an idle browse through the catalogue actually sent me down some quite interesting avenues. Here is a little summary, offered in the spirit of the season! Mr, Mrs and Master Christmas […]

Content note: this post discusses child loss and death in childbirth. As a project team we’ve now spent two years carefully reading and analysing hundreds of early modern wills. To a certain extent we’ve become very familiar with them: we have a sense of what we might find, how bequests are usually phrased, and we […]

Emily Vine **This will inspired a Chris Hoban song! Read his lyrics at the end of the post.** This month’s post examines the will of Margaret ‘Pennington’ Cooke (d. 1552), a widow of Hornchurch in Essex. Margaret Cooke moved in prominent circles and had royal connections – she was a lady-in-waiting to both Catherine of Aragon and […]

This month’s post analyses the will of John Huggens or Huggyns, a ‘Capper’ or cap-maker who died in Gloucester in 1544.[1] Huggens’ will shows how just one type of object, the humble woollen cap, could underpin personal relationships and have multiple meanings within an individual’s life. Caps were a big part of Huggens’ world: making […]

We’re delighted to announce an exciting new phase of the ‘Material Culture of Wills’ project – the launch of our Zooniverse site. We hope that the Zooniverse ‘crowdsourcing’ platform will allow us to involve hundreds of new volunteers in the project who will work with us to transcribe our sample of 25,000 English wills made […]

**This will inspired a Chris Hoban song! Read his lyrics at the end of the post.** Emily Vine This ‘Will of the Month’ post features the will of a man ‘local’ to the University of Exeter: Alderman Thomas Hunte, who died in 1548 in the reign of Edward VI, having been mayor of the city […]

Emily Vine Early modern folk frequently added ‘conditions’ to their wills: that a sum of money would not be given until a beneficiary reached the age of twenty-one, got married, or entered a certain profession, or threats to disinherit those who behaved poorly or ignored parental instruction. These caveats and contingencies reflect a key reason […]

**This will was part of the inspiration for a Chris Hoban song! Read his lyrics at the end of the post.** 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 […]

Emily Vine  What’s in an early modern will? On the one hand the answer to this question is straightforward – according to the legal definition a will is the documentary instrument by which a person regulates the rights of others to their property or family after their death. Yet their value as historical records is […]