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 […]
When selecting previous wills to feature in our monthly series, we browsed testator metadata, looking for particular names or locations, or filtering by occupational, social, and marital status. All of this information can be searched for on The National Archives’ Discovery catalogue. However, thanks to the recent completion of our will transcriptions and the development […]
On paper, this month’s featured testator lived a very different life to the subject of last month’s blog post. Our last post took us to Tudor London, and explored the deathbed will of Margery Gadyng, a young married woman who died suddenly and left behind several children. In this post we travel to late eighteenth-century […]
This month’s post explores the will of Daniel Godfroy, a Huguenot and ‘Master Weaver of Stepney’, who died in 1726 and whose will was ‘Translated from the French’.[1] Stepney, an ancient parish which included the Spitalfields area, was the heart of the London Huguenot community in the early eighteenth century: indeed some Londoners ‘complained that […]
Will Johnson, Barbara Tearle, Emily Vine This edition of our ‘Will of the Month’ series is a very special one. It’s the fruit of a collaboration: the research and transcription were completed by Zooniverse volunteers Will Johnson and Barbara Tearle, and this blog post is a collaboration between us all. It untangles not only the […]
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 will inspired a Chris Hoban song! Read his lyrics at the end of the post.** Many thanks to the Zooniverse users who contributed to conversations about this will on our talkboards, including Will and Barbara, and @sk001, @studentius, @Tearle, @ManyHeaded, and @HJSmith .You can view the discussion of this will here. To join in […]
Our project is analysing a sample of 25,000 wills, and when writing each ‘Will of the Month’ post, it can be difficult to know how to select just one to write about. For December’s post, we wanted to write about a will with a loosely ‘Christmassy’ theme. Because the names of all the testators whose […]
Emily Vine **This will inspired a Chris Hoban song! Read his lyrics and watch a recording at the end of the post.** The end of October and the beginning of November marks ‘Allhallowtide’ – the time of the year when Western Christians, including in early modern England, have traditionally turned their thoughts to the dead […]
**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 Thanks to all participants at our recent workshops at The National Archives and the University of Exeter, where we discussed this will. I have drawn on these discussions when writing this post. In this month’s post we’re thinking not just about the ‘content’ of a will – the details of the bequests it […]
In this month’s post, one of our Expert Volunteers shares a fascinating will that he transcribed as part of our project. Austen Hamilton, Project Volunteer This month’s post explores the will of Thomas Pechill, esquire of Normanton in Lincolnshire, which was composed in September 1665.1 Pechill died within a few months of making his will, […]
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 […]
Our third will of the month, that of affluent fashionable lady Helen Spratt (d.1726), is as long and as detailed as that of the Lincolnshire farmer Ralph Wrighte [link], and is full of rich detail about Helen’s possessions and what they meant to her. She itemises silk dresses, crimson quilts, and chinaware, and sets out […]
This month’s featured will is longer and more detailed than previous examples, stretching to three and a half pages. It’s the will of Ralph Wrighte, a landowner and farmer who died in Sutton Saint James, Lincolnshire, in 1604, and had a lot of land, money, and farm animals to distribute. The dispersal of the estate […]
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 […]
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