Tagged: Jewellery

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 […]

This month’s blog post takes us to Hornsea in the East Riding of Yorkshire, and to the will of a widow named Mary Young, who died in 1786.[1] Mary’s husband, the Reverend James Young, Rector of Catwick, had died in 1768, and the couple had no children. James had made his ‘dear Wife Mary’ the […]

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 […]

Dylan Cox Dylan is a third year History student at the University of Exeter who has been on a work experience placement with the ‘Material Wills’ project over the summer. Dylan has transcribed and researched the will of a London gentleman, and in this blog post he reflects on what the will can tell us […]

Laura Sangha What do you get if you combine a historian, a musician, and 25,000 historic wills? All sorts of fun things! In this post I reflect on what composer, arranger, songwriter and performer Chris Hoban and I got up to during our six-month Arts and Culture Creative Fellowship. For background about the fellowship, see […]

With thanks to Harry Smith for help with tracking down Mary Carlton’s burial record. Our recent ‘Will of the Month’ blog posts have featured the wills of testators who listed dozens of possessions and personal items, and who made bequests to large numbers of friends and family. Most recently we have also written about 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 month’s post has been inspired by conversations with the project’s Creative Fellow, composer, arranger, performer and lyricist Chris Hoban. Chris has recently been analysing the wills of sextons and thinking about the symbolism of the body being laid to rest. This is a longstanding interest of his – you can listen to one of his […]

This month’s featured testament belongs to John Pooke, a citizen and haberdasher of London who made his will in 1607. It was only once I sat down to read Pooke’s will carefully, from start to finish, that it suddenly unfolded like a little novella before me, complete with knotty little plot twists. Perhaps this enlightenment […]

**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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

In this month’s post, one of our Expert Volunteers shares her research into one of the wills she came across when transcribing pages for our project. Liz Wood, archivist and project volunteer There is a formula, a routine, to official copies of probate records. The same impersonal clerical hand, standard phrases about mind, bodily health […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]