Tagged: Rural

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 […]

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 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 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 […]

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, […]

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 […]