{"id":1639,"date":"2024-06-27T06:19:16","date_gmt":"2024-06-27T06:19:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/materialcultureofwills\/?p=1639"},"modified":"2024-06-27T07:04:08","modified_gmt":"2024-06-27T07:04:08","slug":"will-of-the-month-mary-andrews-from-the-bubble-to-the-baltic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/materialcultureofwills\/2024\/06\/27\/will-of-the-month-mary-andrews-from-the-bubble-to-the-baltic\/","title":{"rendered":"Will of the Month: Mary Andrews – from the Bubble to the Baltic"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In this month\u2019s post, one of our Expert Volunteers shares her research into one of the wills she came across when transcribing pages for our project.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Liz Wood<\/em>, archivist and project volunteer<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a formula, a routine, to official copies of probate records. The same impersonal clerical hand, standard phrases about mind, bodily health and God, and then a legalistic division of material wealth which distils decades of personal relationships, tensions and love to \u2018I devise and bequeath to [\u2026]\u2019. Stories, of course, still show through the legal straitjacket and, with a bit of digging, the 1724\/5 will of Mary Andrews takes us from the beaches of Margate to the Baltic strait, touching on Britain\u2019s Empire-building and boom-bust economic revolution along the way.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The will itself gives us the bones of the story. In 1724 Mary Andrews of Wapping, widow, \u2018considering the great Uncertaintyes of this transitory life and for the avoiding of Controversies after my decease\u2019, made her will. Her personal estate was split between her three daughters, two grandchildren and mother. Andrews\u2019 legatees received a \u2018Silver Tankard marked R : M and A\u2019, the rest of her \u2018Plate and Rings\u2019, part shares in three named ships, and an annuity of \u00a35 generated by \u2018One hundred pounds Stock … in the South Sea Company\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Property ownership was overwhelmingly male during Mary Andrews\u2019 lifetime. Before the Married Women\u2019s Property Act was passed in 1870, women lost their separate legal identity and property rights if they married, with the husband taking control of both. Widowhood gave Andrews ownership again and, like other widows, she used the probate system to pass her goods on. It\u2019s striking that five out of six of her beneficiaries were women. The only male presence in Mary Andrews\u2019 will was a child, her grandson John Horsly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

‘My Silver Tankard marked R : M and A’<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bennett Andrews, recipient of the most obviously personal legacy in her mother\u2019s will, was also a key to identifying the family\u2019s Kentish background. The unusually named Bennett was baptised in St John in Thanet (Margate) on 6 March 1697\/8, the daughter of Richard Andrews (Mary doesn\u2019t get a look-in in the baptism record).[2]<\/a> Sixteen years earlier, Richard Andrews and Mary Bennett had married in Canterbury on St Valentine\u2019s Day 1681\/2. At the time of their marriage, Margate-based Richard Andrews was a seaman, Mary Bennett was from Sandwich, 10 miles down the Kent coast.[3]<\/a> The couple had at least seven children in Margate, of whom Bennett Andrews was the youngest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The marks on the tankard, remembered in the will, combine the initials of Mary Andrews and her husband. A wedding gift, perhaps, or later symbol of their marriage. An example of a betrothal tankard<\/a> for \u2018I P H\u2019, also married in 1682, may give us an idea of how the heirloom looked. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

‘Stock which I have in the South Sea Company’<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her will, Mary Andrews included financial provision for her mother (described as \u2018mother in law\u2019) Sarah Bennett. Mrs Bennett\u2019s annuity of \u00a35, paid half yearly, was supported not by family lands but by paper wealth \u2013 ‘One hundred pounds stock in the South Sea Company’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The South Sea Company was formed in 1711 and given a monopoly by Parliament on British trade with Spanish colonies in South America. In 1713 Spain transferred their \u2018asiento\u2019 (Crown <\/a>license) to transport and sell enslaved people to its South American colonies from French traders to British, making the South Sea Company the sole \u2018legal\u2019 supplier of enslaved people to the Spanish Colonies until 1750.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mary Andrews wasn\u2019t the first member of her family to invest in the South Sea trade. The 1712 will of her son Richard, a mariner like his father, included a reference to his \u2018Capitall Stock of the South Sea Company\u2019.[4]<\/a> The young man left this, like all his possessions, to his \u2018Hon\u2019d Mother Mary Andrews\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Nine of diamonds from a set of 52 playing cards which satirised investors in the South Sea Bubble. This card shows a \u2018Sea-Comander\u2019 regretting his investment. From the collections of Baker Library Special Collections and Archives, Harvard Business School (<\/em>https:\/\/curiosity.lib.harvard.edu\/south-sea-bubble\/catalog\/68-8001625459_URN-3:HBSBAKER:228060<\/em><\/a>)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

The South Sea Company has been perhaps more notorious for causing the first international stock market crash than for trading human beings. Richard Andrews was an early adopter, buying his shares in 1711 or 1712. By 1720 the Company was at the centre of speculative mania, fuelled by loans to buy overinflated stock that was regarded as safe as the recently established Bank of England. The \u2018Bubble\u2019 burst in September 1720, with shares plummeting in value from \u00a3950 a piece in July 1720 to \u00a3185 in December 1720.[5]<\/a> The British economy tanked, bankruptcies and suicides rose, the satirical print industry had a field day, and the trade in enslaved people carried on regardless. By 1724, when Mary Andrews linked her mother\u2019s subsistence to the Company\u2019s stocks, the level of return had presumably stabilised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The brief reference to the South Sea Company in Mary Andrews\u2019 will gives us a glimpse of how the worst of empire was rendered mundane in formal documents. It also gives a clear indication of the changing nature of the British economy from the late seventeenth century onwards \u2013 a shift from more tangible property like fields, cows, corn, tools, etc., to pieces of promissory paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

‘One full and equal two and thirtieth part of the good Ship…’<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three \u2018good Ships\u2019 were part-owned by Mary Andrews at the time of her death – the \u2018Anne & Mary\u2019, captained by her son-in-law Samuel Moody, and the \u2018Merrygold\u2019 and \u2018Josiah\u2019, captained by brothers Michael and Edward Hales.[6]<\/a> In all three cases Andrews had a 1 in 32 share in the vessels. Part-ownership of merchant shipping could be lucrative but came with an inherent risk. The wife and mother of lost sailors would have been only too aware that it would take just one bad storm to sink her investments and leave her daughter widowed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Early eighteenth-century \u2018In-letters\u2019 to the Navy Board, individually described in the National Archives\u2019 catalogue, contain detailed information about Naval dockyard management. All three captains and their \u2018good ships\u2019 are mentioned in the correspondence and all three were following the Baltic trade, transporting cargos of hemp and fir timber from Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad), Archangel, Riga and an unnamed port in Norway. One letter shows that even if your ship got safely into port, you weren\u2019t guaranteed a good pay day \u2013 on arrival at the Royal Dockyard, Chatham, in 1717 the \u2018Josiah\u2019 was \u2018found to be falsely packed and containing rotten and decayed hemp\u2019.[7]<\/a> Hemp and fir were both vital products for Royal Navy shipbuilding, hemp for the ropes and fir for masts and decking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sisters of Wapping<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s likely that Mary Andrews moved from Margate to Wapping between 1698 (the baptism of her daughter Bennett) and 1704 (the marriage of her daughter Anne). By 1712, when her only surviving son wrote his will, she was a widow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Early eighteenth-century Wapping was a Sailortown, with most inhabitants involved directly with seafaring or with the service industries that surrounded it. Maritime households like Mary Andrews\u2019 were run by women while the men were absent, either through long sea voyages, early death or abandonment.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Glazed earthenware dish made in 1736 by the Hermitage Pottery, Wapping. It contains a central image of an arm holding a tankard, surrounded by stylised Chinese and European landscapes. \u00a9 The Trustees of the British Museum (<\/em>https:\/\/www.britishmuseum.org\/collection\/object\/H_1942-1208-3<\/em><\/a>)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Old Bailey Proceedings give us glimpses of daily life in Wapping. One victim of Sailortown theft was Mary Andrews\u2019 son-in-law, Captain Samuel Moody, who had \u20185 Gallons of Red Lisbon Wine\u2019 stolen from his ship in 1714.[8]<\/a> Though Mary Andrews was lucky enough to stay out of court, other women of Wapping were less fortunate. The 1748 case of Elizabeth Tod includes the evidence of five women against one man, a gin-drunk lawyer called Henry Rooke who had beaten Tod to \u2018gore\u2019 and stolen her money.[9]<\/a> At least two of the women had husbands at sea, one expected \u2018every day from Jamaica\u2019, the other a \u2018Guineaman\u2019 or slave trader, \u2018gone these six years, trading on the coast of Guinea\u2019. The court report makes it clear that the propriety of men-less Sailortown women was regarded with suspicion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Wapping the wills of dead mariners could be an opportunity to make money. Unscrupulous ship\u2019s clerk Edward Anchors, convicted in 1727, had \u2018for some Years … followed the Practice of Counterfeiting Wills, and getting some evil disposed Persons to prove them.’[10]<\/a> If the deceased was married, Anchors employed \u2018a Sister of Wapping\u2019 as the \u2018widow\u2019 to trick the probate court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Making Connections<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This blog is the result of a volunteer with an archival background and a bit of idle curiosity spending a weekend poking about in some online databases to explore the context of a single transcribed will. Probate records can be a springboard to research into multiple subjects, from the history of a specific family to the study of major historical events such as the South Sea Bubble. A wealth of online resources are available to support this sort of research \u2013 our \u2018Resources\u2019<\/a> page can provide a great starting point.<\/p>\n\n\n