Whilst parish registers are the staple fare of
genealogical research, much useful information
can also be gleaned from old wills, whose
bequests and legacies are a rich source of
references to family members, both close and not
so close.
Not only do wills bring together information
which otherwise often can only be found in a
number of unrelated parish registers, but in
constrast to the brief details in parish
registers (particularly up to the end of the
eighteenth century), a will usually specifies the
occupation of the testator and explains the
family relationship with individual beneficiaries
(often divulging their place of residence as well).
A will can therefore provide a textual snapshot
of the testator's immediate family and relatives.
This article also draws on a case study of the
parish of Barkham, near Wokingham, a small and
relatively isolated agricultural parish (1,362
acres), whose population in Tudor, Stuart and
Georgian times probably ranged between about 120
and 200. 92 wills of Barkham residents made
between 1532 and 1857 survive. There are 24 wills
from 1532-1599 (26%), 43 wills from the 1600's (47%),
20 wills from the 1700's (22%) and 5 wills from
1800-1857 (5%).1
Where to find old wills
Prior to the legal reforms of 1858 obtaining
probate (i.e. the formal ratification of a will
to make its terms operative) was an
ecclesiastical rather than a civil matter,
administered by the church courts.2
Tracking down old wills sometimes can be a
frustrating exercise, since although there was a
clear hierarchy (as explained below), there were
over 300 ecclesiastical courts having probate
jurisdiction, many of them small, and the
interrelationships were complex.
Before Berkshire was transferred to the
Diocese of Oxford in 1836 it was in the Diocese
of Salisbury, and the wills of most Berkshire
testators ought to be found in the records of the
following courts:
i) Until the nineteenth century the majority
of Berkshire wills were proved in the
Archdeaconry Court of Berkshire. In the case of
Barkham, virtually all Tudor wills were proved
there (96%), and in the 1600s and 1700s the
proportion was 56%. Wills could only be proved in
the Archdeaconry Court if the deceased's property
was solely in the archdeacon's jurisdiction (see
below) in Berkshire. The archdeaconry probate
records are to be found at the Berkshire Record
Office. It should be noted that until 1911 the
parish of Caversham was in Oxfordshire and in the
Archdeaconry of Oxford, whose probate records are
at Oxfordshire Archives.
ii) The wills of the gentry and well-to-do
yeomen farmers were usually proved in the
Prerogative Court of the Archbishop of Canterbury
in London (generally abbreviated to P.C.C.). In
principle the P.C.C. had jurisdiction where the
deceased owned property in more than one diocese
or peculiar jurisdiction (see below), but in
practice it did little or nothing to deter the
probate business of those testators' families
which sought the social prestige of a family will
proved in the P.C.C.
A Tudor deathbed
scene
From the seventeenth century an increasing
proportion of the wills of Berkshire testators
were proved in the P.C.C., in the case of Barkham
rising from 37% in the 1600s to 60% in the first
half of the nineteenth century. Use of the P.C.C.
initially increased since many church courts
effectively ceased functioning at the outbreak of
the Civil War (1642). Indeed the church courts
were formally abolished 1653-1660 by the Long
Parliament, and a civil court in London granted
probate for the whole of England and Wales. After
the restoration its records were absorbed by the
P.C.C.
The probate business of the P.C.C. continued
to increase rapidly with material progress,
doubling between 1789 and 1829. Its standing was
even further enhanced in 1810 when the Bank of
England ruled that it would accept only P.C.C.
wills.
Register copies of wills proved in the
Prerogative Court of Canterbury may be viewed on
microfilm at the Family Records Centre.
iii) In the case of testators leaving personal
property in the jurisdiction of more than one
archdeaconry within the Diocese of Salisbury,
wills were proved in the Consistory Court of the
Bishop of Sarum. In the case of Barkham, only 9%
of wills from 1532 to 1857 were proved there.
These records may be found at the Wiltshire and
Swindon Record Office in Trowbridge.
iv) A number of Berkshire parishes, however,
were in'peculiars' (special ecclesiastical
jurisdictions) outside the authority of the
bishop and archdeacon.
In the ancient county of Berkshire the
peculiar of the Dean of Salisbury was the
principal peculiar jurisdiction. It covered the
parishes of Arborfield, Hurst, Ruscombe,
Sandhurst, Sonning and Wokingham in east
Berkshire and the parishes of Aston Upthorpe,
Blewbury and Upton in north Berkshire. These
records are to be found at the Wiltshire and
Swindon Record Office.
Hungerford, Wantage and West Ilsley were in
the peculiar of the Dean and Canons of Windsor.
These records are also at the Wiltshire and
Swindon Record Office, except that Wantage wills
1582-1668 are to be found at Oxfordshire Archives.
The wills of testators from Faringdon and Little
Coxwell were proved in the court of the
prebendary who held the Faringdon stall in
Salisbury Cathedral, which wills are now at the
Berkshire Record Office. The wills of testators
from 'peculiar' parishes were not eligible to be
proved in the Archdeaconry Court or the
Consistory Court.
The foregoing is not a comprehensive list of
church courts having some probate jurisdiction in
the ancient county, and (disregarding the P.C.C.)
if a testator left property in the jurisdiction
of more than one court, the will would need to be
proved in some higher court outside Berkshire. A
further complicating factor is that during
ecclesiastical vacancies or episcopal or
archiepiscopal visitations local probate
jurisdiction was 'inhibited' (i.e. suspended) and
jurisdiction temporarily exercised by a higher
church court.
Who made wills and why?
It is impossible to say with any degree of
precision what proportion of the adult population
made a will by reference to burials recorded in
the parish registers, since family historians
will know only too well that it was not the
practice to record anything other than the name
of the deceased and the date of burial. Also, not
all parishes are fortunate enough to have an
uninterrupted run of registers from when they
were first required to be kept in 1538. Parish
registers did not become more informative in the
case of Barkham until after 1782 when the Rev.
David Davies became rector. One of his many
innovations was to note the ages of the deceased
in the burial register as a matter of course.3
The principal unknown factor in determining
the incidence of will making by reference to
burial registers is the unquantiflable rates of
infant mortality, which remained high until well
into the nineteenth century. Consequently there
is some uncertainty about the proportion of will
makers in specific communities from time to time,
but working on the basis, for the sake of
argument, that (say) an average of 55% of the
recorded Barkham burials relates to adults
produces the following indicative statistics:
| |
1538-99 |
1600-99 |
1700-99 |
1800-57 |
| Total burials |
169 |
331 |
343 |
202 |
| Assumed adults (55%) |
93 |
182 |
189 |
111 |
| Surviving wills |
24 |
43 |
20 |
5 |
Any statistics about adult will-making are
further distorted, however, because married women
(femme covert) normally could not make wills (a
legal incapacity shared with slaves, traitors and
heretics). Subject to limited exceptions (e.g.
under a marriage settlement), women married
before 1883 lacked legal capacity to own property
and therefore had nothing to dispose of. With the
rare exception of wills by married women with
their husbands' consent, family historians will
therefore only be able to find wills made by
widows and spinsters. In the case of Barkham, of
the 92 wills made by local residents during 1532-1857,
only nine (10%) were made by women, eight of whom
were widows. There was no corresponding
limitation in the case of personal
representatives, however, and the majority of
married testators appointed their wives as their
executrix.
The occurrence of the highest rate of will
making at Barkham (say 26%) during the Tudor
period can be partly attributed to the
requirement of late mediaeval canon law that
everyone of sound mind (i.e. compos mentis)
owning personal property (e.g. goods, chattels or
animals) worth more than £5 (bona notabilia)
should make a testamentary disposition leaving at
least one-tenth of his property to pious uses for
the redemption of his soul.4 If a
person failed to do so, his soul would be damned
in the eyes of the church. £5 would have
represented a significant sum in Tudor times,
corresponding to the value of (say) five horses
or ten bullocks.
Not unsurprisingly, in an agricultural parish
like Barkham, the majority of testators were
either gentry or farmers (yeomen or husbandmen),
and poorer inhabitants are sparsely represented.
An analysis of the occupations of the 92 Barkham
testators between 1532 and 1857, disregarding
four testators whose occupations are not given (or
cannot be inferred from inventories), shows the
following:
| Gentry |
17% |
| Yeomen/husbandmen |
59% |
| Craftsmen/tradesmen |
14% |
The average value of the estates of the 21
Barkham testators between 1532 and 1599 the value
of whose personal estates is known (in 18 cases
their probate inventories survive) was 36. 16s.
Only three estates were below £12, and two of
these were less than 20 shillings.
Analysing old wills
To read Tudor wills, not only is it necessary
to decipher strange handwriting, but the spelling
is almost totally phonetic - not by reference to
the standard English of today, but reflecting the
marked local accents of country folk over 450
years ago. Many wills continue to present
problems of legibility until well into the
eighteenth century, and even thereafter there can
be some unwelcome surprises, nineteenth century
clerical hand being particularly indecipherable.
Much of the beginning of a will is formulaic,
however, so that anyone who perseveres in
familiarising himself with the script employed
for standard phrases in time will be able to
decipher even the seemingly most impenetrable
script. For example, the beginning of the will
made by John Wilson in 1558 employed the
following standard terminology: 'I John Wilson
yeoman of the parish of Barkh[a]m in the countie
of Berkes beying sicke in mie body but hole in my
mynde thanckes be to god make this my laste will
in forme folowing ffirst I bequeth mie sowle to
Almightye god to o[u]r blessed ladie And to all
the Saintes in heauen and mie bodie to be buried
in the church erth of god & sainte James the
Apostle at Barkh[a]m'.5
Mastery of the script may not be enough,
however, since in Tudor and Stuart times it was
normal for scribes to make extensive use of
abbreviations (e.g. w.ch for which, y.t for that),
although these are largely standard. The other
potential complication is that capital letters
and surnames are notoriously difficult to
decipher. In practice this is a problem only in
the case of beneficiaries with surnames different
from that of the testator, and even this can
usually be resolved by carefully scrutinising the
way in which the scribe has shaped his capital
letters.
Finally, although consistent with the style of
old legal documents the text of wills is in
continuous format, this again is not usually a
problem because, following the formulaic preamble
of a will, each separate bequest is introduced by
the word Item.
In the case of P.C.C. wills, which represent
an increasing proportion of Berkshire wills from
the 1640s onwards, handwriting is less
problematic, since researchers have access not to
the original wills but to microfilm copies of
contemporaneous transcripts fair copied in a
relatively legible standard court hand into
register books.
Anyone reading Tudor probate records cannot
fail to be impressed by the speed with which the
whole process operated. Wills typically were made
only a few days before death. Since recovery was
generally unlikely, any acute illness was taken
as a signal to make one's last will and testament.
Leaving the making of a will (effectively a
public document because of the need for
independent witnesses) to the last minute also
avoided exposing the testator to the risk of
family squabbles during his lifetime. Further, in
Tudor times a will was invalidated not only when
the testator married, but also by the birth of a
child.6
Tudor and Stuart probate inventories, a high
proportion of which survive in the case of the
Archdeaconry Court of Berkshire, can also be a
fascinating source of information. They contain
Inventory of Robert
Williams, 1698, Consistory Court of Sarum,
Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office
exhaustive lists of the deceased's possessions
(even itemising cutlery) room by room and in
outbuildings.
The probate inventories show that even well-to-do
farmers (yeomen or husbandmen) had very few
material possessions, and it was normal in Tudor
and Stuart wills to make detailed bequests of
clothing, specific household goods, grain and
animals. Pewter plates, saucers, brass pots,
heifers and sheep frequently featured in bequests.
In his will in 1558, William Norman left'A kowe
with A pyed [i.e. black and white] face'to
his'doughter Alis', and'A kowe crompyll horned' [i.e.
with curly horns] to his son Nicholas.7
The potential value of old wills to family
historians is demonstrated by the analysis by
George Sherwood in 1918 of all 4,382 wills proved
in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury in the
year 1750, which reveals that there were 40,320
individuals mentioned, an average of over nine
people mentioned in every Will.8
References:
1. Handlist of extant Barkham probate documents,
B.R.O. Ref. D/EX 1211/44/1/1-8.
2. Court of Probate Act 1857 (20 & 21
Victoria, cap. 77).
3. Barkham parish registers 1741-1812, B.R.O. ref.
D/P 13 1/2.
4. R. Burn, Ecclesiastical Law, Vol. IV, London,
1775, pp. 41-56.
5. B.R.O. refs. D/A1/6 C.52 and D/A1/132/116.
6. A.J. Camp, Wills and their whereabouts, 4th
edition 1974 (revised and extended), limited
edition, London, 1975, p. xi.
7. B.R.O. ref. D/A1/101/15.
8. George Sherwood, A List of persons named in
the P.C.C. wills proved in the year 1750:
Register Greenly, London, 1918.
Further reading: When Death do
us Part, edited by Tom Arkell, Nesta Evans and
Nigel Goose; 422pp; Leopard's Head Press, Oxford
2000; Local Population Studies, University of
Hertfordshire at Watford.
