Speaking of Wills
This came through my social media feed this week
The National Archives in the U.K. has started a partially crowd-sourced project titled The Material Culture of Wills: England 1540-1790. The web site describes the project thus:
This is a four-year research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust that seeks to understand how people's attitudes towards material objects changed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. This period saw extensive social and economic change as England and Wales transformed from a nation of peasant farmers into an industrial nation fully integrated into global trade. We know much about how the ownership of goods changed in this period, but relatively little about people's relationship to their possessions, how they understood them and the meaning they attributed to goods. This project uses an unprecedentedly large sample of wills to investigate this issue.
Wills are the most common personal document to survive from the early modern period. My readers will know that I have a special interest in wills right now. I’m also an early modern historian. (Scroll past the button to keep reading)
Wills are expressions of emotional perspective. Frequently, they are material evidence of a person’s desire to have a good death, to die in a state of grace, or defiance, or to command from the hereafter - an egotistical prospect to be sure. The U.K. project is hoping to reveal a whole raft of emotional perspectives on everything including economic and religious beliefs, and the nature of familial relationships. There is a relationship between the value we place on material goods, including money, and the value we place on relationships within and without our families. Wills tell us much about this.
William Radcliffe, a London cloth worker, left his sister 'a gold ring with a picture of death's head, for all her unkindness'.
This extends, albeit in the inverse, to the super rich like Warren Buffett who knows that he has more wealth than is seemly and therefore is tasking his children with giving it away in a ten year span. They will not be fabulously wealthy on a personal basis but fabulously wealthy and powerful as philanthropists - at least for 10 years.
The reason the National Archives, U.K. is crowd sourcing this project is primarily the huge quantity of documents. The plan is to transcribe 25,000 wills from this time period. They have to be transcribed if they are to be used, or even at the most basic, identified. There is no single accurate list of these documents. Documents are hard to identify if you can’t read the writing on them - and this is the case for most early-modern documents.
You would be hard-pressed to recognize the handwriting on these wills. There was more than block printing and italic - a skill some school districts are retiring from the curriculum. In the early modern period, people wrote in several different ’hands’ each with different conventions for how letters were shaped.
The image below is the alphabet in secretary hand from a Cambridge University web site on paleography - the skill of reading and interpreting old handwriting.
Even more challenging is that there were no spelling rules. A person might spell the same word three different ways in the same document. Much of the skill to reading these documents is to give up on trying to assemble the letters into a recognized pattern - a word - and instead to sound them out phonetically.
a laburar brynging me this letter from my lord I openyd yt before I louked of the derectyon thenkeing yt had bene to my selfe - From a 1580 letter by Bess of Hardwick
As a side note when presented with the word ‘botihm’ as written by a 6-year old, I knew it was ‘bottom’.
As fate would have it, I am a lousy paleographer. So I will not be of much help to the National Archives, but I will be the grateful beneficiary of the transcriptions. As noted in my previous post on the subject when I was working on my doctorate, I met with a descendant of the family I was studying anxious to know if I had identified any wills. Although I knew of none at that time, it is possible it is lurking in the 25,000 wills included in this project. After all, one of the same family’s important records was found under a diet coke bottle on a nightstand in a house previously owned by that family - Grey’s Court. Sir Francis Knollys’s Latin Dictionary had been in the house for 400 years unidentified and now resides in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Dictionaries are nothing to write home about except that this is the book in which Sir Francis recorded the births of his fourteen children. As a member of the Reformed religion he chose a Latin dictionary over a bible to record family history. Before this accidental discovery, historians had the birth order, number of girls and boys, and even the names of his children in a muddle.
It is an established conceit that a will can control someone’s behavior. Do this. Behave a certain way. Believe this theology. All of these have been threats or conditions to be met by beneficiaries in order to claim their designated bequests. ‘Do it my way or I’ll rewrite my will’. I have always found this laughable. How does the author of a will imagine enforcing this from beyond the grave? And surely, if a family is on good and loving terms with each other wouldn’t the presence of the dead person be more valuable than the promised wealth in a will no matter how meagre or munificent?
I have been on the other side of the ‘I’ll rewrite my will’ threat so often it has no strength. Never did actually. If it did, it would mean that I was choosing to live my life prizing wealth above qualities like principle, mind, soul, spirit, life, truth, and love. While I struggle with demonstrating the highest forms of these seven qualities, I have no problem dismissing wealth, especially the promise of wealth or lack thereof at the expense of a loved one’s death, as a motivation for living. What a small life that would be. But as an historian, I await with joy the treasure trove of archival material the National Archives will gift us through this project. I can only hope that William Radcliffe’s sister sold the ‘ring with the picture of death’s head’ he bequeathed to her and put the money to profitable use, turning a curse to a blessing.