The Material Culture of Wills Project

Article written by Joe Saunders

Wills are some of the most useful sources for historical research. They tell us about people’s families, their possessions and sometimes even their outlook on the world. They are especially useful for the early modern period, roughly the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, where they are the only type of personal document to survive in their hundreds of thousands for the period before 1800.[1] People at all levels of society left wills. In fact, around a third of people in England and Wales have left a will historically, around the same proportion as the present-day.[2]

An exciting academic project is currently underway using wills which will transform our understanding and use of these documents. The Material Culture of Wills: England 1540-1790 project is working to transcribe, index and analyse the contents of 25,000 English wills proved the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (the highest probate court in England in the period). The project is a partnership between researchers at the University of Exeter and The National Archives. The key question they are aiming to answer is, how did people’s relationship with their possessions change in an era of increasing trade and commercialisation? Unlike other historical documents which merely list goods owned, wills allow an analysis of attitudes to material culture. According to the project team:

"It was not necessary to describe material objects in wills: testators could simply refer to the ‘residue of goods’ unbequeathed. But most took the trouble to describe in detail some possessions and leave them to a particular relative or friend. It is the element of choice in selecting and describing objects that makes wills so revealing of people’s values."[3]

This project uses an unprecedented quantity of wills to examine changing attitudes to people’s possessions in the 250 years before the Industrial Revolution. The study is transcribing and analysing a sample of the wills that survive from this period, taking 5,000 from five evenly spaced periods.

To approach such a huge task of transcribing thousands of manuscripts the project is using Artificial Intelligence as well as working collaboratively with the public. They are creating a Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) AI model which can generate automated transcriptions of the wills. The team are then working alongside volunteers to carefully check these transcriptions for accuracy, before the data is entered into a database ready for analysis.

The project will produce a range of resources that will be valuable to a very broad range of people including local historians and genealogists. At the end of the project the 25,000 transcriptions will be made available open access online. Additionally, The National Archives will then have a HTR AI model that can be used to improve access to other parts of their manuscript collections

To read more about this fascinating project go to their website, The Material Culture of Wills, England 1540-1790. The team are looking for volunteers to assist so take a look and see if you can help.

Read about a recently rediscovered will relating to Shakespeare’s house and family in Stratford-upon-Avon: Will that sparked Shakespeare family row found.

For an excellent guide to probate records in the period of The Material Culture of Wills project look at Tom Arkell, Nesta Evans and Nigel Goose (eds.), When Death Do Us Part: Understanding and Interpreting the Probate Records of Early Modern England (2000).

Sources

[1] ‘About’, https://sites.exeter.ac.uk/materialcultureofwills/about/
[2] Nigel Goose and Nesta Evans, ‘Wills as an Historical Source’ in Tom Arkell, Nesta Evans and Nigel Goose (eds.), When Death Do Us Part: Understanding and Interpreting the Probate Records of Early Modern England (2000), 44-5.
[3] ‘About’, https://sites.exeter.ac.uk/materialcultureofwills/about/

Pharos Course

If you’re looking to learn more about wills for your own research then take our course; Wills and Administrations; the riches of probate records. This course takes you through the various probate documents available, such as wills, administrations and death duty registers, and explains the differences in the probate systems before and after 1858.