From Christmas Candlesticks to Deathbeds: The Material Culture of the Male ‘Middling Sort’ in Late Medieval English Wills

ABSTRACT

This article analyses how men of the rural ‘middling sort’ in late medieval England used movable goods to perform their status and gender by applying relational approaches from material culture studies to bequests in their wills and testaments. It is based on analysis of 403 wills produced by husbandmen, yeomen and gentlemen from Norfolk and Suffolk, c. 1425–1538. Ranking between the gentry and peasantry, these men were major landholders, administrators and consumers in the English countryside, but their mentalities and wills have received little attention. Wills provide evidence for how rural men interpreted their belongings in life and how they imagined objects could help them prolong their patriarchal authority after death. By focusing on three moments when wills intervened in the lifecycles of things – commodity exchange, gift-giving and animation – this analysis models the relational interpretation of medieval material culture and reveals how objects helped create male, middling-status identities.

KEYWORDS:

• Social history
• material culture
• Medieval England
• wills
• masculinity
• middling sort

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Katherine French, Ben Jervis, Maryanne Kowaleski, Rebekah Pite and Teresa Silva for comments on this paper. She would like to thank the staff at The National Archives, the Norfolk Record Office and the Suffolk Record Offices in Ipswich and Bury St. Edmunds for their assistance. Discussions with Jeffrey Doolittle and Richard Gyug also helped shape her thinking.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Abbreviations in this article are as follows: Norwich, Norfolk Record Office (NRO); Norwich Consistory Court (NCC); Archdeaconry of Norfolk (ANF); Dean and Chapter of Norwich (DCN); Ipswich, Suffolk Record Office (IpSRO); Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk Record Office (BurSRO); and The National Archives (TNA). BurSRO, IC500/2/18/132. Translations my own. ‘Will’ is used for ‘will and testament’. ‘Object’ and ‘thing’ refer to non-human participants in relationships. For vocabulary, see Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass, ‘Introduction’, in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1–16 (1–5); Ben Jervis, Pottery and Social Life in Medieval England: Toward a Relational Approach (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2014), 27.

² Claude Blair, John Blair and Roger Brownsword, ‘Copper Alloys’, in English Medieval Industries: Craftsmen, Techniques, Products, ed. John Blair and Nigel Ramsay (London: Hambledon Press, 1991), 81–106 (84, 104); Samantha Letters, ‘Suffolk’, Online Gazetteer of Markets and Fairs in England Wales to 1516, https://www.history.ac.uk/cmh/gaz/gazweb2.html.

³ For probate, see Christopher Dyer, ‘Living in Peasant Houses in Late Medieval England’, Vernacular Architecture 44 (2013): 19–27 (22–23). For debt, see Pamela Nightingale, ‘National Archives Class C.131: Extents on Debt, 1284–1530’, UKDataService, https://beta.ukdataservice.ac.uk/datacatalogue/studies/study?id=4997. For law, see Alice Forward, Ben Jervis, Chris Briggs, Mathew Tompkins and Tomasz Gromelski, ‘Living Standards and Material Culture in English Rural Households 1300–1600: Digital Archive’, Archaeology Data Service, https://doi.org/10.5284/1085022.

⁴ Christopher Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 152; Roberta Gilchrist, Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2012), 171, 191; Eamon Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 15–22.

⁵ ‘Medieval Candlesticks’, Portable Antiquities Scheme Database, https://finds.org.uk/database/search/results/objectType/CANDLESTICK/broadperiod/MEDIEVAL; Blair, Blair and Brownsword, ‘Copper Alloys’, 83.

⁶ For the concept of object lifecycles, see Arjun Appadurai, ‘Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–63; and Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in The Social Life of Things, 64–92.

⁷ For the concept of entanglement, see Ian Hodder, Studies in Human-Thing Entanglement (2016), http://www.ian-hodder.com/books/studies-human-thing-entanglement. For its application to medieval objects, see Katherine French, Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London: Consumption and Domesticity After the Plague (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 44–45.

⁸ Christopher Woolgar, ‘Heirlooms and the Great Household’, in The Elite Household in England, 1100–1550, ed. Christopher Woolgar (Donington, UK: Shaun Tyas, 2018), 432–55; Roberta Gilchrist, ‘The Materiality of Medieval Heirlooms: From Sacred to Biographical Objects’, in Mobility, Meaning & Transformation of Things: Shifting Contexts of Material Culture through Time and Space, ed. Hans Peter Hahn and Hadas Weiss (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2013), 170–82.

⁹ Wills produced by members of the middling sort living in specific market towns are analyzed in Catherine Richardson, ‘Household Objects and Domestic Ties’, in The Medieval Household in Christian Europe, c. 850-c. 1550, ed. Cordelia Beattie, Anna Maslakovic and Sarah Rees (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 433–47; and Elisabeth Salter, ‘Some Differences in the Cultural Production of Household Consumption in Three North Kent Communities, c. 1450–1550’, in The Medieval Household in Christian Europe, 391–407. Four studies sample probate jurisdictions or counties, thus including some rural testators: Kathleen Ashley, ‘Material and Symbolic Gift-Giving: Clothes in English and French Wills’, in Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings, ed. E. Jane Burns (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 137–46; Sheila Sweetinburgh, ‘Clothing the Naked in Late Medieval East Kent’, in Clothing Culture, 1350–1650, ed. Catherine Richardson, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 109–21; Katherine French, The Good Women of the Parish: Gender and Religion after the Black Death (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); and Joanne Sear and Ken Sneath, The Origins of the Consumer Revolution in England: From Brass Pots to Clocks (London: Routledge, 2020).

¹⁰ For studies of urban wills, see, e.g. French, Household Goods; Lisa Liddy, ‘Domestic Objects in York, c.1400–1600: Consumption, Neighbourhood and Choice’ (Ph.D. diss., University of York, 2015); Kristen Burkholder, ‘Material Culture and Self-Presentation in Late Medieval England’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 2001); Kate Kelsey Staples, Daughters of London: Inheriting Opportunity in the Late Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 111–46; Sylvia Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London, 1300–1500 (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan, 1948), 109–54.

¹¹ Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘A Consumer Economy’, in A Social History of England, 1200–1500, ed. Rosemary Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 238–59.

¹² See, e.g. French, Good Women, 38–48; Susan James, Women’s Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485–1603 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015), 231–79; Elisabeth Salter, ‘Women’s Last Wills and Testaments in Hull, England (c. 1450–1555)’, Early Modern Women 12, no. 2 (2018): 33–53.

¹³ French, Household Goods, 224–5; Martha Howell, ‘Fixing Movables: Gifts by Testament in Late Medieval Douai’, Past & Present 150 (1996): 33–35; Janet Loengard, ‘“Which may be said to be her own”: Widows and Goods in Late-Medieval England’, in Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing and Household in Medieval England, ed. Maryanne Kowaleski and P. J. Goldberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 162–76.

¹⁴ Jim Bolton, ‘“The World Turned Upside Down”: Plague as an Agent of Economic and Social Change’, in The Black Death in England, ed. W. Mark Ormrod and P. G. Lindley (Stamford, UK: Paul Watkins, 1996), 17–78 (53).

¹⁵ E.g. Spenser Dimmock, The Origin of Capitalism in England, 1400–1600 (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Christopher Dyer, An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Louisa Foroughi, ‘What Makes a Yeoman? Status, Religion, and Material Culture in Later Medieval England’ (Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 2020); and Jane Whittle, The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk, 1440–1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

¹⁶ For studies based on inventories, see, e.g. Christopher Briggs, Alice Forward, Ben Jervis, and Matthew Tompkins, ‘People, Possessions, and Domestic Space in the Late Medieval Escheators’ Records’, Journal of Medieval History 45, no. 2 (2019): 145–61; Ben Jervis, Christopher Briggs, and Matthew Tompkins, ‘Exploring Text and Objects: Escheators’ Inventories and Material Culture in Medieval English Rural Households’, Medieval Archaeology 59 (2015): 168–92; P. J. Goldberg, ‘The Fashioning of Bourgeois Domesticity in Later Medieval England: A Material Culture Perspective’, in Medieval Domesticity, 124–44. For studies based on artifacts, see, e.g. Jervis, Pottery and Social Life; Ben Jervis, ‘Consumption and the “Social Self” in Medieval Southern England’, Norwegian Archaeological Review 50, no. 1 (2017): 1–29; Aleksandra McClain, ‘Theory, Disciplinary Perspectives and the Archaeology of Later Medieval England’, Medieval Archaeology 56 (2012): 131–70; Gilchrist, Medieval Life. For studies based on literature, see, e.g. Kellie Robertson, ‘Medieval Things: Materiality, Historicism, and the Premodern Object’, Literature Compass 5/6 (2008): 1060–80. For evidence about rural consumption based on wills, see Sear and Sneath, Consumer Revolution, 276–82.

¹⁷ For aspects of testators’ relationships to objects in English wills, see Ashley, ‘Symbolic Gift-Giving’; French, Good Women, 37–48; French, Household Goods, 41–72, 114–27; Lisa Liddy, ‘Affective Bequests: Creating Emotion in York Wills, 1400–1600’, in Understanding Emotions in Early Europe, ed. Michael Champion and Andrew Lynch (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 273–89; Sweetinburgh, ‘Clothing the Naked’; Woolgar, ‘Heirlooms and the Great Household’.

¹⁸ Andrew M. Jones and Nicole Boivin, ‘The Malice of Inanimate Objects: Material Agency’, in The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, ed. Dan Hicks and Mary Beaudry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 333–51.

¹⁹ Jervis, Pottery and Social Life, 17–32. See also McClain, ‘Theory, Disciplinary Perspectives’, 141–6.

²⁰ For legal aspects of will-making, see Michael Sheehan, The Will in Medieval England (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1963); Jeff and Nancy Cox, ‘Probate 1500–1800: A System in Transition’, in When Death Do Us Part: Understanding and Interpreting the Probate Records of Early Modern Europe, ed. Tom Arkell, Nest Evans and Nigel Goose (Oxford: Leopard’s Head, 2000), 14–37.

²¹ Jervis, Pottery and Social Life, 29–31; French, Household Goods, 4–6.

²² Shona Kelly Wray and Roisin Cossar, ‘Wills as Primary Sources’, in Understanding Medieval Primary Sources: Using Historical Sources to Discover Medieval Europe, ed. Joel Rosenthal (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012), 59–71. For studies of European bequests, see, e.g. Samuel Cohn, ‘Renaissance Attachment to Things: Material Culture in Last Wills and Testaments’, The Economic History Review 65, no. 3 (2012): 984–1004; Howell, ‘Fixing Movables’; and essays in Planning for Death: Wills and Death-Related Property Arrangements in Europe, 1200–1600, ed. Mia Korpiola and Anu Lahtinen (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

²³ The sample is based on testators identified as ‘yeoman’, ‘husbandman’ or ‘gentleman’ in indices of wills registered in the NCC (NRO, NCC), the Norfolk (NRO, ANF; NRO, DCN), Suffolk (IpSRO) and Sudbury (BurSRO) archdeaconry courts and the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (TNA, PROB11). It includes a one-third sample of husbandman wills in Norfolk and Suffolk courts (104 of 332) and all five wills in the PCC (109); all of the 171 yeoman wills in Norfolk and Suffolk courts and all 16 in the PCC (183, with duplicates removed); and a one-half sample of all gentleman wills from the Norfolk courts (48 of 92), all 30 from the Suffolk courts and 36 from the PCC (111, with duplicates removed). Information about all 403 testators, 5149 heirs and 6658 bequests was entered in a relational FileMaker Pro 2016 database. Heirs and bequests were assigned distinguishing type codes and sub-codes, and all adjectives were included. The sample yielded 2196 bequests of movable goods.

²⁴ Bruce Campbell, ‘Agricultural Progress in Medieval England: Some Evidence from Eastern Norfolk’, Economic History Review new ser. 36, no. 1 (1983): 26–46 (27–28); Mark Bailey, Medieval Suffolk, 1200–1500 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2007), 163–75, 264–8; Whittle, Agrarian Capitalism, 31–43.

²⁵ 82% (329 of 403) lived outside Norwich, Bishop’s Lynn, Great Yarmouth, Ipswich or Bury St. Edmunds; 30% of gentlemen (33 of 111), 19% of yeomen (34 of 183) and 3% of husbandmen (3 of 109) lived in one of these boroughs.

²⁶ 260 of 403 testators. French, Household Goods, 225.

²⁷ French, Household Goods, 224–5; French, Good Women, 39; Burkholder, ‘Material Culture’, 187–8.

²⁸ French, Good Women, 40–1.

²⁹ Foroughi, ‘What Makes a Yeoman?’, 55–118; Dyer, Age of Transition?, 66–85, 97–125.

³⁰ Foroughi, ‘What Makes a Yeoman?’, 46–47, 103–5, 205–35, 257–9; Dyer, Age of Transition?, 194–210; Ian Forrest, Trustworthy Men: How Inequality and Faith Made the Medieval Church (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 199–208.

³¹ Keith Wrightson, ‘“Sorts of People” in Tudor and Stuart England’, in The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800, ed. Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 28–51 (39–41); H. R. French, The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England, 1600–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1–29.

³² Rachel Moss, Fatherhood and its Representations in Middle English Texts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), 41–71; Derek Neal, The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 73–89.

³³ 349 of 403 testators were married or widowed and 33 were probably previously married, as they have children. 298 of 403 testators had living children.

³⁴ Mavis Mate, Daughters, Wives and Widows after the Black Death: Women in Sussex, 1350–1535 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1998), 3–7; Judith Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock Before the Plague (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 103–4; Moss, Fatherhood and its Representations, 71, 185–90; Neal, Masculine Self, 82–89.

³⁵ Mate, Daughters, Wives and Widows, 3, 76–91; Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside, 104–14.

³⁶ Mate, Daughters, Wives and Widows, 50–55, 142–3, 154–65; Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside, 115–20.

³⁷ Testators who adopted these status terms were wealthy, though not equally. The 1524/5 lay subsidy returns show that husbandman testators were assessed on an average £6 15s 4d in movable wealth, yeomen on £20 16s 10d and gentlemen on £52 5s 1d. All testators whose wills were probated in 1523 or later were compared with the original 1524/5 rolls from Norfolk and the printed returns from Suffolk in S. H. A. Hervy, ed., Suffolk in 1524: Being a Return for the Subsidy Granted in 1523 (Woodbridge, UK: George Booth, 1910).

³⁸ Sheehan, Will in Medieval England, 215; Philippa Maddern, ‘Friends of the Dead: Executors, Wills and Family Strategy in Fifteenth-Century Norfolk’, in Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England: Essays Presented to Gerald Harriss, ed. Rowena E. Archer and Simon Walker (London: Hambledon Press, 1995), 155–74 (163–4).

³⁹ The doctrine of purgatory held that after death the soul had to purge its sins before ascending to heaven; prayers, indulgences and acts of charity performed by the living could lessen time suffering: Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 322–57.

⁴⁰ Nigel Goose and Nesta Evans, ‘Wills as an Historical Source’, in When Death Do Us Part, 38–71 (44–47).

⁴¹ Goose and Evans, ‘Wills as an Historical Source’, 38–44.

⁴² Dyer, Age of Transition?, 3–4; Goose and Evans, ‘Wills as an Historical Source’, 41–42; Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 68–70.

⁴³ For the evidentiary problems of wills, see, e.g. Clive Burgess, ‘Late-Medieval Wills and Pious Convention: Testamentary Evidence Reconsidered’, in Profit, Piety and the Professions in Later Medieval England, ed. Michael Hicks (Gloucester, UK: Alan Sutton, 1990), 14–33; Maddern, ‘Friends of the Dead’; Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 320–34.

⁴⁴ For omissions in probate records, see Jervis, Briggs and Tompkins, ‘Text and Objects’, 183–8; Daniel Lord Smail, Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 76–86; and Liddy, ‘Domestic Objects’, 32–37.

⁴⁵ For agency as distributed and emergent, see Lambros Malafouris, ‘At the Potter’s Wheel: An Argument for Material Agency’, in Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach, ed. Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris (Berlin: Springer, 2008), 19–36.

⁴⁶ Jervis, Pottery and Social Life, 23–31.

⁴⁷ For the concept of object biography, see, e.g Appadurai, ‘Commodities and the Politics of Value’; Kopytoff, ‘Cultural Biography’; Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall, ‘The Cultural Biography of Objects’, World Archaeology 31, no. 2 (1999): 169–78.

⁴⁸ For ‘charisma’ as revealed by descriptors in inventories, see Smail, Legal Plunder, 67–76.

⁴⁹ Kowaleski, ‘Consumer Economy’, 238–40, 257–9.

⁵⁰ Kopytoff, ‘Cultural Biography’, 64, 66–70. See also French, Household Goods, 43; Appadurai, ‘Commodities and the Politics of Value’, 6–16.

⁵¹ IpSRO, IC/AA1/1/4/71a and b.

⁵² For the term, see Appadurai, ‘Commodities and the Politics of Value’, 15. For an analysis of the criteria that make objects more or less exchangeable, see Kopytoff, ‘Cultural Biography’, 66–70.

⁵³ Appadurai, ‘Commodities and the Politics of Value’, 13–16.

⁵⁴ 56%, 3714 of 6658. A further 129 bequests (2%) consisted of cash left to purchase an object or land, or cash generated through the sale of an object or land.

⁵⁵ Whittle, Agrarian Capitalism, 131, 147–55; Jenny Kermode, Medieval Merchants: York, Beverley and Hull in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 291–5.

⁵⁶ 2562 bequests were left for religious or charitable purposes. 88% (2258) were cash; 4% (114) were crops; the remaining 7% (190) included animals, land and objects.

⁵⁷ 16% (18 of 114 bequests) were intended for consumption by the poor or at church ales.

⁵⁸ NRO, NCC Will Register Cage 167; NRO, ANF Will Register Liber 9 (Gillior) fol. 1. Campbell, ‘Agricultural Progress’, 41–44; Bailey, Medieval Suffolk, 75.

⁵⁹ For the grain market, see David Farmer, ‘Marketing the Produce of the Countryside, 1200–1500’, in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, ed. Joan Thirsk, 8 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 3: 324–430 (358–67); for consumption, D. J. Stone, ‘The Consumption of Field Crops in Late Medieval England’, in Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition, ed. Christopher Woolgar, Dale Serjeantson and Tony Waldron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 11–26 (13–7).

⁶⁰ Stone, ‘Field Crops’, 15, 23–25; Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c. 1200–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 152–9.

⁶¹ For livestock markets, see Farmer, ‘Marketing the Produce’, 3: 377–95.

⁶² 41% of testators (164 of 403) left at least one bequest of an animal. Burkholder, ‘Material Culture’, 185–6.

⁶³ 18% of testators (72 of 403) left at least one bequest of sheep.

⁶⁴ Bailey, Medieval Suffolk, 214–9; R. H. Britnell, ‘Farming Practice and Techniques: Eastern England’, in Agrarian History, 3: 194–209 (207–9); Joan Thirsk, ‘East Anglia: Norfolk and Suffolk’, in Agrarian History, ed. H. P. R. Finberg (1967), 4: 40–49 (42–43).

⁶⁵ BurSRO, IC500/2/15/207; NRO, NCC Will Register Puntyng 23.

⁶⁶ Erica Fudge, Quick Cattle & Dying Wishes: People and their Animals in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 80, 142–4.

⁶⁷ NRO, NCC Will Register Palgrave 299.

⁶⁸ 12% (6 of 52) gentleman bequests included a descriptor, compared to 21% (64 of 306) bequests by husbandmen and yeomen.

⁶⁹ 46% of descriptors (33 of 72) referred to appearance, 36% (26 of 72) to age, 15% (11 of 72) to quality and 3% (2 of 72) to origin.

⁷⁰ Bailey, Medieval Suffolk, 159; Mate, Daughters, Wives and Widows, 52.

⁷¹ BurSRO, IC500/2/18/132; IpSRO, IC/AA2/12/190.

⁷² Fudge, Quick Cattle, 70.

⁷³ For the dairy market, see Christopher Woolgar, ‘Meat and Dairy Products in Late Medieval England’, in Food in Medieval England, 88–101 (94–97); Bailey, Medieval Suffolk, 222–3.

⁷⁴ TNA, PROB 11/26/37.

⁷⁵ Jervis, Pottery and Social Life, 38–40.

⁷⁶ Judith Middleton-Stewart, Inward Purity and Outward Splendour: Death and Remembrance in the Deanery of Dunwich, Suffolk, 1370–1547 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2001), 191. For women as maintainers of church lights, see French, Good Women, 34–35.

⁷⁷ Kopytoff, ‘Cultural Biography’, 76.

⁷⁸ Ashley, ‘Symbolic Gift-Giving’, 139–41. For clothing resale, see, e.g. Kate Kelsey Staples, ‘Fripperers and the Used Clothing Trade in Late Medieval London’ in Medieval Clothing and Textiles, ed. Robin Netherton and Gale Owen-Crocker, vol. 6 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2010), 151–71; James Davis, ‘Marketing Secondhand Goods in Late Medieval England’, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 2, no. 3 (2010), 270–86.

⁷⁹ NRO, NCC Will Register Briggs 220; IpSRO, IC/AA2/8/9.

⁸⁰ Goldberg, ‘Bourgeois Domesticity’, 134–5; Marian Campbell, ‘Gold, Silver and Precious Stones’, in English Medieval Industries, 107–66 (108).

⁸¹ TNA, PROB11/6/228.

⁸² NRO, NCC Will Register Godsalve 137.

⁸³ NRO, NCC Will Register Ryxe 243. Emphasis my own.

⁸⁴ 31 of 157 chantry bequests with specified recipients.

⁸⁵ For this historiography, see Arnoud-Jan Bijsterwald, ‘The Medieval Gift as Agent of Social Bonding and Political Power: A Comparative Approach’, in Medieval Transformations; Text, Power, and Gifts in Context, ed. Esther Cohen and Mayke de Jong (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 123–56. For wills and gift-giving, see Sweetinburgh, ‘Clothing the Naked’; Ashley, ‘Symbolic Gift-Giving’; Joel Rosenthal, The Purchase of Paradise: Gift Giving and the Aristocracy, 1307–1485 (New York: Routledge, 1972).

⁸⁶ Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans W. D. Halls, reprint (London: Routledge, 2002), 4–5, 11, 13–16, 47–49. For honour in medieval giving, see, e.g. Martha Howell, Commerce Before Capitalism in Europe, 1300–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 190–207; Bijsterwald, ‘Medieval Gift’, 124–5.

⁸⁷ Mauss, The Gift, 15–16, 55–59.

⁸⁸ NRO, NCC Will Register Gylys 42.

⁸⁹ Sweetinburgh ‘Clothing the Naked’, 117–9; Ashley, ‘Symbolic Gift-Giving’, 143–5.

⁹⁰ TNA, PROB11/7/200.

⁹¹ Ashley, ‘Symbolic Gift-Giving’, 142–3; Sweetinburgh, ‘Clothing the Naked’, 114–7; French, Good Women, 125.

⁹² For the burdens of serving as an executor, see Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 350–1; Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, ‘Introduction: Placing the Dead in Late Medieval and Early Modern England’, in The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–16 (8–9).

⁹³ Wives and sons were 43% of executors (345 of 797), 8% were rewarded (27 of 345).

⁹⁴ Non-kin were 43% of executors (342 of 797); 69% (237 of 342) were rewarded.

⁹⁵ NRO, NCC Will Register Herman 18; NRO, NCC Will Register Puntyng 12 and IpSRO, IC/AA2/11/65.

⁹⁶ John Langdon, Horses, Oxen and Technological Innovation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 100–15, 203–13; Jordan Claridge, ‘Horses for Work and Horses for War: The Divergent Horse Trade in Late Medieval England’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Alberta, 2011), 57–61; Andrew Miller, ‘“Tails” of Masculinity: Knights, Clerics, and the Mutilation of Horses in Medieval England’, Speculum 88, no. 4 (2013): 958–995 (961–70, 976).

⁹⁷ Fudge, Quick Cattle, 70–71.

⁹⁸ For seasonal and resident laborers in rural households, see, e.g. Bailey, Medieval Suffolk, 246–9; Dyer, Age of Transition?, 210–5; Whittle, Agrarian Capitalism, 235–7, 261–8.

⁹⁹ 33 of 111 gentlemen, 27 of 183 yeomen, and 8 of 109 husbandmen. For livery, see Jonathan Rose, Maintenance in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

¹⁰⁰ TNA, PROB11/22/83; TNA, PROB11/20/111.

¹⁰¹ TNA, PROB11/19/266.

¹⁰² For differentiation in servants’ spaces and goods, see, e.g. Goldberg, ‘Bourgeois Domesticity’, 136; French, Household Goods, 76–91; Christopher Dyer, ‘Medieval Peasant Buildings 1250–1550: Documents and Historical Significance’, in The Medieval Peasant House in Midland England, ed. Nat Alcock and Dan Miles (Oxford: Oxbow, 2013), 105–18 (109–12, 117).

¹⁰³ Burkholder, ‘Material Culture’, 209–10; James, Women’s Voices, 123–5.

¹⁰⁴ NRO, NCC Will Register Johnson 38.

¹⁰⁵ For the meanings of beds, see Katherine French, Kathryn Smith and Sarah Stanbury, ‘An Honest Bed: The Scene of Life and Death in Late Medieval England’, Fragments 5 (2016), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.9772151.0005.003. For dairying and laundering, see French, Good Women, 29–31 and n71 above.

¹⁰⁶ BurSRO, IC500/2/2/89.

¹⁰⁷ For skimmers, see French, Household Goods, 135–6. For handwashing, see Christopher Woolgar, The Great Household in Late Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 157.

¹⁰⁸ French, Household Goods, 172–3; Richard Kieckhefer, ‘Erotic Magic in Medieval Europe’, in Sex in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, ed. Joyce Salisbury, reprint (London: Routledge, 2019), 30–55 (49).

¹⁰⁹ French, Smith, and Stanbury, ‘An Honest Bed’.

¹¹⁰ Salter, ‘Some Differences’, 405–6; Liddy, ‘Domestic Objects, 159–60; Staples, Daughters of London, 135–9; Catherine Richardson, Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England: The Material Life of the Household (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 75–78.

¹¹¹ James, Women’s Voices, 183–200.

¹¹² NRO, NCC Will Register Gate 82.

¹¹³ TNA, PROB11/17/556.

¹¹⁴ BurSRO IC500/2/18/130.

¹¹⁵ BurSRO IC500/2/18/130.

¹¹⁶ French, Household Goods, 122–6; Mate, Daughters, Wives and Widows, 94–105.

¹¹⁷ For the historiography of material culture and ambition, see Sara Pennell, ‘Consumption and Consumerism in Early Modern England’, The Historical Journal 42, no. 2 (1999): 549–64 (559–63).

¹¹⁸ NRO, ANF Will Register Liber 5 (Cooke), fo. 42. For funerals and memory, see Clive Burgess, ‘A Service for the Dead: The Form and Function of the Anniversary in Late Medieval Bristol’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 105 (1987): 184–211 (191).

¹¹⁹ Jones and Boivin, ‘Malice of Inanimate Objects’, 342–6. For the animacy of medieval objects, see, e.g. Gilchrist, Medieval Life, 218–27; Jervis, Pottery and Social Life, 55–62; Mark Hall, ‘Approaching Medieval Sacrality’, in The Oxford Handbook of Later Medieval Archaeology in Britain, ed. Christopher Gerrard and Alejandra Gutiérrez (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 614–25 (614–7).

¹²⁰ Distributed personhood derives from Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988); for historiography, see Zoë Crossland, ‘Materiality and Embodiment’, in Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, 386–405 (392–3).

¹²¹ For seals, see, e.g. Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, ‘Medieval Identity: A Sign and a Concept’, American Historical Review 105, no. 5 (2000), 1489–533. For effigies, see, e.g. Kathleen Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England, 1350–1500 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 1–9. For relics, gravestones, and jewelry, see., e.g. Gilchrist, Medieval Life, 134–44, 216–27; and Patrick Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 165–76.

¹²² This term and concept derives from Janet Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 6–11, 33–34, 36–40.

¹²³ Weiner, Inalienable Possessions, 3–4; Jervis, Pottery and Social Life, 55–62; for medieval heirloom deposition, see, e.g. Gilchrist, Medieval Life, 227–51; Mark Hall, ‘Money Isn’t Everything: the Cultural Life of Coins in the Medieval Burgh of Perth, Scotland’, Medieval Archaeology 12, no. 1 (2012): 72–91 (84–86).

¹²⁴ See similar findings about these types of objects in Smail, Legal Plunder, 67–76, 80–81; Liddy, ‘Affective Bequests’, 279–80; James, Women’s Voices, 86–87; Woolgar, ‘Heirlooms and the Great Household’, 444–5; French, Household Goods, 48–72.

¹²⁵ TNA, PROB11/10/324.

¹²⁶ Gilchrist, Medieval Life, 225–6; Woolgar, ‘Heirlooms and the Great Household’, 441–3.

¹²⁷ Burkholder, ‘Material Culture’, 185–7; Woolgar, ‘Heirlooms and the Great Household’, 444, 451–3; Liddy, ‘Domestic Objects’, 151.

¹²⁸ BurSRO, IC500/2/4/190.

¹²⁹ Hall, ‘Money Isn’t Everything’, 76–87; Gilchrist, Medieval Life, 241–3; Gilchrist, ‘Heirlooms’.

¹³⁰ BurSRO IC500/2/7/14; TNA, PROB11/6/228.

¹³¹ For the associations of Katherine, see French, Good Women, 141–2.

¹³² NCC Will Register Godsalve 269; NRO, NCC Will Register Palgrave 217. For similar spoons, see Gilchrist, Medieval Life, 125–6.

¹³³ NRO, NCC Will Register Palgrave 217; TNA, PROB11/6/228; BurSRO, IC500/2/6/47, TNA, PROB11/3/453.

¹³⁴ Gilchrist, Medieval Life, 242–9; James, Women’s Voices, 259–62; Woolgar, ‘Heirlooms and the Great Household’, 453–5.

¹³⁵ 18% of attributed items belonged to men (6 of 34) and 82% belonged to women (28 of 34).

¹³⁶ See above, n13.

¹³⁷ For affection within rural marriages, see Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside, 101–4.

¹³⁸ TNA, PROB11/25/259.

¹³⁹ TNA, PROB11/14/456. For similar gifts of objects previously owned by men, see Richardson, Domestic Life, 73; French, Household Goods, 54–63.

¹⁴⁰ IpSRO, IC/AA2/12/23. For the gendered meanings of beds, see French, Smith and Stanbury, ‘An Honest Bed’.

¹⁴¹ Burkholder, ‘Material Culture’, 185–6, 190–5; French, Good Women, 41–42; French, Household Goods, 159–62, 175–80; James, Women’s Voices, 80–90.

¹⁴² BurSRO, IC500/2/6/47.

¹⁴³ Quote from BurSRO, IC500/2/15/207; see NRO, NCC Will Register Godsalve 269; NRO, NCC Will Register Gate 82; NRO, NCC Will Register Palgrave 312.

¹⁴⁴ NRO, ANF Will Register Liber 8 (Brokehole), fo. 114.

¹⁴⁵ For objects in wills associated with weddings, see James, Women’s Voices, 274; Gilchrist, Medieval Life, 94; Liddy, ‘Affective Bequests’, 283–4; Richardson, ‘Household Objects’, 438; Loengard, ‘Widows and Goods’, 174–5.

¹⁴⁶ BurSRO, IC500/2/6/47.

¹⁴⁷ NRO, NCC Will Register Godsalve 269.

¹⁴⁸ French, Good Women, 47; James, Women’s Voices, 90–91; Liddy, ‘Affective Bequests’, 282–3; Loengard, ‘Widows and Goods’, 174–5.

¹⁴⁹ TNA, PROB 11/23/471.

¹⁵⁰ NRO, NCC Will Register Briggs 134; NRO, NCC Will Register Briggs 29; TNA, PROB11/20/27.

¹⁵¹ French, Good Women, 42–46; French, Household Goods, 213–5; Liddy, ‘Domestic Objects’, 146–9; James, Women’s Voices, 37, 74.

¹⁵² NRO, NCC Will Register Ryxe 243.

¹⁵³ 45% (162) within three months and 77% (278) within one year. Time between will writing and probate was calculable for 88% of wills (359); the others were undated, unproved or dated incorrectly.

¹⁵⁴ NRO, NCC Will Register Attmere 288. For similar bequests, see Richardson, Domestic Life, 74–75.

Additional information

Funding

The author is grateful to Fordham University, the Medieval Academy of America and the North American Conference on British Studies for supporting the research in this article.