‘But by the Eyes of His Trustees’: the Emotions and Post-Mortem Strategies of Will-Writing in Restoration London, 1660–1700’

ABSTRACT

Wills made in the English probate system during the seventeenth century were emotion-filled documents that allowed their testators to continue to speak and influence the living after their deaths. Read aloud during the probate process, their terms carried out by representatives appointed in an emotionally reciprocal exchange, and made available for public consumption in records offices after the death of the will-maker, wills allowed the words used and their self-fashioning to linger in minds and memories. Beyond words, early modern testators left bequests of personal items, charitable gifts, and material goods, all grounded in emotional meaning. This article examines a sample of seventeenth-century wills written by Londoners during the restoration of the English monarchy (1660–1700). Through linguistic and socio-cultural analysis, it finds that early modern Londoners intentionally utilised their wills to express expectations of their surviving kin which were grounded in emotional terms, and to maintain post-mortem relationships with their living executors from their positions in death in order to ensure their ongoing influence.

KEYWORDS:

• Wills
• probate records
• Death
• early modern England
• history of emotions

Introduction

In early modern England, the idea of the dead communicating with the living preoccupied people’s minds. Pamphlets detailed strange and miraculous apparitions, and the trope of ghostly visits was a staple of early modern drama. Post Reformation, anxiety and imagination about the afterlife only continued. Despite Protestantism bringing an official theological end to purgatory, and the increasing associations of spirits with ungodly, superstitious practices, ghosts still figured meaningfully in the English popular imagination throughout the early modern period.¹ However, true post-mortem communication was a decidedly prosaic affair, if often no less dramatic than a ghost in a play. In writing a will, the contents of which would usually only be known after their deaths, early modern people indeed spoke from the afterlife. Early modern will-makers exerted influence from beyond the grave by utilising the legal system, their designated agents, and their own words to communicate with their surviving friends and kin across this metaphysical barrier. Although physically interred and their souls consigned to the afterlife, their wills ensured the dead’s presence remained alive in the minds of the people who had been part of their life. Testators attempted to influence events which they anticipated would occur and usually appointed a surviving spouse, relatives, or trusted friends as representatives who could be relied on to literally enforce their will. For these executors, overseers, and/or administrators, charged with ensuring that the terms of the will would be fulfilled, the presence of the recently deceased would have been even more intensively felt. Using evidence from contemporary legal texts, literature, and scribal copies of wills from the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, this article argues that people in London at the end of the seventeenth century temporarily lived on through the moral and legal force of the documentation they left behind, through the specific material bequests made to family and friends, and through these trusted agents tasked morally and legally with carrying out their last instructions. Wills allowed testators to assert their expectations of the living, which they articulated in both emotional and material terms. By using a will, testators made certain that their final words and actions would be indelibly preserved for future generations through the legal apparatus of the state.

The executor was the figure through whom the testator’s posthumous will was then legally and practically fulfilled. A testator’s supplications to this figure to fulfil their duties constitute a crucial point for understanding the expression of feeling in early modern wills. An analysis of the executor’s role, a burdensome job which many early modern people would end up undertaking at one time or another, and the bequests they were sworn to carry out, offers a fruitful approach to understanding the affective qualities present in wills. Historians have long acknowledged the emotional content present in many wills, and their potential for studying interpersonal and familial relationships in early modern England. A comprehensive analysis of the emotional expectations within the bequests of early modern English wills, how these were realised by testators’ representatives and what this might reveal about the history of emotions in the period has yet to be written. The emotional content of early modern English wills does more than simply demonstrate the connections between early modern people; put forth at this juncture of law, death, and property, testamentary emotion fuelled the testator’s control over the living from death. The role of the executor, as the embodiment of the deceased’s will in both a testamentary and purposeful sense, was central to this process. By introducing the variety of emotional expectations conveyed in early modern English wills and the key role of the executor in managing the material and affective impact of wills on the living, this article lays a foundation for further study of wills as evidence in the history of emotion in this period.

Only a minority of early modern English people made a will, whether written or verbal (nuncupative). This is despite the fact that clergy encouraged those who could do so to make one, and to do so early in life in order to reduce potential familial tension arising from disputes over intestate succession.² Making a will early in life also encouraged the testator to turn their mind away from worldly matters as they neared death.³ Inheritance could be a thorny and confusing issue, pulled between England’s church courts and local customary law.⁴ In general, the estates of those dying intestate were divided according to the customs of common law, while grants of probate were controlled by the ecclesiastical courts.⁵ Although making a will was not legally necessary for inheritance to take place, will-making was framed as a spiritual good by religious authorities, and allowed a testator greater agency over the dispersal of their property. Estimates for how many wills survive from England between 1500 and 1700 vary from a little over seven hundred and fifty thousand to two million, so although will-makers were a minority in a national population that reached around five million people by 1700, early modern wills nevertheless offer a rich array of evidence for people’s emotional, social, and economic lives.⁶ This article considers wills written by people classified as ‘middling’ in social and economic terms, such as Frances Bostocke, the wealthy wife of a Glazier whose will was proved in 1687, and Rachell Brooke, the widow of a Haberdasher who eked out an existence on a limited annuity, whose will was proved in 1660.⁷ Bostocke left her entire estate, likely worth hundreds of pounds and including multiple buildings and plots of land in Hereford, to her husband, except for a special ‘Japan cabinet’, which she left to a Mrs. Anne Coventry, and twelve shillings apiece to two nephews. Brooke, whose wealth as represented in her will likely came to no more than fifty pounds, left small bequests of shillings to the poor of two specific communities, as well as to several family members and friends, left her orphaned granddaughter specific household goods, and left one of her grandsons ten pounds to bind him as an apprentice.⁸ Despite the difference in their levels of wealth, both women used wills to assert control over the inheritance of their property. Such bequests communicated a direct message from the testator to the recipient. What deserves further analysis is how wills offered the testator other means of communicating their opinions, expectations and demands to the living beyond bequests of material goods or property. The legal process of proving a will ensured that the moral and emotional efforts, expectations, and demands levied were also publicly asserted.

Once a will-maker died, depending on the wealth being distributed and the legal need for certification, the parties responsible for fulfilling its terms would bring it to court for it to be authorised, or ‘proved’. Legal advice manuals counselled making a will privately with only one or two neutral parties as witnesses, to avoid greedy heirs or neighbours who might manipulate the dying person.⁹ Once in court, the parties responsible for the will, including witnesses and any executors, administrators, or overseers named by the will-maker, appeared before a group of officials to swear to the document’s authenticity. The will might have been recited aloud in some cases, including if it had been made verbally, and the judge would then determine its validity and whether or not to grant probate. If probate was granted, scribes would then copy the will into the court’s records. Once certified by the court, the contents of a will were public record.¹⁰ Most Londoners of the ‘middling’ sort would have had some interaction with wills, the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, and the Prerogative Office where copies of the proved wills were kept on file throughout their lifetimes. Given the post-mortem attention paid to wills and their public availability, juxtaposed with the advice to keep one’s will secret before dying, it is likely that most friends and family encountered the last words spoken to them by their will-making loved ones only after their death. Perhaps as a result of this encouragement to secrecy coupled with posthumous publication, testators often used their wills to make direct personal pleas and furnish final messages from their place in the afterlife.

Like most legal documents from the period, seventeenth-century wills included a great deal of formulaic writing. However, testators frequently exceeded the legal requirements and conventions of wills to communicate their expectations for the future, including how their surviving friends and kin were to behave, or to which types of people charitable contributions ought to be given. Many wills from this period included outright expressions of care, love, disappointment, frustration, regret, gratitude, and hope, as well as personal messages referring to specific events, both past and anticipated. Unique statements linking a treasured item to the ancestor from whom it descended, or conveying disappointment or love regarding a person’s actions, constituted bequests in and of themselves. In this context, even formulaic, oft-used phrases that appeared in many wills, such as ‘dear and loving wife’ or ‘trusty and well-beloved friend’, instead of muting the attached emotion with such re-use, highlighted in their ubiquity the shared emotional expectations for how one ought to properly address their beneficiaries from the grave. Many will-makers writing in this period utilised personal bequests of different types to perpetuate influence, control, and relationships with survivors. Most importantly for this argument, they made sustained use of emotional conventions to secure friends or relatives to act as executors, bartering with them, and seeking to maintain a post-mortem relationship with them. Charged to act as the deceased’s agent, the terms of the will relied entirely on the ability and fortitude of the executor(s) to see it through to completion. As the agent of the deceased, the executor temporarily restored the testator’s ability to act in the living world.

A will could not exist without an executor. Ecclesiastical lawyer Henry Swinburne, author of the first full-length treatise on wills and the probate process in England, A Treatise of Testaments and Last Wills (1677), related the will and its executor(s) to each other in visceral terms: ‘as the body is dead, which lacketh a head’, he wrote, ‘so the Testament is … dead, wherein no Executor is appointed’.¹¹ Jurist and legal writer John Godolphin, writing on the topic of executorship in his book The Orphans Legacy (1677) used similar, if plainer speech to describe the intertwined nature of will and executor: ‘[t]his … appointing an Executor, is so essential to a Will, that it cannot have a Being … without it’.¹² Alongside the executor, the other crucial part of a will was the essence of a testator’s true intent and meaning. Legal author William West, whose manual for scribes, Symbolaeographia, was reprinted multiple times in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, wrote that ‘our law respecteth not so much the natural property and signification of words as the true intent and meaning of the Testator, whose mind is the very life and soul of the testament’.¹³ This sentiment was echoed, underlined, and strongly emphasised by most, if not all, legal authors writing on probate during the period. This true will only transformed legally into a testament once paired with the living executor(s), but neither could exist without the other. Although temporary executors, co-executors, overseers, and administrators might additionally be appointed in order to support the executor(s) or fulfil executorial duties in the event that the testator’s appointed executor could not, the role of the executor held the primary legal responsibility for a will.¹⁴ While those who accepted their roles acting as executors took their positions seriously in the context of agreeing to a legally binding contract in court, acting as an executor and fulfilling the terms of a dead person’s last will and testament was more broadly viewed beyond the courtroom as a serious religious and social obligation. Such representatives swore oaths to act ‘well and faithfully’ during the probate process, taking on the responsibility for paying the dead person’s final debts, collecting anything owed, and disposing of their goods and property, always acting according to the ‘mind, will, and intent of their Testator’.¹⁵

The use of words and phrases meant to express emotion, whether formulaic and widely copied or the product of individual variation, provides a starting point for working through what emotions were important to people making, reading, and enacting wills, and thinking about enduring legacies. The 125 wills examined for this article come from London’s craft and mercantile communities between 1660 and 1700. The wills selected were proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, one of two major ecclesiastical courts charged with overseeing probate processes at the time (the other being the Prerogative Court of York for Northern counties). Although wills could be proved in a number of different ecclesiastical courts, the Prerogative Court of Canterbury generally oversaw the probate process for wills of estates in the Southern counties valued at around 5–10l. and above, meaning it represented most of all but the most destitute who made wills in London and the surrounding areas in early modern England.¹⁶ For this study, the sample includes testators who left estates of no more than this threshold up to those who left thousands of pounds. Despite these wide disparities in wealth, the wills examined show that testators mostly wanted the same things: to be remembered, to influence the lives of their surviving kin, and to have the living carry out their final wishes. The wills available through the Prerogative Court of Canterbury provide a rich and readily accessible resource for studying the spectrum of people who fall into the ‘middling sort’ in the period. Although London is far from the only place where early modern people wrote wills in England, it provides a useful, boundaried starting point to examine the issues discussed here. Further research might profitably broaden this geographical range to examine wills proved in York as well as in smaller ecclesiastical courts, providing points of comparisons for how different early modern English communities expressed and engaged in the emotions of will-making. Wills in the sample examined were written by both men and women: of its 125 wills, 70 were written by men and 55 by women. Twenty-four (11 written by women and 13 by men) are discussed here in greater detail in relation to patterns identified across the overall sample. Although 125 wills were consulted as a part of this qualitative study, the 24 cited here are representative of patterns of emotional evidence found throughout the majority. I do not argue that every single will consulted contains the same, or all types, of emotional evidence discussed here; this pilot study simply builds on the acknowledgement by most scholars using wills that they are emotional documents, and identifies different types of emotional evidence that scholars ought to consider reviewing in a more methodical way.¹⁷ For men, selection for the larger sample of 125 was based on occupation, using writers who identified as practicing a craft or who were members of a guild. Since this information was mostly unavailable for women, women’s wills were selected to ensure a roughly similar number of individuals identifying as single, married, or widowed in order to include as many different perspectives as possible. By examining and relating such individual perspectives to one another, we can build a better understanding of the emotional expectations around death and inheritance in the seventeenth century that they articulated.

Approaching wills in the past and present

Social and legal historians have long commented on the strong bonds between kin, friends, and neighbours that reveal themselves in wills. Lloyd Bonfield, Ralph Houlbrooke, Tom Arkell, Amy Froide, Nesta Evans, Amy Erickson, Nigel Goose, and Keith Wrightson have all used the presence of emotion in wills as evidence of these bonds.¹⁸ Bonfield argues that the emotional content of wills likely functioned as a legal strategy developed between the testator and their executor(s), crafting a compelling narrative meant to convince the probate judge to prove the will and uphold its terms against any challenges, while Erickson notes that patterns of familial inheritance, once viewed as strictly a matter of economics, often reflected the emotional climate of their time.¹⁹ Historians working on the history of emotions in the Middle Ages, including Andrea Boffa, Barbara J. Harris, and Francine Michaud, interpret medieval wills as sites of performance, reconsidering them as spaces for historians to seek individual voices from the past. They examine why testators might have included certain statements or bequests, which they use to analyse a period’s broader cultural emotional sphere.²⁰ Although historians of emotion working in the early modern period by and large have yet to study wills in this way, the literature on the history of early modern emotions more generally signals the value of wills as sources for studying historical emotional communities and trends.²¹ Katie Barclay, examining the history of emotions through the lens of performance theory, contends that since emotions are formed in part through their bodily and linguistic expression, written evidence of emotion constitutes part of such expression since the act of writing involves aspects of performance. Although this assertion is couched in relation to dramatic literature, Barclay’s thinking can usefully be applied to wills as sites of performance in their creation, in their further verbal and written iterations, and in their public accessibility.²² Stephanie Trigg points out that early modern Europeans experienced emotion in a much more social than private context, and urges scholars of emotion to pay greater attention to expressions of emotion within social and public places, as well as to look for how expectations for emotional responses were culturally articulated. She notes that early modern religion and philosophic thought related mind to body, a vital part of how emotions are experienced and expressed, in specific ways. Galenic thought and the separation of base, animal instincts (traditionally the remit of the body) from the supposedly higher, more godly cognition of the mind doubtless affected how early modern people processed, controlled, and expressed emotions.²³ In the preparation for a good death, wills served as one of several sites of reflection where bodies and earthly goods met intellectual and spiritual riches, and were forced to reconcile. Sarah Randles discusses the ‘recursive nature’ of material objects and emotions, exploring how emotion is evident in discussions about and around objects in historical contexts. Her work has important implications for how early modernist historians of emotion might approach a deeper analysis of the probate process, the intentions of the people participating in that process, and the resulting records. Wills were, of course, replete with material objects, grounded in emotional meaning, and the testators’ concerns about where these goods ended up.²⁴ By examining a testator’s emotional attachment to material goods, how such objects stand in for the testator’s emotions, and the desire of testators to connect specific people with specific goods, historians stand to gain a richer, deeper understanding of how emotions functioned in a specific community, time, or place, and what those emotions were. Olivia Formby, in a pioneering article on wills as sources for studying the history of emotions, finds that many of the wills written in early seventeenth-century Louth, Lincolnshire, and Kingston-Upon-Hull embedded emotions within actions and material symbols as opposed to expressing them explicitly using emotion words.²⁵ Formby notes that the emotions present within the wills of the testators she studied are mostly ‘implicit, expressed in actions rather than flowery exposition …’²⁶ As medievalists have already demonstrated about earlier communities in France and England, Formby argues convincingly that the seventeenth-century testator, their family, friends, and communities would have read the subtext of bequests in early modern wills as seated in social, emotional meaning. Through statistical analysis, she shows that bequests were often made in recognition of a service done for the testator during their life, such as caring for them in illness or lending them money, or to acknowledge the nature of their relationship with the recipient. Crucially, she notes the ‘symbiotic and emotional act of memory’ of giving physical gifts in the context of a will; such gifts formed ‘a physical point of connection with the dead testator, triggered by encounters of touch, sight, and smell’.²⁷ Formby concludes that although historians have acknowledged the presence of emotion within wills, systematic analyses of the types of emotion expressed through the language of bequest in the context of the early modern will, and the resonance this context provides to the dispersal of property, has yet to be made. While she does not explicitly address the unique relationship between testator and executor, her conclusions point to a need for further exploration of what must also count as a deeply symbiotic relationship. To fully understand the will as not only containing emotion but serving social and emotional functions beyond the bounds of their legal design, including that of a post-mortem mouthpiece, we must first consider how people were advised to make their wills.

Foppish, affected people

The executor’s task was to fulfil their testator’s ‘true meaning’, and so it was of crucial importance that a will reflected the testator’s intent as closely as possible. As with much writing in early modern England, wills were fundamentally collaborative documents. Wills might have been written in a variety of ways between an individual will-maker and various helpers, including professional scribes.²⁸ Like most legal documents from the period, wills used formulaic language and phrases. Scribes, many of whom specialised in different types of composition including legal writing, assisted people in authoring such formal documentation and thus in presenting themselves in courts of law. These professional writers and copyists were able to draw on printed manuals to find just the right turn of phrase. There were a variety of resources for scribes or others in need of help in making a will. Symbolaeographia (1590), the manual noted above by legal writer William West, provided three to four examples of wills, printed in full, which scribes might utilise in their work. These examples included language that would have been familiar to any scribe writing a will in England from the beginning of the sixteenth century through the eighteenth, providing a glimpse of just how long a life formulaic language like this might have. However, such formulae were widely regarded as purely optional. In The Orphan’s Legacy, Godolphin noted that ‘no man is tied to observe this or any other set form in the making of his will, for it [matters] not how it be drawn …’²⁹ while Swinburne devoted an entire section of A Treatise of Last Wills and Testaments to clarifying that ‘in Testaments, the Will and the Intent of the Testator is preferred before Formal or Prescript words …’³⁰ Examples in formularies were simply that. What was of utmost importance was furnishing the true intentions of the testator, and to do so using language appropriate to such a solemn occasion. William Assheton, a cleric who penned an advice manual on will-making in 1696, advised his readers to take good care in writing their wills, cautioning that they:

… avoid the mistakes of … foppish affected People, let the Expressions of your Will be grave and sober; and do not expose your self to the just Censures of Posterity, by any undecent or extravagant Passage. Remember your Will stands upon Record for Publick perusal, and therefore to be idle and extravagant in this last Act of your Life is to be hiss’d off the Stage, and to proclaim your folly to all succeeding Ages.³¹

Assheton’s work was only printed in a single edition and so it is debatable as to how influential his opinions were on this subject, but his advice reflects a general understanding that wills were often used as outlets for emotional expression, which scribes were charged to capture.

“In token of my gratitude…”

The early modern English testators discussed in this study use their choices of executor, bequests, and beneficiaries to express not only love, care, and gratitude, but displeasure, disappointment, and even anger at their friends, employees, relations, and other people or institutions of significance in their lives. Not all legatees received financially expensive bequests such as land, leases, movable goods, or money. Yet, anyone a testator chose to include in their will as the recipient of a bequest must be seen as significant, as the decision tied testator and legatee together in perpetuity within the legal apparatus of the State. Bequests sat at a unique and lively emotional intersection between gift giving, ensuring one’s own legacy and remembrance, and providing for family and friends. One of the most common bequests found in this sample that accomplished this multi-faceted work were mourning rings, either directly bestowed or offered through money left specifically for the legatee to buy a mourning ring. From a few shillings up to five or ten pounds, a ring was an affordable gift accessible to will-makers of all levels of wealth that would allow them to become enshrined in the memories of those who survived them and to mark the significance of their relationship. Thomas Underhill, a London Stationer whose will was proved in 1660, left various amounts of money ranging from twenty shillings to five pounds to six relations, including a niece, nephew, cousin, and siblings, ‘to buy each of them a Ringe to weare in Remembrance of mee’.³² Thomas Gould, another London Stationer whose will was also proved in 1660, left five pounds each to his sisters, and twenty shillings apiece to his two cousins, ‘to buy them a ringe, which I hope they will please to weare in Remembrance of my Loveinge respecte to them’.³³ Hannah Ellams, a Middlesex wife whose will was proved in 1670, left ten shillings to a servant ‘to buy her a ring’, and twenty shillings each to her cousins ‘to buy them rings to weare in remembrance of mee’.³⁴ Judeth Isham, a singlewoman in Westminster whose will was proved in 1679, asked her executrix ‘to give Rings to such of my ffriends and Relations as I have sometime desired her, Intreating them to accept of the same as a Testimony of my respects to them’.³⁵ Given in this way via the will, such rings were meant to function as mnemonic devices that constantly called the deceased loved one in question to mind. Often tied explicitly into a wish for people to remember them, rings were a material memorial of the absent testator. While bequests of various personal items might have had emotional meaning unique to a particular relationship between a testator and beneficiary, bequests of specific types of goods, such as rings, made over and over again throughout many wills, produced what Sarah Randles identifies as an ‘affective field’: a dynamic, culturally pervasive relationship between a material item and the human body that was acknowledged as affected by a specific significance. In seventeenth-century England, mourning rings not only broadcast a characterisation of a generous testator, but publicly advertised the testator’s relationship with the wearer. Early modern gift-giving was almost always a reciprocal act, where the giver received something in return.³⁶ A ring not only called the absent friend or relative to mind visually, but also physically pressed on the body of the wearer. As historians of emotion have argued, emotions are formed in the interplay of biological reaction, internal thought, and social response.³⁷ The role a material object played in asserting the presence of a dead testator, seen but also likely worn and physically felt in daily life, could be considerable. The potent symbol of the mourning ring created an affective field that was drawn on, not only by will-makers, but in broader cultural ways. Anglican cleric John Rawlet, writing in 1667, used a ring given as a bequest as a metaphor to connect his readers to Christ’s sacrifice. Rawlet asked his readers:

would not the memory of such a friend be ever fresh, and precious with you, if you had any humanity, any sense of friendship and kindnesse? And would not your bowels be even turned within you, whenever you beheld his Ring?³⁸

Rawlet couched the emotional terms of such a bequest in as much a physical as mental experience, instigated by the testator’s bequest. In his metaphor of the mourning ring, Rawlet exploited a well-understood, emotionally prescient symbol. His metaphor hints at what recipients of mourning rings were supposed to and commonly understood to feel. Such objects were meant to physically stimulate emotions, including gratitude, awareness of one’s own death, and whatever emotions might be tied to the testator, asserting an enduring material connection with the departed. The emotional consequences were all the more powerful for occurring within the broader social context of a population that wore and saw mourning rings regularly. Such rings were given with the intention of establishing an enduring emotional tether between the dead person and the recipient. Unfortunately, we are unable to see the negative space in a will left by the potentially intentional exclusion of such emotional tethers, where will-makers might have sought to communicate their displeasure with a surviving person by failing to leave a bequest. While some testators accompanied the bequest of a ring with exceptionally strong emotional language, others are more concise, but the ring itself may have communicated a depth of emotion that otherwise went unspoken. In the analysis of these bequests, it is important for historians to keep the pain or displeasure the absence of such positive, or even neutral, language might convey, as well. Alexander Cowse, a Middlesex engraver whose will was proved in 1694, left money to his in-laws and cousins simply ‘to buy them rings’, leaving the specific rationale of doing so unspoken but implied.³⁹ In contrast, John Marriott, a Stationer in the parish of Saint Dunstan’s in the West writing his will in 1662, included a bequest to his ‘worthie and most constant friend’, Miles Flesher, ‘to buy him a ringe to weare in remembrance of his Ould aged freind John Marriott humbly besechinge God to blesse him and his children for all his love to me’.⁴⁰ While Marriott could have simply left a ring without these additional comments, as other testators frequently do, it was important for Marriott to both wish blessings on his old friend, and ask him to wear a ring in his remembrance. Marriott remembers other friends with bequests for rings, describing their friendships in similarly affective terms.⁴¹ While other testators often used the words ‘good’ or ‘loving’ to describe their friends and kin, the deliberate and emotively specific phrasing in Marriott’s will adds a resonance of genuine love and gratitude. Marriott is distinctive here; few other testators in this study utilised blessings in quite the same way, in combination with the bequest of a material object or not. The language a testator used could contextualise the message a ring communicated. While bequests such as mourning rings might initially appear to have been given unconditionally, their gifting was in fact made with the testator’s assumption that the recipient would fulfil their request to remember them. Although this was a fairly mild request, testators certainly attempted to exact more significant agreements from survivors from their position in death.

Many testators used conditional giving to ensure the outcome they most desired for surviving friends and kin in the future. Some conditions, such as those stipulating a child attain their majority before inheriting, or to whom a bequest ought to pass should the designated legatee die before inheriting, appear often across the wills sampled, and seem designed to protect the agency of the testator.⁴² Other conditions attempt to influence the lives of survivors in much more direct ways. Such strategies reveal how men and women attempted to use inheritance, or more pointedly the threat of its revocation, as motivation, reward, punishment, or reproach for actions or behaviour. Hester Cook, a London widow whose will was proved in 1662, left 5l. to her son-in-law Henry Philpott, but only if he returned a silver tankard he had borrowed from her, concluding ‘and if he doe not deliver back the said silver Tankard then I give him nothing and the guift of the said ffive pounds shall be void’.⁴³ Dorothy Clifton, a wife in Stepney, Middlesex making her will in 1671, spent many lines pleading with her daughter Mary Chandler to use the lands bequeathed to her to support Mary’s father John in his old age.⁴⁴ Dorothy wrote in the beginning of her will that in addition to making such a document in consideration of her mortality, she did so

…most cheefely for the good support benefitt advancement and comfort of my said Husband Dureing the full terme of his naturall life and especially that I may Doe my utmost endeavor for him liveing and Dyeing in his old age …⁴⁵

Dorothy continuously used and repeated the phrase ‘upon the speciall trust and confidence by mee in her reposed’ each time she left and described a particular parcel of land to her daughter. This indicates that Mary’s inheritance was not only land, but her mother’s trust that she would look after an ageing, widowed father. Words and intangible entities such as a mother’s trust were as much of a bequest as material items. Elizabeth Lovibond, a married woman making her will in London in 1684, wrote that she left 100l. to her granddaughter Anne Wondey, ‘provided that my said Granddaughter doe marry with the good likeing consent and approbacion of her Grandfather the aforesaid Mr John Wondey and her Mother my said daughter Elizabeth Harding …’⁴⁶ Here, Lovibond does not simply require her grandchild marry with the consent of her grandfather and mother, but with their ‘good liking’, presumably of Anne’s marital partner, showing her concern with the future of her husband and daughter’s opinions in relation to her granddaughter’s marriage. Richard Royston, a London Stationer whose will was proved in 1686, spent an entire page of his five-page will specifying that if his granddaughter Elizabeth Major married without the ‘consents and good likeing’ of her mother and grandmother, then her legacy (all his intellectual property and the financial benefit accruing from it) would be ‘absolutely void’, and would instead go to her younger half-brothers.⁴⁷ While such conditions were of dubious legality, the presence of such clauses emphasises that the issues testators sought to influence were relational as much as material.⁴⁸ Regardless of legal enforceability, Lovibond’s and Royston’s inclusion of this type of condition in their wills made their desires plain for their granddaughters, as well as attempted to exercise control over familial inheritance through these unions in the guise of providing their surviving kin emotional leverage.⁴⁹ In this way, testators imagined the future emotional states of other family members, and empowered them to physically carry out their economic and social desires for them from beyond death.

Marriage was not the only social outcome that testators sought to influence with the collaboration of surviving kin. Thomas Barnard, a Painter Stainer in Surrey whose will was proved in 1677, left his cousin Thomas Jenkyns a bequest of 5l. ‘if he prove dutifull to and please my said loving wife’.⁵⁰ Again, Jenkyns’ bequest relies on the judgement of his surviving wife to weigh whether or not his cousin pleases her. Other will-makers made similar conditions for servants or apprentices, such as Humfrey Moseley, a Stationer whose will was proved in 1661. Moseley left bequests of 5l. each to two of his apprentices, John Langford and Henry Pentor, writing to both that this bequest rested on the condition they would be

willinge to abide with my wife during the time shee keepes shopp or for a longer time if shee thinke good and is willing and ready accordinge unto his best skill and knowledge to help & assist her in her great and troublesome busnies.⁵¹

The distribution of the legacy rested on his wife Anne’s decision as to whether or not the apprentices met his conditions for both their physical presence and their helpful attitudes.

A testator’s words might extend to attempt control over even more intangible behaviours, such as how families might act, think, and feel towards one another. William Boteler, a London goldsmith whose will was proved in 1680, left specific instructions to his family, writing:

I do hereby strictly command and require all my said children (as being noe Bastards) to live in love and unity and not to make any strife or difference one with an other and yet to be vigilent and carefull in lookeing after theire owne particular concerns.⁵²

Boteler here attempts to prevent his children from engaging in disputes with one another, and encourages them to behave lovingly towards one another, but includes an undercurrent of concern for each of their futures as individuals outside of the family unit. Boteler explicitly evokes their birth within wedlock, and therefore under the sight of God, to remind them of their sacred familial bonds, while acknowledging that such ties alone would not keep families from engaging in vicious disputes, particularly over inheritance. Similarly, Thomas Gould, the Stationer who left money to his sisters and cousins for rings, wrote after making a bequest to his son Thomas that ’ … I hope my said sonne will be dutifull to his said Mother, and Loveinge to his sayd brothers and sisters and my exertacion to them all is, that they live in the ffeare of God and peaceably and quietly Together’.⁵³ Rachell Brooke, a London widow whose will was proved in 1660, included such comments when naming her son Richard her sole executor:

… I doe thank him for his naturall affection to his sister Rachell Flammock aforesaid and for his care and charge in helping to bring upp her children And I doe pray God to blesse him and her and hers And intreat him to continue his brotherly love to her and her children …⁵⁴

As with Boteler and Gould, Brooke was clearly looking ahead in entreating her son to continue safeguarding his sister and her children. In addition, she called his past loving behaviour to mind as a model and expressed her gratitude for how he had cared for their family while she lived. The term ‘natural affection’ evokes early modern expectations about how family members were supposed to relate to one another, but her thanks to him also indicates an awareness that this was a privilege. Perhaps Brooke hoped that when the contents of her will became known to the entire family, including not only Richard but her grandchildren and his sister, this bond might be reinforced and forever associated with their mother’s memory. Brooke, Gould, and Boteler thus provided guiding principles for their families’ future spiritual lives and familial relationships. Such words also provided moral pressure, acting as ongoing directives that surviving kin could potentially utilise in times of conflict, which, if evoked, would bring the dead testator’s desires to mind for those involved. Along with expressions of love and care, grudges, unresolved conflict, and bitter disappointments floated to the surface for many will-makers.⁵⁵ One of the most startling examples of such direct language appears in the will of William Bright, a London goldsmith whose will was proved in 1683. Bright writes:

I give and bequeath unto my Neece Elizabeth Case wife to Mr. John Case daughter to my brother Daniell Bright deceased ffive ppounds who was very ungratefull and undutyfull to mee in her marriage and I utterly disclaime her choice and had better for her had shee been rull’d by mee and her best friends. Item I give unto her brother Daniell Bright sonne of my brother Daniell Bright deceased the summe of twentie shillings who lives a lewd and a very bad life.⁵⁶

Bright was a wealthy man who disposed of multiple houses, woodlands, and other properties in Kent and London as well as items such as silk valences, turkey carpets, and diamonds. These were not the smallest bequests he made, as he left twenty shillings to several relations for rings, but the amount is perhaps of less consequence than the terms. If Bright’s will was simply meant to record the amounts or specific items being passed down, and distinguish which individuals received which bequests clearly for the purpose of timely and easy execution, this paragraph might have been omitted. Yet, Bright chose to criticise his niece as ungrateful and undutiful, whilst making clear that the size of the bequest was specifically related to her choice of spouse, and to condemn his nephew for his life choices. Such statements possibly served to prevent Elizabeth or her brother Daniel from legally challenging their inheritance by justifying the amounts given to them, especially in relation to the lands and expensive goods given to other of Bright’s nieces and nephews. But the cutting words, loaded with resentment and judgement, are palpable evidence of Bright’s unhappiness. His phrasing singles them out, where they might otherwise not have been as easily distinguished. It may seem puzzling that Bright chose not to cut his niece and nephew out of his will entirely, but in choosing to include them, he was able to maximise the impact of his final words and write the highly emotive statement he did. As with bequests of specific goods and words of thanks woven into requests for an individual to act as an executor, such explicit emotives allowed the testator to have the final, permanent say in family or community disputes. Read out among family, in public or in private, such statements were pointed and personal. Bright used his will to inscribe the anger he wished to express to his niece and nephew in a manner more permanent than personal letters or spoken words would have allowed.

The testators discussed above made strategic use of the language of bequest, and their material goods, to continue to assert their presences in the physical world, and to influence the lives and behaviour of their surviving friends and kin after their deaths. With the contents disclosed likely only after they were dead and buried, these bequests, and the terms and conditions in which they were embedded, were laden with emotional meaning that would have been highly legible to the survivors. Such messages were able to function most effectively precisely because the testator had died, lending weight and the emphasis of finality to their institutionally preserved, and publicly available, echoes. Yet, these messages could not land without that most crucial individual, who would act as mouthpiece and the physical presence of the dead testator, the executor.

“According to my true meaning”

Although bequests are central to a will’s existence, studies of wills often focus on them without paying much attention to equally interesting transactions of other kinds. In addition to disposing of their property, testators used their wills to make requests of their own, and one such request was made in the act of appointing an executor for the will. Acting as an executor, overseer, or administrator meant taking on the legal and psychological burden, possibly for years, of the recently deceased. Executors took their role seriously. In The house of weeping, a collection of discourses on death, dying, and mourning written by the minister John Dunton, the author writes,

‘[b]ut that which is most considerable is, that we perform the will of the dead, the Laws oblige us, and will see to it; but did they not, certainly it is the noblest thing in the World, to do an act of kindness to him whom we shall never see again, but yet hath deserved it of us, and to whom we would do it if he were present’.⁵⁷

This representative, in acting as an instrument to carry out the literal will that endured after the will-maker’s body died, was legally responsible for ensuring debts were settled, bequests given, and any conflicts resolved peaceably. These trustees were required to see that an honest account of the dead person’s goods was made and might also eventually be required to make a formal accounting before the court.⁵⁸

It is clear that people recognised the unique nature of the relationship between the testator and their executor, and how the executor might serve as physical proxy for the dead. In Southwark in 1680, several executors for a wealthy man named John Marshal, who had left funds for the establishment of a church steeple and a living for a minister, published a broadside explaining their choices around his legacy, in which they illustrated the relationship between will-maker and executors explicitly. At the end of their defence of how the money had been spent, the authors concluded that they hoped their decisions would constitute ‘a good Pursuance of the Donors Will; presuming he designed the good of the Church, the Minister, and the Parish; but could not see what would be for the good of them all in times to come, but by the Eyes of his Trustees … ’⁵⁹ Here, the executors frame their service to the testator in explicit, bodily terms; imagining the dead man beholding a future that he cannot witness without the aid of their own eyes.

Will-makers in turn recognised how executorial responsibilities might become a burden, and usually ended their will by expressing love, trust, or gratitude as a partial form of social payment to those who would take charge of their legacy. The trust required for selecting a person as an executor or other administrator was enormous. Although surviving spouses or children were often appointed as executors, the relationship between the will-maker and the person or people appointed in this capacity was emotionally charged, regardless of the specific relationship the testator might have had with the potential executor. Testators frequently left extra bequests to executors alongside any bequests they made to them in their capacity as friend or kin, along with a brief reassurance or emotional plea related to the performance of executorial duties. The language involved in making someone a representative for a will after death varied from more formal, impersonal terms such as ‘nominate’ and ‘appoint’ where the individuals were not addressed directly, to direct appeals that used words such as ‘entreat’ and ‘desire’. Many testators, though not all, included assertions of their trust and confidence in their chosen representatives, commenting on their ‘care’, ‘pains’, and sufficiency to perform the meaning of their will to its fullest extent. Francis Eaton, a Painter Stainer from London whose will was proved in 1668, made his wife Mary sole executrix, ‘not doubting of her care in the performance of my will’.⁶⁰ Nicholas Bourne, a member of the Stationer’s Company from the parish of Saint Michael, Cornhill whose will was proved in 1660, ‘ordained’ and ‘appointed’ his wife sole executrix, but ‘entreated’ two male relations to act as overseers, ‘intreating them to see that all things be performed according to my true meaning herein declared …’⁶¹ William Hunt, a Stationer from London whose will was proved in 1660, appointed his wife Anne sole executrix, but made his ‘loveing and kind ffreindes’ Joseph Shepherd and Philip Chetwind as overseers, ‘desiring them to Advise and assist my executrixe in performance of this my Will, and as a token of my love I give unto them Tenne shillings a peece’.⁶² Such appointments were deeply personal and evocative of the trust and affection a testator may have with the persons in question. The language of ‘entreating’ someone, acknowledging their pains, and making compensation for the specific act of executing their will, echoes tactics used by petitioners who humbled themselves while praising the merit of the petitioned as a form of social payment.⁶³

This pattern is also present in the wills of unmarried people. In her 1673 will, single woman Ann Oakeley from Lambeth appointed her brother William sole executor with the often-used phrase ‘not doubting but that hee will make a just Performance of this my will’. Similarly to Francis Eaton’s wording, this conventional but emotive expression of her trust in her brother’s abilities to understand and render her final wishes fits as well here as it does with a husband praising his spouse. Earlier in her will, she uses another formulaic, emotive phrase, calling William ‘deare and loveing’, and further leaves him a legacy:

desiring that hee will please to accept of a small legacie of tenn pounds which I doe hereby give and bequeath to him out of the aforesaid 500 pounds remaining in his custodie to buy what he pleases in remembrance of mee …⁶⁴

The social and familial positions of testators such as Oakeley might have affected the language with which they requested the services of their executors. It may be that different language or size of bequest would be required, depending on the social, and indeed gendered, position of the testator in relation to their desired executor. Oakeley demurs about the size of the gift that she uses to express her gratitude (‘a small legacie’), as well as giving her brother the freedom to ‘buy what he pleases’, if it is in remembrance of her. This phrasing both restricts but is also deferential to his wishes and she humbles herself further by describing her gift in this manner. After her other bequests were made, she left the remainder of her estate to him, but this was not considered part of the reciprocity for his acting as her executor. A specific sum was required to be set aside to thank him for performing these duties in service to her final wishes. Even when a potential executor was named as a major, if not primary, beneficiary, and may have been at a similar social level to the testator, it still appears common to have left a bequest in special thanks for the executorial portion of their duties. In 1660, Thomas Butler, a goldsmith from the parish of Saint Botolph’s without Aldgate, made his ‘trustie and loving’ friends George and Thomas Talby and Joseph Kent joint executors of his will and guardians of his underage children, compellingly requesting their care and skill with multiple phrases throughout his will. In two examples, he wrote: ‘I doe hereby earnestly desire my said executors to use their best skill and care in disposeing and ordering of my said estate’, and, ‘not doubting of their love and care to see [my will] performed according to the true intente and meaninge thereof’.⁶⁵ Along with this reminder of their duties from his position in death, he left each of them ten shillings to buy rings in exchange. Rebecca Fynch, a single woman from London whose will was proved in 1676, appointed her ‘loving uncle’ John Snell as her sole executor, leaving him 10l. ‘for his paines in executing this my will’.⁶⁶ Katherine Wicking, a widow whose will was proved in 1665, left 10l. to her executor, whom she had earlier alluded to as her ‘loving friend’, ‘for his paynes and care’, and 5l. apiece to her two overseers.⁶⁷ Wicking, Fynch, and Butler were clear in deploying the language of affective ties regarding the people who they wished to act as executors: as with Oakeley, Eaton, Percevall, and Bourne, they expressed their trust and confidence, and left small tokens that were specifically tied to their duties. Along with executor(s), many testators appointed one or more people to act as overseers or administrators. Historians have suggested that these roles may have been included because will-makers were ‘desirous of checks and balances’.⁶⁸ While true, the emotional reasons that testators of all genders give in their wills for appointing administrators and overseers appears to have little to do with ensuring economic checks and balances. It is logical to assume that in asking for as large a favour as executorship or oversight, testators would express their faith, trust, and confidence in their chosen representatives. Although anxiety in completing the will was undoubtedly present in the number of times a testator admonished their representatives to perform their duties carefully, the emotions around appointing overseers were more focused on building a structure of help or assistance for the executor. Many overseers were identified as friends, kin, or other trusted community figures. Alice Aslin, a widow from the parish of Saint Stephen Coleman Street whose will was proved in 1662, appointed her son Robert (then serving as an apprentice, and therefore likely a younger man) to her executorship. Perhaps because of his youth, she also appointed two ‘loving Frends’ as overseers, leaving them a small bequest of forty shillings.⁶⁹ Many testators, along with this additional bequest, expressed a desire for their overseers to provide help, aid, or advice to their chosen executor. In her study of women and inheritance in early modern England, Amy Erickson notes that overseers of most wills were men, regardless of the testator’s gender, and that ‘cooperation and assistance, rather than control, were usually the stated purposes of appointing an overseer’.⁷⁰ This is borne out in this sample of wills, as in all but one case, overseers are appointed only for executors who were young or a woman. This communicates an anxiety about someone who would have been less adept, familiar, or presumed to face difficulty in dealing with the English legal system. It also conveys a sense of concern, and a desire to ease the difficulty of this monumental request.⁷¹ Bequests made to executors, administrators, and overseers in recognition of their potential duties were different from those made to (other) relatives, often including indications of the testator’s awareness of the weight of the responsibility that would follow. Because of this, wills ought to be regarded as sites of exchange in two different directions: places of taking as well as giving. Testators sought to make a bargain founded on what was fundamentally an emotional bond, exchanging expressions of their trust, confidence, and faith in their chosen representatives for the presumption of their representatives’ dutifulness, care, or advice in the physical and emotional work of carrying out the dead person’s final wishes. The fact that monetary compensation often figured in specifically for an executor or overseer’s work only underlines the significance of this exchange, as well as the value that testators placed on the person who was charged with conveying their enduring, final messages.

Conclusion

For testators, wills in early modern England served as a means of truly distant communication. Effective only after the testator had died, wills allowed the dead person to convey messages to those they left behind through their embodiment in both the legal record and the person of the executor, the testator’s living proxy. Wills are documents replete with emotion, either explicitly in the form of emotive words or phrases, or implicitly through the bequest of physical and emotional goods. The presence or absence of well-worn, formulaic phrases that were used across many such documents only deepened a message’s impact. Regardless of whether or not such phrases accurately reflected how an individual testator might have felt, these phrases inscribed the social importance of the emotions expressed more deeply into the cultural fabric, teaching people how they ought to experience and behave around this most materially fraught part of death.

Examined as a corpus, the voices and desires expressed within early modern wills echo and reflect one another in a mutually reinforcing manner. They show the range of emotions that were often expressed, and were expected to be present, as a testator considered his or her death, including but not limited to gratitude, anger, love, and fear. They also show how invested testators were in influencing a future that they would never see, and in leaving their indelible opinions about familial conflict or the life journeys of surviving individuals. Many will-makers took explicit measures to ensure the moral, spiritual, and material success of survivors, expressed anger or disappointment towards individuals who they felt had behaved badly, and sought to use their executors to extend agency beyond their deaths. Much work remains to be done in the history of emotions in early modern wills. Research into how the emotional content of these documents differs between counties, in different regions, and in comparison with wills from other parts of the early modern world beyond England would be valuable, as would a comprehensive study of how the emotional content of wills changes over time. The emotional scripts present in formulaic language, shaping how testators addressed their kin, friends, and the people they desired as executors, has much to teach us about how early modern people used and experienced emotion. Variations in these scripts speak to gendered differences in how women and men requested executorial services, or acknowledged such services, and is particularly deserving of extended study. In addition to acknowledging the evidence they provide of strong social ties, it is time to use the tools developed in the study of the history of emotions to realise the full potential of what these distant communications can tell us about their communities.

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Drs Ruth Connolly, Barbara Crosbie, and Adam Morton, as well as my colleagues, the anonymous reviewers, and the editors of this special edition for their feedback on early drafts of this article. I am indebted to Dr Amy Froide for her guidance and mentorship on the M.A. Thesis which formed the basis for this piece.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth DeBold

Elizabeth DeBold is a postgraduate research student in History, Classics, and Archaeology at Newcastle University, working on early modern book history and print culture. Her dissertation project, funded by Northern Bridge/AHRC, focuses on apprenticeship in the London Stationers’ Company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Notes

1. The classic work by Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971), provides a thorough exposition on early modern English attitudes towards ghosts, and the changes the Reformation brought to how such beliefs were expressed. Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England 1480–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), and Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), provide further analysis of how the early modern English Reformation caused people to grapple with death in new ways, socially as well as in literature.

2. For more on clerical encouragement of will-making, see Lloyd Bonfield, Dying, Devising, and Dispute: Probate Litigation in Early Modern England (Ashgate: 2012) pp. 22–25; Christopher Marsh, ‘Attitudes to Will-Making in Early Modern England’, in Tom Arkell, Nesta Evans, and Nigel Goose eds., When Death Do Us Part: Understanding and Interpreting the Probate Records of Early Modern England (Leopard’s Head Press Limited: 2000), pp. 158–175, especially pp. 166–169; and Tom Arkell, ‘The Probate Process’, in Arkell, Evans, and Goose, eds, When Death Do Us Part, p. 3–13, especially p.12.

3. See Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family, p. 82–83. Houlbrooke cites William Gouge’s popular 1622 text Domesticall Duties and the sermons of sixteenth-century minister John Hooper, who both urged people to make their wills well before they might expect death, both to reduce the potential for familial conflict arising from dying intestate, and to move towards death unencumbered by thoughts of mortal property.

4. Jeff Cox and Nancy Cox, ‘Probate 1500–1800: a System in Transition’, in Arkell, Evans, and Goose eds., When Death Do Us Part, p.14–37, especially p.19–20.

5. Arkell, ‘The Probate Process’, 8.

6. Nigel Goose and Nesta Evans, ‘Wills as an Historical Source’, in Arkell, Evans, and Goose, eds., When Death Do Us Part, p.38–71, especially p.39–40. E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population of England 1541–1871: a reconstruction (Cambridge University Press: 2002) p.210.

7. Although less common than the wills of single women or widows due to their legal status under coverture, women who became wives could and did make wills that were legally valid throughout the early modern period. This involved strategies such as making legal agreements with male relatives to protect their agency over their assets prior to marriage (whether financial, personal property, or real estate), and/or securing the permission of their spouse to be able to dispose of this property. Some wives’ wills include information about how and why they are allowed to make a will; others provide no such contextual information. For further reading, see Amy Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (Routledge: 1995) especially p.139–140 where she addresses wives making wills.

8. Will of Frances Bostocke, wife, proved January 19, 1687, PROB 11/386/81, The National Archives (TNA). Will of Rachell Brooke, widow, proved April 11, 1660, PROB 11/297/363, TNA. A ‘Japan cabinet’ likely describes the finish, and possibly the origin, of the cabinet: it would have been coated in shiny lacquer, and potentially imported from Japan, India, or another east- or south-Asian country. It is worth noting that most wills were written by men, but as I will discuss further on, women (single, married, and widowed) also wrote wills, even under the pressures of legal restrictions such as coverture.

9. See Bonfield, ‘Legal Standards for Undue Influence’, in Dying, Devising, and Dispute, p. 87.

10. Seventeenth-century chronicler Edward Chamberlayne wrote in his work Angliae Notitia (London: 1671) that ‘ … for a moderate fee, one may search for and have a copy of any such testament made since the rebellion of Wat Tyler … ’ (p. 453). Samuel Pepys recorded a trip to the Prerogative Office to search for and read his uncle John Day’s will in his diary. See Samuel Pepys, ‘Monday 7 September 1663’, in The Diary of Samuel Pepys: https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1663/09/07/.

11. Henry Swinburne, A Treatise of Testaments and Last Wills (London: 1677) p.202.

12. John Godolphin, The Orphans Legacy: or, a Testamentary Abridgement, Part II (London: 1677) p.76.

13. William West, Symbolaeographia (London: 1590), p. 76. Emphasis mine.

14. Since the testator could appoint anyone, and any number of people, as an executor, including infants (born and unborn), the people of a nation, or the King or Queen, temporary executors, and/or administrators and overseers could be appointed by the court to assist where those appointed executor might otherwise be logistically impractical. Swinburne (Part XX, pp.279–284) discusses a variety of such situations, as does Godolphin (Chapter IX, p.102–109).

15. Swinburne, p.341. Thomas Wentworth, The Office and Duty of Executors (London:1656) p.6.

16. Bonfield, Dying, Devising, and Dispute, p. 249. Bonfield notes that at the end of the 17^th century, the financial threshold to allow a will to be proved in the Prerogative Court was 5l., ‘decidedly modest’. See also Tom Arkell, ‘The Probate Process’ p.9–12, for a fuller explanation of the fees for and estate values of wills proved in ecclesiastical courts.

17. For further in-depth analysis using the larger sample, please see Elizabeth DeBold, ‘According to My True Meaning: Emotions and Will-makers in Southern Britain, 1660–1690’, M.A. Thesis, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 2022.

18. Bonfield, Dying, Devising, and Dispute; Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family; Arkell, Evans, and Goose, eds., When Death Do Us Part; Amy Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press: 2005); Erickson, Women and Property; and Keith Wrightson, Ralph Tailor’s Summer: a Scrivener, his City, and the Plague (Yale University Press: 2011).

19. Bonfield, p.205; Erickson, p. 8.

20. See Barbara J. Harris, ‘Defining Themselves: English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550’ Journal of British Studies 49 no. 4 (October 2010); Francine Michaud, “Family Emotional Outlets? Women’s Wills, Women’s Voices in Medieval Marseille (1248–1350), in Joëlle Rollo-Koster and Kathryn L. Reyerson, eds. ‘For the Salvation of my Soul’: Women and Wills in Medieval and Early Modern France, Saint Andrews Studies in French History and Culture (University of Saint Andrews, 2012); and Andrea Boffa, ‘Creating Identity through the Act of Will-Making’, Medieval People 33:1, 2018: p.209–222. Boffa, as well as Michaud and early modernist Harris, all argue that wills are highly performative documents, seeing them as reflective spaces showing how a person’s identity had been built over the course of their life, but were also active sites of such building. These authors focus primarily on the networks and personal identity aspects of wills, and not on the history of the emotions that arguably laid the foundations for these components. My thanks to Dr Susan McDonough for bringing these references to my attention.

21. Natalie Zemon Davis perhaps comes closest to the idea of utilizing early modern wills as sources to study the history of emotions in Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-century France (Stanford University Press: 1987).

22. Katie Barclay, ‘I.4: Performance and Performativity’, in Susan Broomhall ed., Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction (London: 2017) p.14–16.

23. Stephanie Trigg, ‘Affect Theory’, in Broomhall ed., Early Modern Emotions, pp.10–14.

24. Sarah Randles, ‘Materiality’, in Broomhall ed., Early Modern Emotions, p.17–19. Randles draws on sociologist Sara N. Ahmed’s assertion that emotions are ‘sticky’; aligning with objects, individuals, and communities across time

25. Olivia Formby, ‘The emotional evidence of early modern English plague wills’, Historical Research 94:266, November 2021: p.782–805, https://doi.org/10.1093/hisres/htab027.

26. Formby, p.795.

27. Formby, p.803.

28. Margaret Spufford, “Religious Preambles and the Scribes of Villagers’ Wills in Cambridgeshire, 1570–1700’’, in Arkell, Evans, and Goose, When Death Do Us Part, p.146. Spufford notes that the dying will-maker was ‘much in the hands of the scribe writing his will’.

29. Godolphin, p.9.

30. Swinburne, p.300.

31. William Assheton, A Theological Discourse of Last Wills and Testaments (London, [1696]) p.20.

32. Will of Thomas Underhill, proved August 3, 1660, PROB 11/301/30, TNA.

33. Will of Thomas Gould, proved November 19, 1660, PROB 11/302/170, TNA.

34. Will of Hannah Ellams, proved November 21, 1670, PROB 11/333/633, TNA.

35. Will of Judeth Isham, proved May 21, 1679, PROB 11/359/642, TNA.

36. Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, The Culture of Giving (Cambridge: 2008), p.146.

37. William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge University Press: 2001); Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Cornell: 2006) and Generations of Feeling (Cambridge: 2015); and Katie Barclay and François Soyer, Emotions in Europe, 1517–1914 vol. 1 (Routledge: 2022).

38. John Rawlet, A Treatise of Sacramental Covenanting with Christ … (London: 1667) p.192.

39. Will of Alexander Cowse, proved August 1, 1694, PROB 11/434/209, TNA.

40. Will of John Marriott, proved July 1, 1662, PROB 11/308/494, TNA.

41. Idem.

42. For examples, such structuring appears in the wills of Susanna Gillingham, proved January 22, 1664, PROB 11-313-70; Christopher Birkehead, proved November 2, 1680, PROB 11/364/217; Charles Baldwyn, proved October 8, 1689, PROB 11/396/422; and Anna Kekewich, proved September 16, 1678, PROB 11-357-447, all TNA.

43. Will of Hester Cook, proved December 30 1662, PROB 11/309/614, TNA.

44. John is specifically identified as Mary’s father in Dorothy’s will; the biological reality is of course unknowable, but Dorothy’s positioning of the man she calls Mary’s father is a significant part of her request. It is also possible that John was legally incapable of making a will for one of many potential reasons at the time, including but not limited to being considered mentally incompetent due to disability or old age.

45. Will of Dorothy Clifton, proved July 11, 1671, PROB 11/336/409, TNA.

46. Will of Elizabeth Lovibond, proved October 11, 1684, PROB 11/377/371, TNA.

47. Will of Richard Royston, proved November 16, 1686 PROB 11/385/221, TNA.

48. See Godolphin, Orphans Legacy, Part I, chapters XIV and XV, 40–46. Chapter XIV lays out general conditions often found in wills, and chapter XV is devoted entirely to conditions related to marriages.

49. It is worth noting that this sort of exertion of control in early modern English wills is not unique; see Rena Lauer, ‘From Slave to Wife: Manumission and Marriage in Venetian Crete’, Medieval People 36, issue 1 (2021). Lauer’s articulates how former enslavers in medieval Crete used their wills and bequests to control enslaved people freed after the testator’s death, showing that this sort of manipulation exceeds geographic, temporal, and cultural boundaries. Whether or not people of other times and cultures also made legally unenforceable stipulations that were nevertheless potentially profitable manipulations requires further research.

50. Will of Thomas Barnard, proved January 4, 1677, PROB 11/353/8, TNA.

51. Will of Humfrey Moseley, proved March 26, 1661, PROB 11/303/623, TNA.

52. Will of William Boteler, proved August 27, 1680, PROB 11/363/547, TNA.

53. Will of Thomas Gould, proved November 19, 1660, PROB 11/302/170, TNA.

54. Will of Rachell Brooke, proved April 11, 1660, PROB 11/297/363, TNA.

55. See Joëlle Rollo-Koster, who discusses what she terms the ‘scope for retaliation’ in her article “Item Lego … Item Volo … Is there really an ‘I’ in Medieval Provençales’ Wills?” in Rollo-Koster and Kathryn L. Reyerson eds., ‘For the Salvation of my Soul’, p.13.

56. Will of William Bright, proved July 18, 1683, PROB 11/373/375, TNA.

57. John Dunton, The House of Weeping … , London, 1682, p.286.

58. These were generally the responsibilities of an executor and any of any administrators or overseers assisting them, but it is worth cautioning that practices varied in different courts, and over time. See Cox and Cox, ‘Probate 1500–1800’, especially pp.25–30.

59. Reasons most humbly offer’d by the Trustees of Mr. John Marshal’s Will … (London: 1690). Emphasis mine.

60. Will of Francis Eaton, proved September 22, 1668, PROB 11/328/60, TNA.

61. Will of Nicholas Bourne, proved April 7, 1660, PROB 11/297/449, TNA.

62. Will of William Hunt, proved October 1 1660, PROB 11/300/150, TNA.

63. Ben-Amos, The Culture of Giving, p.197.

64. Will of Ann Oakeley, proved February 19, 1672, PROB 11/338/244, TNA.

65. Will of Thomas Butler, proved March 2, 1687, PROB 11/386/318, TNA.

66. Will of Rebecca Fynch, proved May 2 1676, PROB 11/350/528, TNA.

67. Will of Katherine Wicking, proved May 10, 1665, PROB 11-316-556, TNA.

68. Erickson, Women and Property, p.71.

69. Will of Alice Aslin, proved June 25 1662, PROB 11-308-439, TNA.

70. See Erickson, 160–161. Erickson also cautions that how and when overseers were appointed varies widely by region; for example, in northern counties they might only have been appointed if the executor were someone else besides the widow, while in the south, they were often appointed in support of an executrix widow. Erickson also cautions that the frequency with which overseers were appointed seems to have declined through the end of the seventeenth century. Amy Froide, in her 2005 book Never Married, notes that the executors, overseers, and administrators appointed by single women were overwhelmingly men, writing that ‘contemporaries felt that men had more legal knowledge, resources, and contacts to ensure that they could successfully carry out their duties … ’. (p.83).

71. Young people are not appointed to executor positions as often as women are; Erickson estimates that between 63–89 percent of married men appointed their wives in this capacity (Women and Property, p.157) and perhaps the choice of executor was at times made as a result of a testator valuing the closeness of a relationship over the technical ability of the proposed executor.