ABSTRACT
The examination of some 450 contested wills brought before the consistory court has revealed the full extent of human weakness. In the pre-industrial society, such as the one covered by this study, additional finance was raised by lending to or borrowing from one's friends or relatives. One feature that stands out in many of these contested wills is the increasing prosperity of the more enterprising yeomen, husbandmen, weavers, stonemasons and craftsmen in general. Society was on the way to becoming a consumer society and, as the Gloucestershire wills reveal, an increasingly mobile one. The upper ranks of society were doing very well on the whole and seeking an outlet for their surplus funds. Naturally, because of the closeness of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century society, the enterprising methods of the upper echelons of that society tended to extend down to the lower ranks, although they excluded the very poor.
