ABSTRACT

In 1605 the widow Elizabeth Jenyson wrote her will.1 She had lived with her husband in London and Dublin, but the wealth he accumulated as Auditor General for Ireland (some of it questionably) enabled the couple to retire comfortably to Walworth Castle in County Durham shortly before his death in 1587. In 1601 Jenyson had founded a local grammar school, to which she bequeathed ‘a great new English Bible with a chain to fasten to a desk and also the Dictionary of Thomas Thomas’. In 1603 she had hosted James VI of Scotland as he travelled south to assume the throne of England. James expressed his appreciation by knighting her son-in-law, George Frevile. The first people mentioned in Jenyson’s will were the Freviles. She gave Lady Elizabeth Frevile ‘the bed whereon I lie’, with the bedstead, the bed curtains and tester, ‘a new maĴress marked with my name’, two woollen coverlets, pillows and pillow-beres, and ‘the sheet that I lie on, as also a pair of fine sheets of my own making marked with the leĴers E.F.’.