Women’s Wills

An early modern English life, its possessions and its desired legacy for future generations, could be inscribed in the writing of a will. Because women made approximately 20 per cent of the two million wills that survive from the 1550s1750s,1 wills can be regarded as one of the main genres in which women wrote, or dictated, during the period. Wills exemplify less a category of text than a range of factors that encompass stylistic conventions, interpersonal contexts of authorship and response, representing key institutions such as religion, the law, family and gender relations along with practices of textual production, dissemination and reception. A further element underscoring the generic quality of wills is that they must be proven; like all genres and texts, they are subject to interpretation and dispute over meaning and intention. Conceived generically, wills thus mark the interaction of discursive, historical and social factors now regarded as central to notions of textuality and meaning. Thinking about wills in such terms in no way diminishes their importance in legal and social history, nor is it a move aimed simply at substituting one disciplinary approach for another. It does, however, allow wills to be considered as texts that position authors and readers in socially and personally important ways. Wills reveal the workings of powerful institutions and discourses while also contributing to and intervening in them, and they interact with other genres in the period such as plays and advice books. While the majority of people in the early modern period did not make wills, they were widely known about and their purpose was respected. Wills are a paradoxical kind of text – a part of everyday life and death, they are yet infrequently encountered by the majority of people, and generally in a solemn social context. Wills provide a meeting point between the wishes of those now dead and the wishes of the living: ‘An outward and visible sign of wealth and a check upon the “wrongful” disposition of property, [a will] enshrines the wishes of the individual holder as against the demands of the potential heir. It is in effect the written version of the “dying words,” the permanent expression of the deathbed wish’.2 Jack Goody’s description captures the life and death drama inherent in making and executing wills as well as the micro and macro effects that they can have, from structuring interpersonal relationships to reproducing the social system.3 Indeed, as Shakespeare sensed when starting such plays as Hamlet and King Lear amid crises of family succession and settlement, any system of inheritance – with the laws and codes that implement it – struggles, in J.H. Baker’s words, ‘to hold a balance between the living, the dead, and the unborn’.4 Baker’s

summation of the functions of a will as a legal device mindfully understates what is at stake. Inheritance can perhaps best be theorized as a set of customs produced by different attitudes to death and dying in feudal and early capitalist societies. Since land could only be devised by will after the 1540 Statute of Uses, the genre of the will provides an important illustration of shifting inheritance practices that reflect not only economic and political change but also cultural change in early modern England. The ‘cosmic’ significance of wills and succession that drives Shakespeare’s great tragedies is also tied to the legal and material aspects of interpersonal, family and gender relations. In this light, wills exemplify the complicated connections among the religious and temporal discourses that pervade everyday life in the period. The Book of Common Prayer and tracts such as Thomas Becon’s The Sicke Mans Salve (1558-59; 28 reprints by 1632), William Perkins’s A Salve for a Sicke Man (1595), William Perneby’s A Direction to Death (1599), and Christopher Sutton’s Disce Mori, Learne to Die (1600) all exhorted readers to die well. An important part of doing so was piously to make a will. Christopher Marsh sums up the tenor of Becon’s influential work in this respect as follows: ‘it is the Christian’s essential duty to settle his estate, on loan from God, in a manner which demonstrates gratitude and faith, and serves to signal – but not cause – his salvation … The real duty a testator performed in making his will was to dispose of his wealth in a godly fashion’.5 The godly disposal of wealth implies that religious and moral aspects of will making are fundamentally linked to social and material concerns. The difficult critical-historical task is in part, we suggest, to avoid elevating one set of concerns at the expense of the other and instead to grasp their interdependence. In general it is only when dispute arises over a will that the complex of personal, moral, material and other motives can be revealed and placed under scrutiny. In recounting a court case between family members in Douai in 1434, Martha Howell observes, ‘This was … a suit between intimates, people closely bound to one another by shared experiences, shared property, shared affections’.6 Her words are an important reminder not only of the cultural conditions in which selves, kinship and property are situated, but also of the experiential and affective facets of people’s lives that permeate property relations as much as they are constituted by them. In the early modern period, the various situations in which married women could make wills are analogous to their many other restricted legal and social rights to hold and exchange property. Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford summarize the situation thus:

unmarried daughters and married women were rare as testators, since each needed male permission – a father or husband, respectively-to dispose of personal property. Married women required a husband’s consent to dispose of personal property, apart from bequests of pin money … A widow’s power to bequeath her possessions depended upon how much of the family wealth her husband had left to her.7