A Market for Charitable Performances? Bequests to the Poor and their Recipients in Fifteenth-Century Norwich Wills

Among the means by which charity was disbursed in late medieval England the wills of the wealthier sectors of the population are generally acknowledged to be important. ¹ Though as J.A.F. Thomson pointed out as long ago as 1965, it is impossible to calculate exactly the value of charitable bequests (due to the testators’ habits of leaving gifts in kind rather than cash, making imprecise provisions for the residue of their estates, and leaving flat-rate bequests to an unspecified number of poor people), the scale of giving is often assessed as generous. ² Furthermore, testamentary charity is often taken to be identical to practical help for the poor. Heath goes so far as to state that in late medieval Hull, ‘[I]f we measure the priorities of our testators by the consistency of certain bequests, then the poor must have stood very near the top of the list’. ³ Miri Rubin identifies funerals as ‘the times when the poor were treated with greatest liberality and honour’ (as determined by the will of the deceased). ⁴ Cullum and Goldberg found that approximately a quarter of 2,286 lay York wills of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries included specifically charitable bequests. ⁵ Thomson found a smaller, but still solid, proportion of London testators supporting their local hospitals – 23.4 per cent of wills in the period 1401–49, and 17.8 per cent in the period 1479–86, and noted that ‘Bequests in general terms to the poor are extremely common.’ ⁶ Wills often specified that any residue after all debts and bequests were settled should be expended in works of charity and piety for the good of the testator’s soul, ⁷ and Clive Burgess’s research on late medieval Bristol suggests that these bequests were no mere matter of form; a widow might dispense charity from her husband’s estate for years after his death. ⁸ Though Anne Warren expresses doubts about the scale of charitable giving, hers is perhaps a minority view. ⁹ Tanner concludes that ‘charitable bequests were a prominent and regular feature of wills in Norwich … from as early as wills survive in large numbers’. ¹⁰