consulting the print copy on request from the
University Library.
with the number of surviving accounts declining dramatically for the years after 1685;38 this obviously limits their applicability for the study of mourning jewellery, as this seems to have been the period at which mourning jewellery became progressively well-established, reaching its peak of popularity in the wills of testators in Middlesex, and slightly later for those from Surrey.39
Furthermore, though probate accounts might record funeral costs, quite a few either express these charges as a single lump sum, or, where the provision of rings or jewellery is noted, the description is often too imprecise to allow for definite conclusions concerning the number or detail of the mourning memento acquired.40 Unsurprisingly, the most detailed funeral accounts tend also to be associated with wealthier individuals, whose profuse funerary displays necessitated a greater degree of material accoutrements and financial outlay to be accounted for.
Also, probate accounts fail to record those items of mourning jewellery which were acquired independently of any instructions on the part of the deceased, or that were not classed or explicitly itemised as part of the ‘discharge’ concerning the payments made by the executor in settling the deceased’s estate. Harding has also drawn attention to the fact that in evaluating the cost and provision of the various elements of the funeral, “it is not always clear whether remembrances such as rings and gloves should also be counted as
‘funeral expenses’, or just seen as part of the wider acknowledgement of ties and affections that will-making often expressed”.41
Similarly, probate inventories do not seem to offer any further solution to the problems inherent in trying to uncover the consumption of mourning jewellery during this period. Though inventories have been used to good effect by several historians to uncover and quantify the material life and consumer behaviour of various groups in early modern England, there are also inherent problems in relying on them for the study of mourning jewellery.42
38 Erickson, A., ‘Using Probate Accounts’, in, T. Arkell, N. Evans, and N. Goose (eds.), When Death Do Us Part: Understanding and Interpreting the Probate Records of Early Modern England (Hertfordshire: Local Population Studies, 2004), pp. 104-7.
39 Notably, both the probate inventories and accounts relating to the parish of Earls Colne, do not seem to have survived.
40 These conclusions are upheld by Clare Gittings, who, whilst using probate accounts to great avail herself as part of her study of the changes in early modern funeral expenditure into the mid seventeenth century, also suggested that probate accounts – where they did exist for the critical post-Restoration period – would likely be “frustratingly brief” on the topic of mourning jewellery.
Clare Gittings to Cara Middlemass [Private Email Correspondence, 21.11.13].
41 Harding, Dead and the Living, p. 220.
42 For example, see: L. Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660-1760 (London: Routledge, 1988); M. Overton, J. Whittle, D. Dean, and A. Hann, Production and Consumption in English Households, 1600-1750 (London: Routledge, 2004).
The production of the inventory was part of the probate and administration process, providing a list of all the deceased’s personal and household goods along with their appraised value.43 Though, in effect, this might suggest that any items of mourning jewellery which the deceased possessed at the time of their death would be listed along with all their other goods and chattels, this was clearly not always the case.
For example, though the probate inventory might, in theory, list the deceased’s moveable possessions, personal goods – such as a ring or a particular item of jewellery – may also have been passed on to the intended recipient before death. Furthermore, “the bequests in a will were sometimes not included in the inventory” and these were “often the testator’s most precious possessions”; these items may already have been allocated or distributed, or simply removed from the house of the deceased before the inventory was drawn up.44
It is interesting to note, for example, that in Lorna Weatherill’s study of the ownership patterns of key domestic goods contained in nearly 3000 inventories, for the period 1675-1725, she found very few references to gold and jewellery at all.45 Maxine Berg, on the other hand, who analysed the types of goods being left in the wills of metalworkers and women in Birmingham and Sheffield for the period 1700-1800, found many more specific references to jewellery, with over 21% (three-quarters of whom were women) of the Birmingham testators who left goods in their wills, making bequests of jewellery.46
Another possible significant omission from the inventory concerned the widow’s property or right to bona paraphernalia; these were the personal items and “property a woman could claim from her husband’s estate upon widowhood”, such as her apparel, bed, and, crucially, her jewels and ornaments (which may also have included items of mourning jewellery).47
Where jewellery is listed in an inventory, often the information provided is too circumscribed (i.e. “a Ringe of Gold”) to be of much use in identifying the piece as a specific item of mourning jewellery, or, in some cases, jewellery and plate might be
43 Grannum and Taylor, Wills and Probate Records, pp. 71-74.
44 Spufford, M., ‘The Limitations of the Probate Inventory’, in, J. Chartres and D. Hey (eds.) English Rural Society, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 144.
45 In the sample and analysis of ‘key goods’ contained in these inventories, Weatherill classed all references to either gold or jewellery under the category of “Silver”. Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour, p. 203-7.
46 These numbers are likely to be higher than for some other large English towns, as Birmingham was becoming established during this period as a manufacturing centre for the ‘toy’ and jewellery trade.
Berg, M., ‘Women’s Consumption and the Industrial Classes of Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of Social History, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter, 1996), p. 420.
47 A. L. Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 26, 184, 239. See also: Grannum and Taylor, Wills and Probate Records, p. 73; Spufford, ‘Limitations of the Probate Inventory’, p. 145.
classed together, providing merely a lump monetary sum of their total value. In a similar vein to probate accounts, the survival and availability of inventories is also somewhat limited, and they become “much less detailed and frequent” into the early decades of the eighteenth century.48
Richard Grassby has also highlighted that one of the essential weaknesses of using probate inventories for the study of material culture, is the fact that they tend to “remove things from their proper historical context”; though inventories might help to “establish the existence and value” of certain objects, this detached quantitative data essentially reveals very little about an object’s “personal significance”, or how it might actually have been
“physically or emotionally experienced” at the time.49
Of course, the material culture element – examined in the first two chapters of this thesis – also provides a crucial foundation to the information that can be extracted from the testamentary record, and of all the probate documents, wills do seem to offer the greatest utility for the study of mourning jewellery.
Historians such as Cressy,50 Helt,51 and Beaver,52 for example, have all utilised wills as their principal source material, with which to uncover the customary funerary practices, mortuary rituals, shared attitudes, expectations, and responses towards death, mourning and remembrance, as it was experienced across various social groups within early modern England.
48 Gibson, Wills and Where to Find Them, p. xix.
49 Grassby, R., ‘Material Culture and Cultural History’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Spring, 2005), pp. 591, 598.
50 Cressy looked to examine some of the social and cultural aspects of the funerals of minor gentry in Elizabethan England, through the study of 600 Essex gentlemen’s wills. With a concentrated focus on one period, one county, and one social class, Cressy suggested that the wills offered a “distinctive historical voice”, revealing the attitudes and expectations, plans and preferences, of this social group as they contemplated and prepared for their final rite of passage.
Cressy, ‘Death and the Social Order’, pp. 99-119.
51 Helt’s study is based upon the analysis of 1,276 women’s wills probated in the Archdeaconry courts of Elizabethan Essex. This distinctive work emphasised the gendered nature of women’s wills, using the testamentary record to reveal “the particular role of women in memory, as rememberers and as remembered, in the mortuary customs of post-Reformation England”. Helt focused on the ways in which women
specifically utilised their wills and the act of testamentary gift-giving as a means of defining and securing their post-mortem memory and identity, within their communities and social networks.
Helt, ‘Women, Memory and Will-Making, pp. 188-205.
52 Beaver’s study was primarily based upon an analysis of 732 wills proved between 1590 and 1690 in the Consistory Court of Gloucester. Beaver sought to concentrate on the “ritual of death and its social context in early modern England”, using wills as “evidence of the beliefs and social relationships mobilized in preparation for death”. Using the wills to furnish information on local mortuary practices, he located his discussion of the transformation of these customary rituals, within the context of religious conflict and controversies of the mid-seventeenth century.
Beaver, D., ‘“Sown in Dishonour, Raised in Glory”: Death, Ritual and Social Organisation in Northern Gloucestershire, 1590-1690’, Social History, Vol. 17 (1992), pp. 389-419.
The use of wills for the study of mourning jewellery offers the historian much valuable and unique information. They typically provide a testator’s name, gender,53 parish and county of residence, occupation or social rank, marital status, even indications of the health and religious beliefs of the testator at the time of the making of the will.54
Testaments often also contain instructions for burial or directions for the performance and provision of certain elements of the funeral, as well as the obligatory concerns surrounding the bestowal of various legacies and bequests. The use of wills places the focus firmly on the concerns and attitudes of the deceased, revealing what they considered most fundamental and essential to include in their last preparations, publicly conveying and detailing their utmost expectations and expressed preferences, carefully describing and bequeathing their possessions and goods, as they contemplated their own mortality and composed their final wishes before death.
Those wills which do contain references to mourning jewellery provide information illustrating the types of bequest typically being made; in a few cases, testators were involved in providing very detailed directives concerning the gift of personally-owned items of jewellery for a remembrance, or precise instructions regarding the number and price of the mourning memento to be acquired and distributed. Wills also offer a unique insight into the operation of social and communal networks, providing evidence of the ways in which jewellery was transmitted and bequeathed, and how kinship links, personal relationships, expectations, obligations, and attachments, perhaps influenced and dictated the giving and receiving of mourning jewellery.
The wills offer clues as to how mourning jewellery was utilised by testators as a means of promoting personal remembrance or acknowledging and recognising the demands of contemporary social expectation and ritual tradition. They provide information concerning the ways in which these items were habitually bequeathed and transmitted, the number of pieces which might be given, the amount of money set aside for their
53 It is important to note that in any sample of early modern wills, women – predominantly married women in particular - tend to be underrepresented. Though widows and spinsters could leave wills in their own right, a married woman had to first obtain the consent of her husband before she was entitled to dispose of personal property.
Prior, M., ‘Wives and Wills, 1558-1700’, in, J. Chatres and D. Hey (eds.), English Rural Society, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 201-225.
54 There has been much debate, however, concerning the extent to which it is possible to ascertain the religious convictions and attitudes from the information contained in the religious preamble of a will. To what extent was the statement of Christian faith a true reflection of personal religious views or more the result of scribal influence and the insertion of formulaic statements of faith?
Spufford, M., ‘The Scribes of Villagers’ Wills in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Their Influence’, Local Population Studies, No. 7 (Autumn, 1971), pp. 28-43; Richardson, R. C., ‘Wills and Will-Makers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Some Lancashire Evidence’, Local Population Studies, No. 9 (Autumn, 1972), pp. 33-42.
procurement, and the sorts of people who were typically giving and receiving mourning jewellery over the course of the period under study.
A Material Culture Approach
When we use the term ‘material culture’ what exactly do we mean? For researchers, it seems to imply not only the physical materials under investigation, but also a particular approach to the study of history. Several proponents of the approach, or method of material culture - including Henry Glassie and Ann Smart Martin - have described objects as
“texts”, in the sense that they may be ‘read’ and interpreted by researchers.55 Furthermore, Karen Harvey, has noted that “unlike ‘object’ or ‘artefact’, ‘material culture’ encapsulates not just the physical attributes of an object, but [also] the myriad and shifting contexts through which it acquires meaning”.56
Context is a touchstone in the contemplation and interpretation of material culture.
It is key to understanding what objects meant to their contemporaries; how they were used and understood, and where they fitted into the material, social, cultural, and economic lives of people in past societies. Significantly, Bernard Herman has noted that, in order to
“derive meaning from material culture we must reconnect objects to their historical contexts”.57 It is in this vein that Glassie has identified three ‘master contexts’ to which a researcher must first critically attend, in order to understand and interpret material culture;
these are: “creation, communication, and consumption”.58
Jules David Prown recognises in his definition of material culture that, first and foremost, it stands for the “the manifestations of culture through material production”.
Most importantly for historians, however, the term also encapsulates the method and motivation of the approach, namely: “the study of material to understand culture, to discover the beliefs – the values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions – of a particular community or society at a given time”. In a similar vein to Glassie’s ‘contexts’, Prown believes that the underlying premise of material culture lies in the belief that “human-made objects reflect, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, the beliefs of the individual who commissioned, fabricated, purchased, or used them and, by extension, the beliefs of the larger society to which these individuals belonged”.
55 Karen Harvey, ‘Introduction: Practical Matters’, in History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources, ed. K. Harvey (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 3.
56 Ibid., p. 3.
57 Herman quoted in Ibid., p. 11.
58 Glassie quoted in Ibid., p. 11.
This approach may appear to some as a call for the promotion and production of some kind of “object-based cultural anthropology”, in opposition to the ‘traditional’ text-based study of history. Prown’s focus, however, upon the interpretation and meaning of objects, and on contextualising their place within a society in order to gain deeper understanding of that world, shares many of the same ambitions and objectives of traditional historical research – whether text- or object-centred.59
Furthermore, Harvey, in her own definition of material culture, has also touched upon the debate amongst both proponents and critics of a material culture approach, concerning the role and possible agency of objects in actively determining and shaping human society and history. In her definition, ‘material culture’ is “not simply the objects that people make, use, and throw away; it is an integral part of – and indeed shapes – human experience”. In her negotiation and interpretation of material culture, objects are
“active and autonomous, not simply reflective” in regard to past societies and mentalities.60 This sense of objects as much more than merely “conduits of information” or simple “cultural receptacles that acquire meanings, which can then be unearthed and read”
by academic researchers, is a view held by many scholars working today under the umbrella of ‘material culture’.61 For historical archaeologists, Cochran and Beaudry, for example, material culture is a “potentially active agent in social life”; they contend that by positively acknowledging the “active role of objects”, benefits researchers, guarding against more traditional or limited approaches, which would seek to “segregate objects from people”.62
This abundant focus on the “relationship between people and things” has, in turn, also led – most particularly in the field of archaeology – to the creation of specific ‘object biographies’.63 These investigations often take a single item or object, and seek to reconstruct and contextualise its ‘life-history’ at various stages of “production, exchange and consumption”. This method primarily serves to understand the way in which “social interactions involving people and objects create meaning”, and the way in which these meanings “change and are renegotiated through the life of an object”. Most importantly, this biographical approach asks specific questions about the “links between people and
59 Prown quoted in Ibid., p. 6.
60 Ibid., p. 3.
61 Ibid., pp. 4-5.
62 Cochran and Beaudry quoted in Ibid., p. 5.
63 Gosden, C. and Marshall, Y., ‘The Cultural Biography of Objects’, World Archaeology, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Oct., 1999), pp. 169-78.
things” and about the ways in which “meanings and values are accumulated and transformed”.64
In terms of a methodological approach to material culture, Bernard Herman has identified two strands of thought between those works which are ‘object-centred’, and those which are ‘object-driven’. The former is largely rooted in an art-historical approach and concentrates primarily upon the “physical description” and “aesthetic qualities” of the artefacts and objects themselves.65 The latter, meanwhile, regards objects as “evidence of complex social relationships” and seeks to uncover the meanings of objects through a process of “thick description”, and by using a variety of sources in order to construct
“collective biographies” about how people made, used, and lived with such objects.66 Historians have approached material culture in a variety of ways. Georgio Riello, for example, has determined three broad approaches to material culture adopted by historians. The first, is a ‘history from things’; this utilises “objects as primary sources”, and they are treated very much in the same way that a historian would analyse or read a document or manuscript. Here the objects provide the “raw materials” for the interpretation of the past, in that they directly provide “evidence of something that was part of the past”.67
The second approach is a ‘history of things’; here the object or collection of artefacts are themselves the very subject matter of analysis.68 The third variety of material culture is perhaps the most complex: ‘history and things’; this regards material artefacts as
“independently valuable” sources, which provide both an “immediacy” and a “direct key to aspects of the past that would otherwise be inaccessible”.69
Trying to judge how useful material culture may be to a historian rests to large extent on determining just what the benefits may be, in opposition to a more traditional approach which focuses primarily upon the written record; namely, what can not be obtained from manuscript sources alone?
In terms of how useful Riello’s three approaches outlined above may be to the
In terms of how useful Riello’s three approaches outlined above may be to the