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  • Women's Last Wills and Testaments in Hull, England (c. 1450–1555)
  • Elisabeth Salter (bio)

Over the last fifty years, medieval and early modern cultural history has witnessed an important shift towards exploring the life stories of those individuals who did not belong to the cultural or political elite. This shift was foreshadowed by pioneering scholars such as Eileen Power, who was publishing works devoted to exploring the "labours and passions of the flesh and blood" of the "quite ordinary person" in the 1920s.1 It is now acknowledged that not only is it possible to investigate the lives of those people who formed the majority of the population, it is also important and valuable for our understandings of the past.2 Moreover, studying the lives of pre-modern women is a crucial element in this project of historical reconstruction.3 [End Page 33]

However, despite that pioneering work of an earlier generation of scholars and excellent ongoing work by many others—at all career stages—there remains a relative paucity of studies focusing specifically on how to find and use evidence to investigate the lives of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century women.4 Moreover, there remains some resistance to allowing women full entitlement to their histories, which includes their business dealings and acumen, occupational specialization, household management, creativity, and strategic vision.5 This article seeks to contribute to redressing this imbalance by presenting some findings about the lives of townswomen from the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-sixteenth century—a century of change and transition that lies somewhere on the cusp between our various definitions of "the late medieval" and "the early modern."6 The examples are drawn from one town, Hull, in the north of England and the [End Page 34] starting point is one of the most valuable sources of evidence for the lives of townspeople, including women, often widows: the last will and testament.

Using the Evidence of Last Wills and Testaments7

Employing the will for the reconstruction of life stories may seem ironic because it is a document made in consideration of death. But in fact, late medieval and early modern wills are vibrant sources of information about women's life experiences, as well as their hopes for the future. Recent studies of women's lives, such as Susan James's Women's Voices in Tudor Wills, have prioritized the will; however, this study, as others have done, tends to gravitate towards women of higher status.8 This orientation results perhaps from the obvious reason that the wills of the wealthier often provide more extensive arrays of material goods, property, and wishes, alongside biographical details traceable in other, complementary sources of evidence, including other legal documents, literary texts, and visual imagery.9 Wills made by women of all statuses, including the townswomen of Hull, demonstrate women's loyalty to places of current or past residence, occupational identity and status, and affiliation to religious and cultural groups. They also detail wishes for the prosperity and health of close family and for the wider networks of friends, family, and kin who have been important during their lifetime and who they hope will continue to play a part in the remembrance of their own lives and in the success of their families.10

I argue that testatrixes deployed last will and testament documents to assert or define these elements of their lives, rather than simply to report or record them. Women's wills, therefore, provide valuable details about their own perceptions of, and aspirations for, their own lives. They also contribute to our understandings of civic life, religious identity and its re-formation, and the transmission [End Page 35] of ideas and occupational skills in late medieval and early modern urban society more generally.

Luckily, whereas many details of the lives of people of the "middling sort" that might have been recorded in writing are simply lost, thousands of wills do survive and they contain wonderfully revealing details of biographical information. Most women's wills were made by widows, as a married woman's property defaulted to her husband, and there are relatively few surviving will texts made by unmarried women.11 But this does not diminish...

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