The probate documents summarised here span almost two hundred years of life in the manor of Stalbridge Weston, from William Weston’s will of 1547 to Joseph Snook’s inventory and administration of 1736. They are not a complete record; not everyone made a will, and some that were made have not survived. But read together they are the closest thing we have to a roll-call of the people who lived on the manor before the parish registers and the census-takers caught up with them.
A farming place, first and last
Open almost any of these inventories and you find yourself in a yard full of animals. Grace Snooke’s widow’s goods in 1686 included five kineIn the context of cattle, usually means the milking cows in a herd. May also be a cattle trough. In full., two yearling bullocks, a bull, a weanling calf and seven purrA male lamb. In full. sheep, along with two and a half acres of wheat standing and more in the mow. Thirty years later John Loder was appraised with seven cows, a bull, sixteen sheep, eight lambs, a mare, three and a half acres of wheat and two and a half of beans. Robert Kember in 1727 had six oxen, two steers, a cow with calves, ten sheep, twelve lambs, a mare and colt, and £9 worth of plough tackling. The livestock varies, but the shape of the holding barely shifts across the whole period: a few milk cows, a working horse, sheep, pigs for the salting trough, wheat and barley in the barn.
This is mixed husbandry on a modest scale. Except for maybe the Weston family, nobody in the Stalbridge Weston records is rich by the standards of the Dorset gentry, and most are firmly middling: yeomen and husbandmen with enough land to feed a family, sell a little, and leave something behind. Robert Langman, whose 1727 inventory totals £547, is the exception, and even his wealth is mostly on paper: £459 of it is ‘money due on Bond and otherways’, making him effectively the village’s private banker. His actual household goods come to less than Grace Snooke’s forty years earlier.
Inside the house
The appraisers walked from room to room, and their route gives us the plan of the house. Loder’s 1716 inventory takes us through kitchen, hall, brewhouse, buttery, milkhouse, three upstairs chambers and a cockloft. Thomas Hobbs’s smaller place the same year has a hall, buttery, ‘little Roome against ye Hall’, kitchen and two chambers above. What fills them is much the same from household to household: feather beds and flock beds with bolsters and coverlets, joint stools, chests, coffers and boxes, a cupboard or two, pewter dishes, brass pots and pans, a warming pan, spits and andirons at the hearth, a flitch of bacon hanging, and the deceased’s wearing apparel, linen and woollen.
The beds are a wealth thermometer. At the top of the range is the feather bed: a tick stuffed with goose or duck down, warm, springy, expensive, and usually the single most valuable piece of furniture in the house. Robert Langman had four of them between himself and the floorboards in 1727, valued at £6 the set; John Loder in 1716 had feather beds in three separate upstairs chambers. Below the feather bed sits the flock bed, stuffed with scraps and offcuts of wool, serviceable and warm enough, and what most middling households actually slept on. Robert Kember in 1727 had one feather bed for himself and two flock beds for the rest of the household; George Hancock the weaver in 1690 made do with a single ‘fflocke bed two fflocke pillowes & bedsted’ in the lower chamber. At the bottom is the dust bed (or chaff bed), stuffed with threshing wasteThe lord's waste referred to uncultivated land within a manor not held by tenants. These were typically open, unimproved lands... In full. from the barn floor, scratchy and quick to go flat. Johane Watte in 1608 left her servant John Hunte ‘a dust bed, bolster, pair of blankets, coverlet, pair of sheets’ to go with the bedstead in the maid’s chamber, a respectable legacy for a servant and no worse than what the maid was already sleeping on. And Thomas Hobbs in 1716 still had a dust bed in the chamber over the kitchen.
Every so often something more personal surfaces. John Loder kept a pair of virginals in the hall alongside his clock. Susanna Chamberlaine, who died in frugal circumstances in 1726/7 with goods worth only £16 12s 6d, still had two gold rings valued at thirty shillings. Ann Snooke’s list includes a Bible and other books, butter, cheese and bacon in the dairy, and ‘4 milch Cows one pig and one hayrick’. These are the details that make the inventories such good reading.
Work beyond the Fields
Most testators farmed, but not all. George Hancock, who died in 1690, was a weaver: his inventory lists ‘2 Lumes and all it harniss & all that belong to them’ at £2 10s, a piece of woollen cloth and a box of linen. His whole estate came to £28, including the reversionThe automatic transfer of a tenancy upon the termination of the current tenant's interest. In manorial practice, reversions were commonly... In full. of a leasehold cottage in Stalbridge Weston (which was actually held by his wife). Joseph Snook in 1736 was a sailor on the Norfolk, one of the King’s ships; his inventory runs to two items, his clothes and six months’ back wages of £6 15s at £1 2s 6d a month. Stalbridge Weston was not sealed off from the wider world, even if most of its adults were knee-deep in farming for most of the year.
Family trees in prose
For anyone trying to reconstruct a family, wills are often the single most useful document in the archive. Parish registers tell you who was baptised, married and buried; a will tells you who was alive on a particular day, how they were related to the testator, whether they had already married, how many children they had by then, and sometimes which of those children were favourites and which were in disgrace. Thomas Gray’s will of 1634 names a wife, three sons, a daughter, a son-in-law, a goddaughter-granddaughter, a grandson, two sisters, a brother, four nephews, two nieces and a cousin, and gives each of them a relationship as well as a bequest. Ambrose Bryne in 1639 sorts his grandchildren into two sets, Glovers and Brines, and earmarks a pan or a platter to each. These are family trees in prose, set down by people who knew exactly who everybody was and never imagined a stranger reading them three and a half centuries later.
The women of the manor
Widows are everywhere in these documents, which is not the same as saying women are well served by them. Men who left wills usually made their wives executrix and residual legatee; Mary Loder, Elizabeth Hillier, Anne Lock and Constance Brine all inherit ‘all the rest’ after the specific bequests are paid out. When those widows died in turn, a few left wills of their own (Johane Watte in 1608, Margaret Snooke in 1665, Melior Snooke in 1696, Joan Chamberlaine in 1709, Jane Hobbs in 1721), and several more left inventories. Johane Watte’s will of 1608 runs to pages of bequests of cows, heifers, bullocks, beds, gowns, petticoats and silver spoons to dozens of neighbours and kin, plus fifteen pounds owed to her by Lady Awdley.
A husband’s will often returns to his widow ‘all those goods which she brought with her at the time of our marriage’: her bed and bedding, her linen, her apparel, her plate, sometimes a specific chest ‘which was hers before marriage’. Under coverture, a wife’s moveable property became her husband’s on the wedding day, so he had to give it back by will if she was to keep it as a widow. Thomas Gray is explicit in 1634 (Elizabeth gets ‘her plate she brought with her, all her wearing apparel’); Ambrose Bryne does the same for Constance in 1639 (‘the chest which was hers before marriage… the bed & all that she brought which was her own’). It looks like generosity, and in practice it was; it is also the law quietly being unpicked at the last possible moment.
Unmarried daughters usually come off well in cash terms; Christian and Mary Loder each get £40 from their father in 1657. But the land still goes to the sons, and the widow’s life interest is always shadowed by her own eventual death, at which point the son takes full possession. The tenor of the bequests is warm: ‘my loving wife’. The legal structure is not.
What the records do not show
Labourers and servants rarely made wills, so the manor’s poorest are invisible here except as witnesses or as the named recipients of a shilling for a pair of gloves. Children who died young leave no trace, and neither do women who never married or men who died intestate without enough goods to bother administering. And because these documents come from several different church courts, the Prerogative Court of Canterbury for the grander estates and the Archdeaconry of Dorset for most of the rest, survival is patchy. A gap in the series does not mean a quiet year or two in the manor; it usually means a box of parchment that did not make it to the twenty-first century.
There is also one very large gap of a different kind. The earliest surviving Stalbridge parish register begins in 1690 for baptisms and marriages and 1693 for burials; the earlier books were lost at some point before then. That means for roughly the first 130 years of this collection, there is no parish register to cross-check a will against. The manorial records help to plug the gap, but for a good many of the families on these pages the probate documents are much the best glimpse we get of them as individuals rather than as tenants on a rent roll.
Taken together with the manorial sources, what survives is rich for a place this size. Read the linked summaries and the manor starts to fill in: the Snookes, the Loders, the Chamberlaines, the Hobbses, the Kembers, cropping up as testators and legatees, as overseers of each other’s wills, as appraisers of each other’s goods and as witnesses marking their names with a cross. That’s a village, on paper.
What Is Probate?
Probate is the legal machinery by which a dead person’s property is identified, valued, paid out and handed on. In the period covered by these records, roughly 1540 to 1740, the business was handled not by the civil courts but by the church. Dorset is a slightly awkward case. Ecclesiastically, before 1836, the whole county formed the Archdeaconry of Dorset inside the Diocese of Bristol, which is why William Watts’s 1560 will is headed ‘Diocese of Bristol’. Most routine estates passed through the Archdeaconry Court of Dorset, whose records have always been kept at Blandford; larger or more complicated ones went to the Consistory Court of the Bishop of Bristol (Dorsetshire Division), whose Dorset records ended up at Blandford too. Estates with property in more than one diocese, or above a set value, were reserved to the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC) in London. That is why some of our documents carry PROB references at The National Archives (the PCC papers) while others sit in the Dorset History Centre at Dorchester.
The documents you will meet
Most probate files contain up to three things: a will, an inventory and, if there is no will or the executor has failed, a grant of administration.
Wills. A will is the testator’s own instructions for the disposal of goods and chattels and, where they owned it, real property. It is written or dictated in the testator’s lifetime, witnessed, and then proved in court after death. The proving is what turns a private piece of paper into a legal instrument.
Our earliest wills, like William Watts’s of 1560, open with a long religious preamble bequeathing the soul to God before ever reaching the question of who gets the cows. Modern readers tend to skim these as pious boilerplate, but they were not boilerplate to the person dictating them, and they tell you something about the religious temper of the moment. Here is a fairly full example, from one of the seventeenth-century wills in this collection:
……. being old lame and decayed in body but of good and perfect memory and remembrance (I give great praise and thankes unto almighty) God therefore considering with my self the frailty of this mortall and transitory life how uncertaine and short a tyme wee have to live here uppon the earth and that it is most pleasing both unto Almighty God and alsoe to the world that every man should settle and put in order that estate and worldly selfe which God hath lent him ………………..
………………first and principally I comend my sinfull and miserable soule unto Almighty God my Creator whoe gave it me assuredly trusting that a thorough the glorious merite …………..
………………..there to remaine in blisse with the same three persons. but one Coequall coeternall and everliveing God untill the next comeing of our Saviour Christ Jesus when all flesh shall come to iudgement And then assuredly trusting that God of his infinite mercy and goodnes towards mee (a most vile sinfull and wretched person) for Jesus Christ his sake will unite and ioyne the same my soule unto this my vile and corruptible body nowe full of sinne and inniquity and make them an incorruptible body and to be partakers of that everlasting kingdome which is prepared for all Gods elect Children
………………..Item I comit my body to the earth from whence it was made ……………….
Note the phrase ‘Gods elect Children’: that places the testator squarely in the godly reformed tradition of the period. By the 1720s the preambles have shrunk and the tone is more business-like (‘In the name of God Amen. I being sick in body but of sound and perfect mind and memory…’), but the underlying structure (soul first, body second, worldly goods third) stays the same all the way through.
A few of our documents are nuncupativeOral. A nuncupative will is an oral statement made in front of witnesses, who then sign a written copy of... In full. (oral) wills; Margaret Snooke in 1665 and Robert Snooke in 1727/8 are examples. In those cases the testator was too ill to write, declared their wishes in front of witnesses, and the witnesses were later sworn before a surrogate and their words reduced to writing. Nuncupative wills are never as tidy as written ones, but they often catch a voice on the edge of death that no formal document would.
Inventories. An inventory was required by law from the executor or administrator. Two or three ‘honest men’, usually neighbours with some standing in the village, walked through the house after the funeral, room by room, listing and valuing everything they found. The result is a priced snapshot of a household on a single day, accurate to within the appraisers’ eye. Values are written in old money (£ s d) and totals are sometimes slightly wrong: these were not professional clerks.
The grant of probate. Almost none of the ‘wills’ in this collection are the originals signed by the testator. What survives, and what we’ve summarised on the linked pages, is the registered copyThe copy of an entry of a court roll recording the admission of a tenant to copyhold property. The copy... In full., a fair copy written out by a clerk of the court into the court’s own register at the moment the will was proved, with the grant of probate tacked on at the end. The grant is a short Latin or English clause recording the date on which the will was exhibited, the name of the executor (or, if the executor had declined or predeceased, the person to whom administration with the will annexed was granted), and the official before whom the oath was sworn. That is why the date on a PCC will is almost always later than the date the testator actually signed, sometimes by years, and why the same document can end with a note in a completely different hand from the body of the text. The original parchment usually went home with the executor and has long since disappeared; the copy in the register is what has come down to us.
Administrations and bonds. When someone died without a will (intestate), or when the named executor refused or could not act, the court granted administration of the estate to a relative, usually the widow and occasionally a child or a parent. The grant is recorded in a bond: a formal obligation, signed and sealed, in which the administrator and one or two sureties bind themselves to a penal sum (typically double the estate’s value) that they will forfeit if the administrator fails in their duties. Those duties were to make an inventory within a set period, to present an account of their administration by another set date, and if a will later turned up, to bring it straight to the court. Several of our documents are administration bonds of this kind: Bernard Chamberlayne 1680, George Hancock 1690, Thomas Cooke 1692, Richard Devenish 1733 and Joseph Snook 1736.
How to read the dates
Two wrinkles might catch out unwary readers. England used the Julian calendar until 1752, and the legal year began on 25 March, not 1 January. A document dated 25 January 1727 in our sense would have been written as 25 January 1727/8 by a careful scribe of the time, with the ‘/8’ flagging that under the new-style year it was already 1728. You will see this notation in several of our records. Secondly, the PCC probate date is the date the will was proved in London, which can be weeks or months after the testator died. For the date of death itself you need the parish burial registers, which don’t survive for Stalbridge parish before 1693.
How to read the money
Values are in pounds, shillings and pence: £1 = 20s, 1s = 12d. A yeoman’s inventory in the £50 to £100 range is typical of the middling sort for this period. £20 or less suggests a cottager or a dependent adult; several hundred pounds (as with Robert Langman) means a man with capital to lend. A pound in the 1720s had very roughly £150 to £200 of today’s purchasing power, though the comparison is slippery because so much of the household economy never passed through a shop.
The hands that wrote them
These are manuscripts, not printed texts. Spelling is phonetic and inconsistent: Hellyer, Hillyer, Hillier and Helyer are all the same family. Latin tags appear at the top and bottom of court entries (exhibitum fuit, ‘it was exhibited’; jurat coram me, ‘sworn before me’), and the abbreviations follow scribal convention: ‘Imp<rim>is’ for Imprimis (firstly), ‘It<e>m’ for Item. Where a testator could not sign, the document records their mark, usually a cross or an initial, and the same goes for witnesses and appraisers. A surprising number of the men going through other men’s houses with a valuing eye could not write their own names.
Every probate document we’ve transcribed has a linked page of its own, with a summary of the bequests or appraised goods, and full archival references so you can order up the original for yourself. If you are new to probate records, a good way in is to start with one of the longer inventories — John Loder’s of 1716 will do nicely — and walk the appraisers’ route through the house with them. It is about as close as you can get to pushing open a door in Stalbridge Weston three hundred years ago and looking round.