Wills have been interpreted as valuable evidence for women’s affective attachments both to people and to their possessions. Maxine Berg has been particularly influential in arguing that ‘bequests show us that women to a far higher degree than men noticed their possessions, attached value and emotional significance to these’, while Marcia Pointon has similarly suggested that the act of writing a will enabled women to ‘delineate objects they held dear and to name people for whom they had particular feelings’. 10 Both refer back to Amanda Vickery’s work on the ‘sentimental materialism’ of Elizabeth Shackleton. 11 In Berg’s discussion, clothing takes on a significant role for women as ‘a way of passing on something of themselves, a token and a memory’. 12 These assertions stem partly from the fact that women overwhelmingly left bequests of clothing to other women. However, the act of description is often understood to offer some evidence for affective attachments in the face of an almost total absence of explanation of the motivations behind bequests. Berg has argued that the fact that goods mentioned in women’s bequests were often accorded ‘detailed description including design, pattern, colour, type of material’ or quality such as ‘best’ and ‘worst’ suggests that these words were intended as a ‘statement of the emotional quality of connections to particular relatives and friends’. 13 Pointon similarly emphasises the importance of material description in women’s wills as a ‘declaration of sentimental attachment’. 14 Indeed, so influential have these conclusions been that scholars have sought to extend them beyond the widows and single women who dominate surviving probate records to married women, 15 as well as to men. 16
It is easy to see why it has been so tempting to read descriptions of clothing and other possessions in this way. Though very few women wrote them in their own hand, wills can still be regarded as ‘one of the main genres in which women wrote, or dictated, during the early modern period’. 17 Indeed, there can be little doubt that the words used to describe clothing in the pages of a will are often the testatrix’s own; as Catherine Richardson writes, ‘wills give us some contact, however scribally mediated, with the language in which individuals described their own material environment’. 18 Nestled between generic phrases, as in the will of Mary Flint, these descriptions seem to offer glimpses of an ‘authentic’ voice, and this is perhaps why it is tempting to invest them with meaning. There have been some challenges to this, though they remain in a minority. Most recently, Richardson has questioned whether we can read ‘feelings’ back into bequests, arguing that ‘sentiment does not naturally find a place within the generic constraints of a will’. Rather than seeing bequests as automatically invested with ‘excessive, sentimentalized emotion around death’, she continues, what we can look for is evidence of the role of objects in early modern ‘affect and interconnection’. 19 Lena Cowen Orlin has launched a more vehement attack, arguing that the desire to sentimentalise objects is so entrenched in today’s society ‘that it may not occur to us to ask whether it would have been equally foreign for early moderns to sentimentalise them’. 20 It is not my intention here to go as far as Cowen Orlin, who suggests that bequests of personal possessions were deliberately devoid of emotion. 21 Indeed, Mary Braithwait’s unusual probate documents, explored in this chapter, hint at some of the complex motivations which lay behind clothing bequests. However, care needs to be taken when interpreting descriptions of clothing as evidence for this, with close attention paid to the intertextual, material, and social networks and processes involved in their production.
My discussion draws on probate records for 530 women proved by the Dean and Chapter Court of York between 1696 and 1830. 22 The sample reflects a bias towards widowed and single women that is unsurprising, given that married women required their husband’s permission to write a will. Around three-quarters of the women are identified as widows, whilst just under one-fifth are listed as spinsters. Only seven of the 530 were identified as ‘wives’. 23 It is rare to find women’s occupations listed in the probate records, and we are usually only given their marital status. 24 However, around 7 per cent of the records do not give any of these details at all, although some of these women mention children. The Dean and Chapter Court of York had peculiar jurisdiction over parishes in Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, and Lancashire, as well as the City of York. The court also exercised probate jurisdiction in other peculiars in the diocese when undertaking a visitation of them. The sample therefore has a relatively wide geographical reach, which includes both rural and urban areas. It is, however, dominated by records belonging to women who lived, or had previously lived, in York, as over a third of the records list a York parish as the deceased’s address. This is unsurprising given that the population of York was around 12, 000 by 1760 and increased by more than one-third between 1760 and 1800. 25 However, we also find women like Jane Byron of Stokeham in Nottinghamshire, which had only forty-nine inhabitants by 1848. 26 These records are broadly representative of what Amy Erickson terms ‘ordinary people’, encompassing ‘everyone who was not aristocratic or gentry on the one hand, nor in chronic poverty on the other’. 27