Wills and other probate records of the sixteenth centuries are vital sources for family and local historians, and have been used for a wide variety of purposes by modern researchers. They provide genealogists with much information on particular families, they enable local historians to re-construct the culture of the people who wrote them, and they give the basic data from which studies can be made of topics as diverse as furniture, literacy, and agriculture.
The words used in them are, however, often no longer used in modern English, and may be difficult to understand for newcomers to historical research. Andirons, beres, and winding sheets were all very familiar items to our seventeenth-century ancestors, but the average person today would have no idea what they were.
The purpose of this book its to provide definitions for words commonly found in early modern probate records. It is based on a wide rage of published collections of probate records. The words are arranged alphabetically, and are confined to words used in probate records, and to their meanings in that context.
Contents:
Introduction
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Chapman Codes
A-Z Glossary
