Introduction

Summary

This collection of inventories provides rich evidence for historians of many different specialisms for life in Bedfordshire in the period from 1550 to 1660. Readers will come to the collection with varying degrees of knowledge of the place, period, probate procedure and material. This introduction provides background information to fill in these different lacunae.

The first half of the introduction is about structure. It discusses what inventories were; their survival rate in Bedfordshire; the character of the county in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the Bedfordshire people for whom inventories were made; and how the inventories reflect the procedures of the probate system. The second half of the introduction is about their contents. It highlights issues about farming, housing, household and personal possessions in order to alert readers to features that need to be recognised to understand the inventories.

Probate inventories were the lists of a deceased person's goods, with their values, which were required to be made and produced in the church courts as part of the process of obtaining probate of a will (or letters of administration in the case of intestacy). Their purpose was to prevent fraud by the executor, creditors, debtors, heirs and beneficiaries and also to protect them, especially minor children, from fraud. One copy of the inventory was kept by the church courts and a second copy was returned to the executor.

Throughout the country as a whole, many thousands of inventories have survived and are held amongst diocesan records, most deposited with county record offices. However, for Bedfordshire only a few hundred have survived for the period before 1660. Bedfordshire Historical Record Society (BHRS) has already published 1813 and this book complements them with a further 432, one of which was made in 1497 and the others between 1550 and 1659. A few more survive in fragments and have been omitted.

The county and the Archdeaconry of Bedford were almost coterminous. The exceptions were the two parishes making up the peculiars of Biggleswade and Leighton Buzzard and the extra-parochial area of Colworth; they were administered separately from the Archdeaconry.