7 - Thame Households

Summary

This chapter is intended to ‘flesh out’ the data, which has been treated largely in a descriptive and statistical fashion in hitherto. The decision to aggregate inventory data is based on the desire to iron out anomalies of life cycle and circumstance in individual households. And yet each household does have its own special circumstances of condition and composition, frozen at the moment of the death of the householder. Wills provide valuable additional data which reveals a little of the social matrix and affections of the householder and household. These can in turn be related to other records such as parish registers, and of civil life of Thame in this period, frankpledge and quarter session records. The distribution of assets, of property and of personal belongings can reveal a little more of the world experienced by the inhabitants of Thame in the seventeenth century. In this chapter nine households have been selected as approximately representative of different occupational and status groups: the yeoman, husbandman, labourer, artisan, trading artisan, trader, cleric, gentleman and widow. The line drawings for each decedent are intended only to suggest the possible spatial layout of the dwelling and its principal furnishings from the evidence of probate inventory and will. The ratio of the room furnishing value to the total furnishing expenditure is shown after each room. The exact appearance of the furniture is also conjectural, based on extant examples.

Agriculturalists

John Corner, Yeoman

Yeomen were traditionally owner-occupiers of land to the value of at least forty shillings, but in practice were those agriculturalists, whatever the manner of land holding, who could produce a significant marketable surplus over domestic requirements, usually with the help of hired labour. In a market community set in its fertile valley, we commence with a portrait of those households in Thame which were primarily agricultural by occupation and identity. In his will John Corner, a yeoman who died in early July 1619, commended his ‘soule to Allmightie God and my bodie to be buried in the Church yard of Thame’. He left a wife, Elizabeth and a son Robert, still a minor.