Bolstered by research into early modern domestic economies and the history of the book, Maureen Bell, Paula McDowell, Helen Smith, and, most recently, Valerie Wayne, among others, have helped us to recognise the extent to which womenâas printers, booksellers, bookbinders, publishers, and wholesalersâmade essential contributions to the early English book trade.1 Research of this kind, however, has so far been significantly hampered by a dearth of documentary evidence as bookwomen only sporadically appear either in Stationersâ Company documents or in book imprints. For the past few years, the newly assembled Book Trade Probate (BTP) team has been gathering and transcribing wills, probate licences, administrations, sentences, and inventories for a two-part project on early modern book-trade probate.2 The first stage will conclude with publication of the print volume Playbook Wills, 1529â1690 (University of Manchester Press, 2025), while the second will culminate in an exhaustive, searchable online database of transcribed book-trade probate material. So far, we have located more than five hundred London book-trade wills dating from 1557 to 1666, from the incorporation of the Stationersâ Company to the Great Fire of London. Women figure significantly in these documents. They not only are invoked regularly as legatees, executrixes, overseers, and witnesses, but they also appear in eighty-eight wills as testators, mostly widows.3
Like those of men, early modern womenâs wills can reveal home towns, residences, church parishes, and burial locations. They also can identify in their bequests family members (immediate and extended, living and dead), close friends, business associates (and the larger networks in which they operated), household servants, and apprentices (past and present). Bequests can be extensive, gifting not just money, leases, and property but an array of household items, and as such, they can provide fascinating catalogs of a womanâs cherished possessions. Jane Costerdine, for example, in 1654 left four pieces of jewelry to family and friends: to her sister-in-law Susanna Pagitt she left âa ring ⦠having fiue stones in itt, and one lost outâ; to her cousin John Pagitt âa little Ring with a stone in ittâ; to her cousin Thomas Pagitt âa little Ring which is enamelled with white, and a little stone in itâ; and to her neighbor âMr Crane a little Ring with this motto (what wee decreed is now agreed)â.4 Jacomine Langford willed her âhusbandes best suite and cloake and Hatt and His best stockinges and gartersâ.5 Anne Humble gifted all of the needlework cushions and bedding âDone and wroughtâ by her daughters.6 Jane Brookbank gave a cousin âher husbandes best suit and Cloake with a Gold Ring made vp in a Truelouers knottâ.7 Jane Jaggard gave âall [her] bookes in the closett in her chamberâ.8
Wills also can give us a senseâadmittedly a rough oneâof the size of a womanâs assets at the time of her death.9 The six monetary bequests in Jane Costerdineâs 1654 will together amount only to thirty pounds, ten shillings. By comparison, in her 1618 will Elizabeth Oliffe dictated bequests to her family and friends amounting to around 320 pounds, including five shillings âto the man that shall make my graveâ.10 Even more impressive were the property bequests in the extensive 1638 will of Elizabeth Adams. To her children, grandchildren, and their spouses, she gifted considerable land and tenement holdings in Hertfordshire along with yearly rents coming from freehold lands in the same county. With these, she also dictated that a further one hundred pounds be spent on her funeral.
Evidence of book-trade work can also be found in womenâs wills. In some cases, book-trade women single out business subordinates, suggesting perhaps a working relationship. More than a dozen left legacies to apprentices working under their supervision, while a few more singled out journeymen for bequests. Alice Badger, Anne Boler, Margaret Kembe, Joyce Macham, Joan Man, Katherine Vincent, and Joan Wolfe all gifted rights-to-copy to their heirs.11 Those that Joyce Macham transferred to her son Samuel in 1627 were all established during the tenure of her bookseller husband Samuel Macham.12 Katherine Vincent even went so far to name the four titles licensed by her husband that she was gifting to her son George: âFower Coppies vizt one called the posie of godlie prayers an other called the Euerrie dayes sacrifice the third the misery of inforced marriage, and the other called the Oliffe leafeâ.13 Anne Boler, on the other hand, left the rights-to-copy of her bookseller husband James to her eldest son of the same name, while â[a]ll and euerie such Coppies of bookes as [she had] bought since [her] said Husbandes deathâ were gifted to her youngest son Thomas.14
A few widows even refer to the tools or products of their trade, others to their larger businesses. Isabella Everest and Anne Lownes each left all their âwaresâ to a female family member, a sister and daughter respectively.15 Anne Boler, Susanna Crawley, Dorothy (Jaggard Downes) Fawne, Joyce French, Jacomine Langford, and Katherine Sudbury all bequeathed bibles.16 Susanna Crawley left a âbooke of Doctor Pessons vppon the now Covenantâ and Marie Brewer gave âa booke of Doctor Halls workesâ.17 In 1574 Joan Wolfe left to her son and son-in-law âall the presses letters furniture Coppies and other necessaries Instrumentes and tooles being with in my prynting howse or belonging vnto the same for concerning or belonging to the arte of prynting And also all the bookes whatsoeuer being in my shoppe; my saide dwelling howse or ells wheareâ.18 Anne Cooke followed suit in 1598, gifting to her son Henry âall the ymplement[es] that belongeth to the Shop[p]e and to the tradeâ.19 In 1641, Sarah Fairbeard similarly directed that her âexecutors ⦠indeavour to obtaine from the Cittie of London and Companie of Mercers a Newe Lease of my newe Shopp at the Royall Exchange in London, in the name and for the vse of my said Neeceâ.20 Two decades later in 1659, Jane Bell left âvnto [her] said daughter Elizabeth the summe of ffiue pounds more to be paid by my Executor out of [her] printing houseâ.21
Even while some of these women like Margaret Hodgetts and Elizabeth Bellamy apparently chose to leave the book trade shortly after they were widowed, a number of them appear to have carried on for years with their work as publishers, booksellers, binders, distributors, and printers.22 The printer William Wilson even dictated in his 1665 will that his wife Mary continue running his printing house after his death. In attempting to account for a widowâs activity (i.e. its course and kind), we should keep in mind that it was in large part dependent upon her financial situation after her husbandâs estate went through probate. In London and towns across England, it had long been customary to break up a husbandâs land, leases, and personal property or âchattelâ (i.e. his money, trade implements and merchandise, personal effects, and household items) after his death.23 If a husbandâs debts were significant, his widow often could only rest assured of retaining what was called her âchamberâ (i.e. her linen, jewels, clothing, bed, hangings, and chests).24 In London, ecclesiastical law dictated that one third of the value of a husbandâs leases and personal propertyâafter debts were settledâshould go to his widow, one third to his children, and one third to family, friends, and associates in separate bequests.25 If he died intestate (i.e. not having left a will), one third went to his widow, the other two thirds to his children. One important consequence of this system was that many book-trade widows found themselves with significantly reduced means to carry on the family business once their late husbandâs estate was settled. In her survey of around 455 English wills from the early modern period in which the widow served as executrix, Amy Louise Erickson found that in 97 cases the widow ended up either in debt or with nothing when all was said and done.26 This figure does not include the many widows who must have emerged from the process with substantially fewer assets. A widowâs decision not to continue working in the book trade, in other words, likely had more to do with simple economics than with anything else. When the draper-turned-stationer Richard Brookbank died in 1643, the probate licence associated with him listed the value of his estate at around thirty-nine pounds. As he and his wife Jane had no children, his monetary bequests were limited to friends and relatives, ten shillings in total. Like many testators before him, he also dictated that all of his debts be âtruely paideâ before the remainder be given to his spouse.27 When Jane died two years later, her estate was valued at twelve pounds, possibly so reduced because of her husbandâs previous debts.
As suggestive as the wills of book-trade women can be, this probate material has so far been mostly ignored. Just one of the probate documents that Strickland Gibson reproduces in his 1907 Abstracts from the Wills and Testamentary Documents of Binders, Printers, and Stationers of Oxford, from 1493 to 1638 comes from a woman (Anne Herks), while George J. Gray and William Mortlock Palmer include material from just two widows (Magdalen Graves and Margaret Pilgrim) among the forty-seven sets of probate documents in their Abstracts from the Wills and Testamentary Documents of Printers, Binders, and Stationers of Cambridge, from 1504 to 1699 published eight years later. In his 1904 Abstracts from the Wills of English Printers and Stationers: From 1492 to 1630, Henry R. Plomer included partial transcriptions of the wills of Lucy Reynes (proved in 1549), Elizabeth Toye (proved in 1565), and Joan Wolfe (proved in 1574). In the volumeâs introduction, he makes it clear that his main purpose in including this material was to âsupplement the information given in the wills of their husbandsâ, even while admitting that Joan Wolfeâs will is âan interesting and valuable recordâ.28 A comparison of Plomerâs abstracts with the wills themselves reveals his capricious method. Plomer promises that his abstracts include bequests, but in actuality they provide only partial lists of these legacies.29 In his Reynes and Wolfe abstracts, women legatees are often cut, as are a number of sums and objects.
The earliest London womenâs wills the BTP project has so far identified that were left before the incorporation of the Stationersâ Company in 1557 come from Joan Hebson and Anne Taverner. John Hebson had served as the Stationersâ warden before naming his wife joint executor of his estate and dying in 1502. Within a year, Joan Hebson would finalise her own will, dictating sales of tenements in Eastcheap and in Barking and leaving money to a priest to sing and pray for her own soul and the souls of her two husbands. Anne Tavernerâs relatively extensive will was witnessed on 3 December 1537 and proved nine days later. Anne married the bookbinder John Taverner sometime in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, and she ran his rented Paternoster Row shop after his death in 1531.30 John plied his trade as a binder, retailer, and textwriter (i.e. a writer and copyist of non-legal manuscript texts) during his long career, and by the 1520s he would come to be one of the wealthiest stationers in London and a respected citizen.31 In Anneâs will, the lionâs share of the bequests are given to her daughter Margaret and her husband the stationer-haberdasher William Bull, and to her stationer son Nicholas and his wife Mary. To the former pair, she left most of her âowne propre goodesâ, including a goblet with âa Castle in the Bottome and a foote of syluerâ, three furred gowns, a âbedstede hanginge and all other thinges therto belongingâ, and two chestes one grete and one other smallâ. To the latter, she left the âResidew of all my goodes not bequethed my Dettes and this my legaces paiedâ.32 The Bulls would run the Paternoster Row business after 1537, and as such it is possible that the implements of her scribal textwriting and bookbinding business were passed onto the Bulls in Anneâs two chests.33
At the end of the period considered here is the will of Dorothy (Jaggard Downes) Fawne that was witnessed in Hackney on 15 September 1666, just two weeks after the Great Fire had gutted much of London.34 Dorothy enjoyed close connections with three prominent seventeenth-century stationer families before she married the widower bookseller Luke Fawne in the late 1650s or early 1660s: the Weavers, the Jaggards, and the Downeses.35 She was the daughter of the bookseller Edmond Weaver, and she was almost certainly the Dorothy who married the printer Isaac Jaggard in the 1610s or 1620s. Among other things, the Jaggards were key members of the syndicate that published Shakespeareâs First Folio in 1623. After Isaacâs death in the spring of 1627, Dorothy would continue working at her Barbican printing house for a short time until she appears to have sold the business to the brothers Thomas and Richard Cotes.36 By 1638, she had married Thomas Downes, joining his long standing bookselling business in St. Paulâs Churchyard.37 In her will, Dorothy left bequests to the Stationersâ Company, to former Fawne apprentices Jonathan Robinson and Brabazon Aylmer, to Jane Greene (possibly the widow of Charles Greene who had apprenticed with Dorothyâs father), and to the bookseller Anthony Dowse who she calls a âwelbeloued ffreindâ. She left her âgreat Bible lyeing in the Parlourâ to another of her close friends, Robert Welden.
In early modern England, unmarried women could elect to leave a will if they were twelve-years-old or older. In the early 1580s, Anne Hill, the unmarried daughter of the deceased printer William Hill, was working as a servant in the household of Humphrey Winnington. In September, 1582, the 21-year-old Anne finalised a will in which she distributed a twenty-pound legacy from her father as well as a one-hundred-mark âobligaconâ due to her from the draper Richard Smith.38 Though most of the women connected to the book trade were either a wife, a widow, or, like Anne Hill, a daughter, some who worked in a printing house or bookshop did so as an unmarried and unrelated servant. Little evidence of these women exist. Most of what we do know comes from burial entries in parish registers and court proceedings. We do, however, have at least one will from a female servant who worked in the early English book trade. In May 1565, Margaret Dourman left her estate (âgoodes cattells Iewells debtes and houshold stuffeâ) to the barber surgeon Richard West along with ten shillings to âpoore folke at the day of [her] buryallâ.39 When she drew up her will, Dourman was employed by the London bookseller Roger Ireland, possibly at the Holy Ghost in St. Paulâs Churchyard.40 Ireland was an original member of the Stationersâ Company, and he had risen in the companyâs administrative ranks to an assistant in the 1560s and then to a warden around the time of Dourmanâs death. Working for Ireland was probably anything but mundane. In the early 1550s, he seems to have acquired his own London tennis court and was around the same time accused of running an illegal gambling operation.41
Married women were not legally qualified to leave a will because they were understood to be under the protection of their husbands (i.e. âcovert baronâ in the common-law terminology of the day). There were exceptions to this. A wife could negotiate freedom of testation (i.e. power to leave a will) as part of her marriage contract; she could also be given permission to leave a will by her husband.42 Of the book-trade wills from women that we have so far found, four were left by wives with living husbands. Joan (Morton) Patchet in 1561 and Jane Constable in 1631 each left a will which cites the permission of her husband.43 After the deaths of her first and second husbands, Margaret Morrall married the London bookseller Henry Danson in 1608.44 Margaretâs will records that she had been granted permission to âat any tyme make or cause to be made any writing vnder my hand and Seale wherein or whereby I might and may give and dispose of three hundred powndes of lawfull money of Englandâ.45 It then dictates that the three hundred pounds be divided equally between her eldest son Robert Wood and his fiancée Margaret Coates, John Morrall, and Aminadab Morrall. These were her only bequests.46 At some point in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, Priscilla Garford received a seven-hundred pound legacy from her mother. Later on, she may have negotiated a freedom of testation at her marriage.47 Whatever the terms of existence, her 1665 will dictates that this legacy be passed onto her husband Richard Garford.
Remarriage was a complicated proposition for many a book-trade widow. If she chose to marry a non-stationer, she had to relinquish her rights-to-copy and her shares in Stationersâ Company stock. Cuthbert Burbyâs widow Elizabeth, for example, married the gentleman Humphrey Turner at St Michael, Cornhill on 17 October 1609. Stationersâ Company policies explain why she transferred all of her rights-to-copy to the booksellers William Welby and Nicholas Bourne on 16 October, and why her shares of Stationersâ Company stock were re-assigned to four bookmen on 21 October.48 Even if a widow elected to remarry a stationer, it was sometimes the case that she faced financial consequences as a result of dictates in her deceased husbandâs will. In 1570, Stephen Kevall insisted in his will that if his wife Jane remarry that she pay five separate legacies amounting to over eighty-two pounds. Similarly, in his 1603 will, the bookseller Henry Hooke directed that if his wife Alice remarry âthat before the day of the Solemination of her maryage she enter into sufficient bond to give vnto eyther of my two sonnes samuell & nathanaell Hook twentie pund A piceâ.49 Neither Jane Kevall nor Alice Hooke ended up remarrying.
In 1665, with the bookseller John Grove and the stationer apprentice Nicholas Hooper standing by as witnesses, Joan Mead affixed her seal to each of her willâs three manuscript pages. She also signed each of these with her own full name. Meadâs ability to write was not exceptional. A number of women who worked in the early modern book trade were literate. As Helen Smith has documented, widows frequently penned notes in the Stationersâ Company register in transferring rights-to-copy, and they also wrote letters to company leaders in order officially to resign yeoman, apprentice, and livery shares in the companyâs stock.50 Like Joan Meadâs does, wills can provide evidence of the extent of literacy among book-trade women. Around 33% of the eighty-eight wills (i.e. twenty-eight) that we have found include womenâs signatures, either an original signature, or, if a register copy, evidence of an original. Over half (i.e. forty-seven) of these wills contain marks instead of signatures. By comparison, around 10% of husbandsâ wills are marked, and 70% have signatures.
While we should be careful about what we conclude from this signature evidence, it is at least possible that these twenty-eight widows were fully literate, adept in both reading and writing.51 As such, they would have not only been able to pen administrative notes and missives, they also would have been able to write out customer receipts and keep business records (i.e. account books, day books, and the like). If publishing was a part of their business, they would have been able to read, correct, even copy edit as well. Nineteen of the women who left wills in the period we are considering are advertised in at least one imprint as publisher. A further three more widows (i.e. Dorothy [Jaggard Downes] Fawne, Elizabeth Toye, and Alice Wolfe) published titles without putting their own name in an imprint. Of these twenty-two publishing widows, ten signed their wills (Elizabeth Adams, Elizabeth [Tapp Hurlock] Bellamy, Anne Boler, Lucretia East, Sarah Fairbeard, Dorothy [Jaggard Downes] Fawne, Mercy Meighen, Elizabeth [White Burby] Turner, Katherine Vincent, and Joan Wolfe), and nine left their marks (Jane Bell, Joan Broome, Susan Islipp, Joyce [Norton] Law, Joyce Macham, Elizabeth Overton, Elizabeth Toye, Sarah White, and Alice Wolfe). Of the former group, Elizabeth Adams, Anne Boler, Dorothy (Jaggard Downes) Fawne, Elizabeth (White Burby) Turner, and Mercy Meighen each published new titles after her husbandâs death. Of the latter, only Joan Broome did so. While Broome represents an important exception, literacy may have had something to do with the extent to which widow publishers were, to use Alan Farmerâs terminology, âentrepreneurialâ.52
Many book-trade womenâs wills include bequests of specific items. The strong majority of these are either articles of clothing, textiles associated with eating and sleeping (napkins, pillow cases, sheets, etc.), furniture, jewellery, kitchenware, or expensive tableware (goblets, salts, tankards, etc.). In a number of cases, such bequests are extensive, providing an inventory of sorts of the kinds of things a widow would have surrounded herself with before, during, and after her marriage. For example, Mary Bishop, wife of the bookseller George Bishop, left her cousin Mary Walker âTwoe boales pcell guilt, a guilt sault, twoe guilt pottes one Douzen of spones my great Chest wth Drawers, my Wayneskott Chest ⦠my Walnuttree bedsted, Two Nedleworke Chaires, one Chaire of peartree in the hall, one Cipres Chest in the Wainskott Chamber, The Court Cubbord in my Chamber, and my little Tabell in the hallâ.53 With recurring articles of clothing like petticoats, girdles, and coats and objects like bowls, pots, silverware, chests, bedframes, chairs, cupboards, and tables, there are, however, more unique bequests. To the books already mentioned should be added Joanne Wayeâs âblacke gowne whiche was [her] morninge gowne at the buriall of [her] husband ⦠garded with velvettâ, Joan Wolfeâs âneste of Goblet[es] of siluer parcell gilte with a cover being marked vppon the couer wth an R and an I engraphenâ, Elizabethâs Toyeâs âCouerlet of Imagerieâ, Elizabeth Oliffeâs âpaynted Clothe & hangingeâ, and Elizabeth (Bankworth) Blountâs beaver hat.54 The wills of book-trade widowers that we have transcribed rarely contain significant numbers of object bequests, nor do they contain the same kind. In these, widowers usually distribute their goods as bulk legacies. If they do leave objects, these are usually items of clothing. Such contrasting bequests could be taken to be a result of the different roles that book-trade men and women played in what were more often than not domestic operations. Even while wives and widows were tasked with running or helping to run the first-floor printing houses, bookshop(s), or book stall(s) of the family businesses, they at the same time were also responsible for overseeing the everyday affairs of the household having to do with cleaning and cooking.
As Helen Smith pointed out a decade ago, for early modern women,
sex is unlikely to have been the most significant category of identity. ⦠Early modern subjectivity was formed in relation to external rather than interior commitments and identifications. Women like Anne Griffin, Joan Orwin, and Elizabeth Toye identified themselves as members of the community of stationers, as well as, at various points, wives, mothers, widows, and members of political and religious communities.55
Womenâs wills suggest that, at least as far as book-trade funerary practices were organized, the orientation of these commitments and identifications may have been shifting. In the 1570s, a number of widows singled out disenfranchised women as a supporting cast for their funerals. In her 1577 will, Jane Kevall bequeathed twelve gowns of cloth at âsixe shillinge eight pence the yardeâ to eight poor women so that they could accompany her corpse to burial.56 Nine years later, Joan Jugge gifted âeighte pore women dwellinge within the saide parishe of Christ churche eight black gownes of five shilling[es] the yardeâ, and Mary Bishop in 1613 left âvnto Three skoore poore women, And to so many poore Women more as I shall happen to be yeares ould aboue Threeskore, att the tyme of my Decease, To every of them A black Cloth gowne of Eight shillinges a yeard, And also a lockeram smock of Sixteene pence an Ell att the leastâ.57 Later charitable bequests are not only less often given to bolster participation in funerary rituals, they are also often directed towards company widows. In 1616, Alice (Waterson Coldock) Bing singled out stationersâ widows for twelve charitable bequests, and two decades later Anne Boler gave âfortie shilling[es] in money to be distributed to amongst eight poore widowes of the said Company of Stationers equallie parte & parte likeâ.58 It may be that these later wills speak to a burgeoning company identity among book-trade widows after the sixteenth century.59
The observations offered here are tentative. All of them need to be tested against an exhaustive collection of early modern book-trade probate material from both women and men. Over the coming years, the Book Trade Probate project will undoubtedly unearth more wills, and these may modify the impressions conjured here. Even then, conclusions about the activities of book-trade women drawn from probate material will need to be weighed against other evidence from the period. Only around 15% of the book-trade wills that we have so far identified come from women, meaning that such probate evidence will likely be partial at best. Moreover, only around 20% of eligible adults left wills in the early seventeenth century, and those that did often had significant estates to pass on.60 For every will that we have from the likes of Margaret Dourman, in other words, there are dozens of wills from successful bookwomen like Joan Wolfe, Elizabeth Adams, and Anne Boler.
Still, no other set of resources documenting women connected with the early-modern English book trade provides anywhere near the quantity and quality of evidence as wills. Many of those surveyed hereâfrom both husbands and wivesâconfirm what sixteenth- and seventeenth-century book imprints and Stationersâ Company records vaguely attest: that a significant number of widows continued to work in the trade after the death of their husbands, even as Englandâs probate laws and customs made this sometimes a difficult proposition. Suggested as well is the high probability that these women had been essential partners in these businesses while their husbands were still living. Womenâs wills conjure too tantalising images of the lives led by bookwomen as wives, daughters, widows, even maidservants. Until we readily acknowledge that these lives intersected in significant ways with foundational books like Calvinâs Institutes of the Christian Religion, the Geneva Bible, Gerardâs Herbal, and the First Folio, our understanding of early modern English culture will necessarily be incomplete.
Appendix: Womenâs English Book-Trade Wills (1557â1666)
I am indebted both to Peter W.M. Blayney and Lucy Munro for their help in locating some of the wills recorded here. Maureen Bell, âWomen in the English book trade 1557â1700â, Leipziger Jahrbuch zur Buchgeschichte, 6 (1996), pp. 13â46; Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: press, politics, and gender in the London literary marketplace, 1678â1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Helen Smith, âGrossly Material Thingsâ: Women and book production in early modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Valerie Wayne (ed.), Womenâs labor and the history of the book in early modern England (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).
The Book Trade Probate team consists of me, Aaron Pratt, Breanne Weber, Mouli Chaudhuri, Sarah Whichello, and Katie Holly.
It was exceedingly unusual for a book-trade widow not to be named executrix of her dead husbandâs estate. Of the husbands whose wills we have located, only John Norton, John Sudbury, and William Crawley did not make their wives executrixes. (Richard Garford outlived his wife Priscilla.) See Appendix.
Public Records Office (PRO), PROB 11/297/45. Will quotations come either from original wills or register copies. Transcriptions are diplomatic. Years are rendered in the New Style dating system. Names have been regularised.
PRO, PROB 11/181/261.
PRO, PROB 11/194/187.
London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), DL/C/B/005/MS09172/52, no.137
LMA, DL/AL/C/003/MS09052/006, no.170.
Early modern wills offer incomplete accounts of testatorsâ estates. Not only were the values of property and amounts of debt not included but total assets could be outweighedâsometimes significantlyâby debts, thus nullifying a willâs bequests. See Amy Louise Erickson, Women and property in early modern England (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 32â33.
LMA, DL/C/B/005/MS09172/30, no.35.
In early modern England after 1557, ârights-to-copyâ were conferred by the Stationersâ Company, not by the state. Before and after this time, a âprivilegeâ to print a title or an entire class of titles could also be granted by a monarch. Authorial copyright did not exist. See Peter W.M. Blayney, âThe Publication of Playbooksâ, John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds.), A new history of early English drama (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 398â400.
For Joyce Machamâs work as a publisher after her husbandâs death, see Alan Farmer, âWidow publishers in London, 1540â1640â, in Valerie Wayne (ed.), Womenâs labor and the history of the book in early modern England (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 56â7.
LMA, DL/C/B/004/MS09171/023/227v.
PRO, PROB 11/176/126.
LMA, DL/AL/C/003/MS09052/007, no.155, PROB 11/148/625.
Crawley specifically left her âgreate Bible with silver Clapsesâ (PRO, PROB 11/311/358) and Langford both her own and her âhusband[es] bibleâ (PRO, PROB 11/181/261).
PRO, PROB 11/311/358, LMA, DL/C/B/005/MS09172/49, no.32. Crawleyâs bequest is The new covenant (1629), a collection of sermons by Anglican clergyman John Preston. These were originally delivered at Lincolnâs Inn. Brewerâs âbookeâ, The works of Joseph Hall B[ishop] of Exeter, was first published in the mid 1630s.
PRO, PROB 11/56/386.
PRO, PROB 11/91/477.
PRO, PROB 11/191/367.
PRO, PROB 11/296/336.
Margaret Hodgetts transferred four rights-to-copy to Robert Allott in early 1626, months after her husband John died, Edward Arber, (ed.), A transcript of the registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554â1640 A.D., vol. IV (London: 1875â1894), p. 418. While the fishmonger Edward (Tapp Hurlock) Bellamy left one third of his estate to his wife Elizabeth in 1656, he chose to leave his book business (bookshop, book holdings, and rights-to-copy) to his daughter Mary (wife of the bookseller George Hurlock).
While the freehold and copyhold property that a woman brought to a marriage was legally held by her husband, it was put under her control upon his death, Erickson, Women and property, p. 25.
Allowable funeral expenses were also deducted before the estate was divided. See Peter W.M. Blayney, The Stationersâ Company and the printers of London, 1501â1557, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 84.
The freehold and copyhold property that a husband both brought to and acquired during a marriage could usually either be distributed by bequests in his will or, if he died intestate or did not include such dictates in his will, conferred along the lines of the English system of primogeniture according to manorial and borough custom, Erickson, Women and property, pp. 26â27.
Ibid., p. 174.
LMA, DL/C/B/005/MS09172/50, no.33.
Henry R. Plomer, Abstracts from the wills of English printers and stationers: from 1492 to 1630 (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1904), p. iii.
Plomer, Abstracts, p. ii.
See Blayney, Stationersâ Company, vol. I, p. 472.
Ibid., p. 209.
PRO, PROB 11/27/170.
See C. Paul Christianson, âThe Stationers of Paternoster Row, 1534â1557â, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 87 (1993), p. 84.
Luke Fawne died in March, 1666, and his lengthy will was proved shortly thereafter on March 26th. In it, Fawne left hundreds of pounds in legacies to his family and friends as well as the residue of his estate to his wife. For more on the Fawnes, see H.A. Shield, âLinks with Shakespeare IVâ, Notes and Queries, 194.25 (1949), pp. 536â537.
Edmund Weaver and his sons Gabriel, Thomas, and Edmund were all booksellers. Edmund senior was originally freed as a Draper before being transferred to the Stationersâ Company in 1600, Arber, transcript, vol. II p. 725. Thomas Downes, his son Thomas, and his brother Bartholomew were booksellers as well.
Arber, transcript, vol. IV p. 182. With the exception of twenty pounds to his brother Thomas and five pounds to the poor, Isaac left his wife âAll the rest of my goodes and chattles money and debts whatsoeuerâ, LMA, DL/AL/C/003/MS09052/007, no.29. He also made her his sole executrix. Within weeks of Isaacâs death in 1627, Dorothy published Lancelot Andrewesâs Seven sermons on the wonderful combat between Christ and Satan.
Thomas Downes named Dorothy his executrix and left her the residue of his estate after his debts had been satisfied and his legacies (amounting to 140 pounds) had been paid. His largest legacy of one hundred pounds went to John Weaver, orphan son of Dorothyâs brother Edmund whom she and Thomas had taken in.
LMA, DL/C/B/005/MS09172/011D, no.115. William Hill died in 1564. For more on his short career, see Blayney, Stationersâ Company, vol. II, pp. 617â620. The Richard Smith referenced here might be the draper bookseller who apprenticed first with Thomas Pettit and then with John Wight. For more on the interesting career of Smith, see Kirk Melnikoff, Elizabethan publishing, and makings of literary culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), pp. 99â136.
LMA, DL/C/0359/001/76r.
Roger Irelandâs only imprint, a 1569 almanack, advertises Irelandâs bookshop at the sign of the Holy Ghost.
Blayney, Stationersâ Company, vol. II p. 895.
E.A.J. Honigmann and Susan Brock, eds., Playhouse wills, 1558â1642: an edition of wills by Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the London theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 12.
Jane Constableâs father was the London butcher Christopher Child who died in 1625, naming his wife Joan and Jane executors in his will. In her will, Jane asked her husband to act as executor of her fatherâs estate after her death.
Margaret first married the London saddler Eachey Wood at some point in the final two decades of the sixteenth century. After the death of Wood, she then married the London merchant tailor William Morrall in 1593.
PRO, PROB 11/146/468.
Margaretâs will was proved two years later in September, 1625. Henry Danson died sometime after 1627.
Priscilla Garfordâs parents were John and Margaret Foot. Her brother was the wealthy London grocer Thomas Foot who was elected Lord Mayor of London in 1649.
See Arber, transcript, vol. III, pp. 419â421; Jackson, Records, p. 38.
LMA, DL/AL/C/003/MS09052/001D, no.113.
Smith, âGrossly Material Thingsâ, pp. 91â92.
For pitfalls in assessing literacy through signature evidence, see Roger Chartier, âThe practical impact of writingâ, in Roger Chartier (ed.), A history of private life, volume 3: Passions of the Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 111â159.
Farmer, âWidow publishersâ, pp. 54â57.
PRO, PROB 11/122/203.
PRO, PROB 11/68/367; PRO, PROB 11/56/386; PRO, PROB 11/48/210; LMA, DL/C/B/005/MS09172/030, no.35.
Smith, âGrossly Material Thingsâ, p. 90.
PRO, PROB 11/63/346.
PRO, PROB 11/72/698; PRO, PROB 11/122/203.
PRO, PROB 11/176/126.
Farmer has recently identified a network of book-trade widow publishers in London in the 1630s, one that included Anne Boler, âWidow publishersâ, pp. 57â61.
Honigmann and Brock, Playhouse wills, p. 11. See also Erickson, Women and property, pp. 32â33.