Religious Patronage as Gendered Family Memory in Sixteenth-century England

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In her last will, Bridget, Lady Marney (née Waldegrave, d. 1549) asked to be buried among the family of her first husband, William Findern, in the church of Little Horkesley, Essex, whose manor had been bestowed on her for life. ¹ Yet she exhibited a clear desire to recognize all three families of which she had been part: she requested that her tomb be embellished with brass images of herself, Findern, and her second husband Sir John Marney; escutcheons of the three family’s respective arms; and an inscription to “shewe the tyme of my decease and of what stockes I cam of and to what men of woorship I was maryed unto.” The prominent position of her tomb—“at the hygh ende of the Chauncell”—would ensure that this tripartite identity would be broadcast to posterity. ² The role of monuments, not least those built to commemorate the passing of a family member, in producing and displaying messages about family identity, authority, and social positioning is of increasing interest to scholars of early modern Europe. ³ Grave and funerary monuments were permanent, or at least long-lasting, markers of family identity, and of the part that individuals played in the production of family reputation and lineage. As Susan Broomhall has recently noted in her analysis of Catherine De’ Medici’s funerary monuments for her husband, King Henry II of France and sons, such iconography could be designed not only for the benefit of the family, but the individual who commissioned the work. ⁴ De’ Medici deployed iconography of her own grieving heart strategically to reinforce that she was the legitimate heir to her husband’s power, and thus the appropriate regent for her son, and caretaker of the kingdom.

That women might utilize family memory strategically in this way is no longer particularly surprising. Women, especially those of the social elite, were as readily involved in court politics and political life in the early modern period as men, and while their practice of power was gendered, their efficacy is no longer in question. ⁵ Moreover women have been particularly associated with the production of family memory, both then and now, often located as the keepers of family stories and the holders and producers of family records. ⁶ As recent work on this has suggested, women’s deployment of family stories and their uses of genealogies shaped the family identities they produced. If medieval and early modern men often focused on male lineage, sometimes excluding women altogether, women provided more inclusive representations of their families, embracing not only women but multiple lines of descent. ⁷

That early modern women thought about their families as lateral, as well as lineal, is also not surprising given what we know about women’s identities from other sources. Studies of will-making, in particular, have evidenced that women defined family quite broadly across both natal and conjugal lines, and that they often preferenced women in their bequests. ⁸ A number of historians have thus suggested that women resisted, if quietly, patriarchal constructions of family identity. This is perhaps especially pertinent among the English elite, not only due to their practice of male-descending primogeniture, but as the freedom of the testamentary system acted in practice to exclude the wife’s family from the line of inheritance. This can be contrasted with many parts of continental Europe where the dual descent of property (from the male and female lines) was recognized, protected, and shaped how families constructed their boundaries. ⁹

This article seeks to explore women’s religious patronage at end of life as a site for the production of family identity and memory, using evidence from wills and testaments. The significance of the family as a “social frame for memory” is now well recognized, building on early work by Maurice Halbwachs who argued that the family was one of the key sites for memory-making at both individual and national levels. ¹⁰ Families are not only an important location in which people learn about the past, but stories of family act to frame and shape interpretation of historic and social knowledges, both personal and national. ¹¹ The construction of family memory is thus a central area where women could exercise agency over not only how the family was envisioned for its own purposes, but how those representations could coalesce with other forms of historical knowledge-making to shape stories of place, nation, and social positioning. As we will demonstrate, the significant familial dimension of women’s religious patronage, both in their own wills and in their execution of their spouses’ wills, became a mechanism through which a shifting religious environment was made meaningful to individuals and communities.

This article looks especially at the period of the early English Reformation. It is based on a sample of 334 women’s wills, proved in the Prerogative Courts of Canterbury and York between 1528 and 1558. While this is only a portion of the wills dating from this period, care was taken to ensure a sufficiently representative sample: it contains a roughly even number of wills for each five-year interval and covers the geographical breadth of England.

Given that the Prerogative Courts had authority over cases where the deceased possessed property worth over five pounds in more than one jurisdiction, the sample is weighted toward the nobility and gentry. Yet it also includes testators of the merchant, artisan, and lesser landholding classes. All bar twenty-four of the women were widows; of these, twenty were wives, and the remaining four had never married. Married women, whose property ownership was restricted under coverture, were significantly less likely to leave testaments than their unmarried counterparts. ¹² To provide a point of comparison, 119 wills of male testators were also analyzed. Most of these men were the relatives of these female testators. Most notably, the sample includes eighty-seven spousal pairs, allowing for a more precise assessment of the role of gender and kinship on end-of-life testamentary practices.

The mid-1520s to 1558 cover part of the reign of Henry VIII (r.1509–1547), who initiated the English Reformation, his Protestant son Edward VI (r.1547–1553), and his Catholic daughter Mary I (r.1553–1558). Like elsewhere, the Reformation in England was a drawn out process, but the key events that formally separated the Church of England from Rome occurred in the 1530s, with the last years of the decade seeing the promulgation of religious doctrine along a Lutheran model, the abolishment of feast days and pilgrimages, and the dissolution of the monasteries. Further reform followed over the next decade, but especially after Henry’s death, where the publication of the Book of Homilies was followed by widespread iconoclasm and the abolishment of the chantries, prayers for the dead and the structures designed to enable them. After Edward’s early death in 1553, Mary’s ascension to the throne marked a return to Catholicism, if briefly.

This period of the Reformation was marked by significant religious upheaval, as both institutional and personal religious practices were contested, negotiated, remade, and remade again. As is well documented, the Reformation across Europe had a particular impact on will-making, a central site where elite families practiced religious patronage, providing money or resources for religious institutions or individuals, and for most families, bestowing financial support for prayers and rituals that would commemorate the deceased and progress their journey toward heaven. ¹³ The disavowal of Purgatory and works-based salvation rendered the intercessory system, and thus a “plethora of ritual observances” related to death and commemoration, doctrinally obsolete. The dissolution of the monasteries and, more crucially, the chantries secured their dismantlement. ¹⁴ Bequests to parish churches decreased, and poor relief—while always a feature of end-of-life provisions—came to dominate, as one of the few officially sanctioned avenues for pious giving. In a sign more of testators’ caution and uncertainty than Protestant conversion, traditional bequests rebounded only partially under Mary. The accession of Elizabeth I ensured that the options for end-of-life patronage were permanently changed and, despite an uptick in provisions for preaching and lectureships, indelibly narrowed. As this article argues however, thinking about wills through the lens of family, rather than religious change, highlights striking continuities in commemorative and inheritance practices across the sixteenth century.

Even if will-making changed to reflect new religious conditions that many wills were designed to reinforce and commemorate, particular family relationships and identities gave them a continuity of purpose. In this way, family memory and identity practices were an important site through which religious practice and belief was negotiated and refigured during this period. Alexandra Walsham has recently noted the ways in which material objects were reused across the Reformation, transformations that nonetheless carried with them traces of past memories and beliefs, which could then reassert themselves at later historical moments. ¹⁵ Here we suggest that wills, and the testamentary practices they enabled, were similarly “sticky” with family memory, contributing to a Reformation not marked as a clean break from the past but one that was messy, partial, and ongoing. This article explores this first through an exploration of women’s testaments as a site of post-mortem piety, before turning to their role as executrices for their husbands.

Testamentary Patronage as a Family Affair

Unsurprisingly, for a document fundamentally concerned with the distribution of property, the family was at the core of early modern testaments. It was a concern which preoccupied both male and female testators, for kin predominated among the beneficiaries of both. But it was also one which arguably manifested particularly pervasively in the wills of women. Men had the more pressing obligation, tasked as they were with securing “the future of family lands, trade or goods”; as a result their wills were chiefly focused upon their children and wives. ¹⁶ Women were both less encumbered by this duty, and also typically possessed of a far more complex familial identity. Whereas men maintained a primary allegiance to one lineage throughout their lives, women acquired new ties as they married—often more than once—while still sustaining a relationship with their family of birth. ¹⁷ As Barbara Harris has noted, wills “prove beyond any doubt” that women “were far more than ‘passing guests’ in their natal and marital families. Rather, they accumulated families as they married and remarried and remembered them all when they died.” ¹⁸ Their recognition of kin in their wills was also far more likely to extend laterally as well as lineally, “incorporating siblings and their offspring, godchildren, indigent female relations, and assorted dependents whom they considered to have a claim on their notice and protection.” ¹⁹ This pattern largely continued across the transformations of the Reformation. While these (gendered) familial loyalties had their most obvious impact on testators’ personal bequests, they also permeated the religious patronage women disbursed in their wills, influencing the ecclesiastical institutions and individuals to which they directed their benefaction. ²⁰ This section examines this two-fold intersection between kinship and post-mortem piety as expressed in women’s bequests. In doing so, it highlights that, even when the fate of the soul was in the balance, spiritual agendas were far from incompatible with more worldly concerns. Family and the production of family memory became a framework through which piety was negotiated.

Nowhere is the role of the family in shaping testamentary patronage more evident than in the “decidedly proprietary attitude,” which many upper-class individuals exhibited toward the parish churches in which they wished to be buried. ²¹ By the late Middle Ages, the local parish church had overtaken the monastery as the preferred site of interment for both the aristocracy and gentry. ²² This was, as Nigel Saul has noted, largely the product of dynastic concerns: for many families, the former “reflected more fully the territorial dimensions of their lordship,” and burial here thus offered a stronger expression of their “landed identity.” ²³ By the same token, where monastic churches were selected prior to the Dissolution, it was most often due to longstanding hereditary ties. ²⁴ The result was that many parish churches came “to resemble private mausoleums for the most prominent local family.” ²⁵

If burial decisions were thus habitually inflected by concerns of lordship and lineage, they were concerns of which women were, by necessity, particularly conscious. Whereas men typically selected the parish church of the family’s main seat of residence, women’s choices—as Harris has pointed out—“were neither self-evident nor predetermined,” belonging as they did “to several families during their lifetimes.” ²⁶ Their decisions, accordingly, “reflected their primary attachments and fixed the identity by which they wanted to be remembered.” ²⁷ Lady Anne Grey (née Barley, d. 1558), for instance, requested burial not with one of her three late husbands, but in her natal parish church of Albury, Hertfordshire. She further affirmed her identification with her birth family in her arrangements for her tomb: she requested “a tombe of marble or white Alabustre declaring a memorial of the stock that I came of.” ²⁸ Various women of the Howard family, both natal (e.g. Elizabeth Boleyn) and marital (e.g. Agnes, Duchess of Norfolk), elected burial in St Mary’s, Lambeth, in what became a peculiarly feminine mausoleum. ²⁹ These decisions reflected concerns of status and dynastic memory. Women who had married more than once commonly elected to be buried with the father of their first-born child (or son) or their highest-ranking husband; heiresses often chose burial with their natal kin. ³⁰ Anne Grey’s childlessness may explain her desire to emphasize her Barley ancestry. But these choices were also very much a product of less tangible emotional attachments. ³¹

The impact of these burial decisions on patronage was two-fold. Monuments and memorials, such as those commissioned by Grey and Marney, were designed to serve as a “perpetual reminder” of their own and their family’s socio-economic status and place in the community (and, for much of this period, to encourage intercessory prayer), as they were elsewhere. ³² However, as Harris has noted, these memorials—and indeed intra-church burials more broadly—also contributed to the “material well-being” of the church and its parishioners. The fees required for the particularly desirable burial sites habitually selected by the gentry and nobility constituted a significant part of parish income. ³³ Secondly, and for our purposes more importantly, female testators almost inevitably directed their greatest benefaction toward the churches in which they intended to be buried.

To take just one example: Anne Whiting, née Pauncefoot (d. 1534) bequeathed 6s8d and a pair of vestments to her marital parish of Kentisbeare, Devon, where her late husband was buried, as well as three cows for a yearly obit for their souls. ³⁴ These bequests, however, paled in comparison to those she made to the parish church of Compton Pauncefoot, Somerset, where she wished to be buried alongside her “grauntfather and other of myn Auncetours.” Aside from the substantial sums which were to be outlaid for her funeral, month’s mind (requiem mass held one month after death), and year’s mind, she made provisions for two priests to sing for her soul for a year, donated several pairs of vestments to the church and its chantry, and left 40 s to the chantry priest. ³⁵

It is unsurprising that Anne held a particular preference for her natal parish church. In 1531, she had secured sole ownership of Compton Pauncefoot manor and, with it, the advowson of the neighboring church. ³⁶ Moreover, the latter was, quite literally, a product of Pauncefoot patronage. Her grandfather Walter had provided the impetus for the rebuilding of the church, bequeathing ten marks toward the works, as well as £20 specifically for the construction of the south aisle, where he wished to be buried; the parishioners were to raise the remaining funds. ³⁷ In addition, Walter had founded and furnished the chantry chapel there, of which Anne was patron. ³⁸ Anne herself (or more probably her successors) left her own mark on the physical fabric of the church: a stone tablet inscribed “Anne Whyting 1535” can be found by the south-east window of the church, along with a frieze of shields, bearing the arms of Pauncefoot, Whiting, and the marital families of two of her daughters. ³⁹ Anne’s testamentary provisions, then, display a clear melding of spiritual and familial impulses: her bequests to the church worked to enhance both its worship, as well is its function as a monument to the wealth, status, and pastoral stewardship of her family. Her request that her “best gowne and best kirtell” be made into vestments for use in her grandfather’s chantry furnishes a particularly poignant illustration. ⁴⁰ Such bequests of domestic textiles or goods for repurposing as liturgical items was a common and largely female phenomenon, linking women materially (and bodily) to the divine service—here, in celebration of family. ⁴¹ The church thus became the embodiment of an identity both familial and religious; the family embedded in the fabric of religious practice.

While Whiting’s will exemplifies testators’ tendency to reserve the greatest largesse for their preferred burial location, it also makes clear that this was far from the only way in which kinship shaped testamentary provisions. Testators were also apt to leave bequests to other churches with which they had, at one point, had natal or marital ties. Widowed testators who, like Whiting, were buried apart from a former spouse quite often left legacies to the church in which the latter was interred. Lady Elizabeth Talbot, née Hungerford (d. 1548) elected to be buried in the church of Bromsgrove, Suffolk, with her mother-in-law and other Talbot kin, but apart from both her husbands. ⁴² Yet she also left funds to support, for a further five years, the chantry priest singing for the souls of her second husband, Sir Gilbert Talbot, and his father of the same name at their burial place of Whitchurch, Shropshire. This was not simply the product of executorial duty, since Elizabeth was not named among the executors of her husband’s will, in which he made arrangements for this chantry. ⁴³ In a similar fashion, while Margaret, Countess of Kent (d. 1540) requested burial with her third and final husband, the Earl of Kent, she also left twenty shillings to her sometime parish church of St Anne and St Agnes within Aldersgate, where her first husband was buried. ⁴⁴

Even when a spouse was interred elsewhere, female testators might demonstrate a residual allegiance to former marital parishes. Anne Grey, for instance, left a number of richly-made liturgical textiles to the parish churches neighboring the manors of her first two husbands, though they were buried elsewhere: Butterwick, Lincolnshire, where she had resided with Sir Robert Sheffield; and Blisworth, Northamptonshire, where she had lived with Sir John Grey, and where her late brother, William Barley, had formerly been the parish priest. ⁴⁵ Given that she retained no residual economic interest or patronal obligation in these parishes, it seems evident that these bequests were a product of a continuing sense of familial loyalty. ⁴⁶ It is undoubtedly these ties, too, which account for her charity to the poor in two parishes in John Grey’s native Warwickshire, including Astley, where several members of his family were interred. ⁴⁷

Female testators might also exhibit a continuing bond with their natal kin and communities through bequests to their parishes of birth. ⁴⁸ Joan Peerse (d. 1538) directed most of her patronage toward her parish church and intended burial place of St Thomas, Salisbury, but also left “a paire of vestments price xxxs [30 shillings]” to the church of Durrington “wher I was borne.” ⁴⁹ Similarly, Elizabeth Warley (d. 1531), late wife of a London goldsmith and parishioner of St Mary Woolnoth, bequeathed funds to the church works of Holy Trinity and “Our Lady” in her native Cambridge; her parents were evidently interred in the latter, since she requested that her bequest be met with prayers for their souls. ⁵⁰

Such bequests were not entirely restricted to female testators. Rauf Swillington (d. 1526), for instance, requested burial in London, but made provisions for a yearly obit and a stone with “thymage of my father and his iiij chilern” to be established in the parish church of Driffield, Yorkshire, “where I was borne.” ⁵¹ Sir John Clerke (d. 1539) was himself buried in the church of Thame, Oxfordshire, but requested that a stone be laid upon the grave of his second wife and mother to his sons, Elizabeth Ashby, who was interred in the church of Blakesley, Northamptonshire—the site of another of his manors. ⁵² However, given the structural factors that encouraged men to leave their property to their direct line, as well as the tendency for wives to outlive their husbands, these were, inevitably, largely gendered practices. ⁵³ Where men did leave such bequests, they were more often monetary than material. Women, as the producers of family memory, influenced not just the physical form of religious institutions, but in collapsing religious patronage with familial commemoration, gave particular shape to the practice of the faith.

The influence of the family on post-mortem patronage extended beyond the fabric and finances of parish churches to the men that staffed them. A number of female testators—in far greater numbers than their male counterparts, who were more likely to provide support during their lifetimes—displayed a particular concern to direct their testamentary benefaction toward clerical relatives. Dame Katherine Babington (d. 1537) left ten shillings to a Sir William Babington to say a trental (a set of thirty requiem masses), as well as the rather more generous bequest of a featherbed, bedding, a broach, and cookware to Thomas Babington, parson of Gotham. ⁵⁴ Katherine’s bequests, moreover, formed just one part of the wider familial sponsorship of these priests: Thomas had received his benefice at the hands of her husband, Sir Anthony; William, meanwhile, was later presented to Egginton, Derbyshire, by her brother- and sister-in-law, Humphrey and Eleanor Babington. ⁵⁵

Indeed, some women showed an even more substantive concern to safeguard the livelihood of clerical kin. Dame Mary Fitton of Gawsworth, Cheshire (d. 1557), for instance, bequeathed to Sir William Fitton, chaplain, not only various items of bedding, but also a “wichehouse of syx leades” (that is, a salt-house), which he was to hold for “all suche terme of yeres and interest” as remained to her. ⁵⁶ Her precise relationship to the cleric is unknown—he does not appear in the pedigree of the Fittons of Gawsworth—but he was evidently a member of her extended marital family. ⁵⁷ He had, moreover, enjoyed the patronage of the Gawsworth Fittons for some time: his ordinations as subdeacon (September 1543), deacon (June 1544), and priest (September 1544) had occurred with a title—a guarantee of financial support—from her husband, Sir Edward (d. 1548). ⁵⁸ That Mary refers to him as “chaplain,” as well as her gift of bedding, indicates that he was employed in her household. Mary’s sponsorship of Sir William clearly owed much to kinship. He was not the only Fitton relative to hold a position on her domestic staff: a Thomas Fitton, referred to as “my servant,” was also a beneficiary of her will, receiving—like William—“a fetherbed, a bolster, ij blankettes, ij coverlettes, a payre of flaxen sheetes, and one pillowe and pillowbeere.” As in the case of the Babingtons, this kind of patronage was clearly habitual for the family: her husband had earlier presented one Ranulph Fitton to the Gawsworth benefice. ⁵⁹ Yet, in a telling illustration of how familial and spiritual concerns could co-exist and coalesce, William’s ecclesiastical vocation was evidently crucial to Mary’s bestowal of such comparatively generous largesse. Mary specified that if he died before the lease expired, the wich-house (and the profits thereof) was to be enjoyed for the remaining term not by another relative, but by the priest/s responsible for saying divine service at the nearby chapel of Siddington. ⁶⁰

The religious and the familial were often similarly intertwined in pre-Reformation bequests to religious houses, and especially convents. ⁶¹ Both male and female testators, unsurprisingly, favored houses with which they had a personal connection, and particularly those in which family members were professed. This was certainly the case for the gentlewoman Anne Brickys (d. 1531), whose daughter, Suzanna Sulyard, and “cousin,” Dame Agnes Townsend—both beneficiaries of her will in their own right—were nuns at Barking Abbey. ⁶² Brickys’ request to be buried within the abbey’s Lady Chapel, as “nyghe my dought[er] fortune I may,” suggests that a second daughter had once been professed there. Barking is the only religious house mentioned in Bricky’s testament, and is the target of substantial patronage: Anne bequeathed to the abbey a gilt cup, satin gowns to make two vestments, and forty shillings to the nuns to pray for her; a pax and vestment were to go to its appanage, the chapel of All Hallows; and the abbess, Dorothy Barley, was gifted a richly illuminated tablet of gold. ⁶³

Other testators were less narrowly focused on a single institution but were nevertheless guided by kinship in their disbursal of testamentary largesse. Elizabeth de Vere (née Scrope), Countess of Oxford (d. 1537), for instance, recognized twelve separate convents, monasteries, and friaries from across the east of England, but singled out the convents of Syon, Denny, and Barking for particular generosity. ⁶⁴ It hardly seems coincidental that these were all houses to which de Vere had familial connections. Her niece, Ursula Brewes, was professed at Denny Abbey. ⁶⁵ Her cousin, Dame Margaret Scrope, was a nun at Barking, as had been her late sister, Anne Scrope, while her marital family, the de Veres, were the convent’s “principal patrons.” ⁶⁶ Similarly, both the de Vere and Scrope families had longstanding connections to Syon. ⁶⁷ Even where women lacked professed relatives, kinship might nevertheless inflect their bequests to religious houses. In particular, the interment of a spouse in a monastery, whether or not the testator wished to be buried there themselves, often prompted the same kind of generosity as we saw above with parish churches. Thus, among the numerous institutions to which Elizabeth Reed made benefactions, the equal largest (£10) was reserved for the London Charterhouse, where her late husband was entombed. ⁶⁸

The Dissolution, naturally, put a stop to institutional benefaction. However, ties of kinship became even more crucial after the disestablishment of the convents, as a number of former nuns—lacking the career options open to their male counterparts, and typically left with smaller pensions—fell back on familial support. ⁶⁹ While some testators made bequests to former religious with whom they do not seem to have had any familial connection, in the overwhelming majority of cases such benefaction was extended to kin. Elizabeth Peche (d. 1544), for instance, left £5 to her sister, the aforementioned Margaret Scrope of Barking, whom she had apparently housed since the Dissolution. ⁷⁰ In 1548, Isabel Craike made arrangements for an annuity of £3.6 s.8d to be paid to her daughter of the same name, formerly of Wilberfoss Priory, and bequeathed to her an extensive range of clothing and household goods. ⁷¹ Male testators, too, might evidence a concern for the continued financial wellbeing of female kin. Eustace Sulyard (d. 1547), for example, brother to the aforementioned Suzanna, late of Barking Abbey, arranged that she receive an annuity of forty shillings. ⁷² However, these bequests appear with markedly greater frequency in the wills of women.

This kind of overtly preferential patronage of ecclesiastical institutions, clerics, and professed or former religious linked to the testator by blood or marriage was hardly universal: testators, of course, could and frequently did direct benefaction toward institutions and individuals with no discernible familial connection. But there are more than enough such instances to establish that kinship often inflected end-of-life patronage. When we add to this the almost ubiquitous influence of the family on burial decisions, it becomes even clearer that kinship was frequently crucial in shaping testators’, and particularly female testators’, religious arrangements. Indeed, as representatives of their families in their own right, support for priests and women religious can be seen—like an investment in a church building—one of the ways that families weaved themselves into the fabric of the faith. The Reformation diminished the forms of pious giving open to testators, eventually putting a stop to obits and limiting the devotional furniture permitted in churches—both of which, as we have seen, had been popular means by which women created and maintained links between family and faith. However, even as the disavowal of purgatory removed the imperative for earthly intercession on behalf of dead kin, women continued to find ways to sustain these connections throughout the period considered here, and indeed beyond. Alms, in particular as a common replacement for direct contributions to the church across Europe, could be employed as a means of recognizing and reinforcing both familial and spiritual loyalties. ⁷³ Writing her will in 1563, Blanche Forman (née Stanney) left bequests to the poor in her birthplace of Oswestry, Shropshire, as well as in the London parishes she had inhabited with each of her two husbands. ⁷⁴ As we will see, post-mortem patronage was a very much a family affair not only in the making of these arrangements, but in their fulfillment.

Executing Family Piety

Wills require an executor, and in early modern England as elsewhere, women, especially widows, were most commonly called upon to perform this function. ⁷⁵ Indeed, of the male testators in the sample, three-quarters made their wives either sole or joint executrix. This custom gave women an essential, and disproportionately prominent, role in post-mortem religious patronage, extending their role from simply directing family memory in their bequests to ensuring the form it would take in practice. Not only were widows responsible for fulfilling their spouses’ explicit bequests, but they were also frequently charged with using their own discretion to distribute the residue of the estate—over which they, as executrix, had “virtually complete control”—in acts of piety for the benefit of the deceased’s soul or charitable causes. ⁷⁶ Clive Burgess has suggested that this latter clause, despite the ease with which it might be dismissed as a stock phrase, “must in reality have betokened the most significant part of many a provision”—a fact which only heightens the significance of the executrix’s function, and the considerable autonomy she had in exercising it. ⁷⁷ While historians, most notably Burgess, have increasingly drawn attention to this role, much of the existing research has focused on the late medieval period, or on monuments. ⁷⁸ Accordingly, the contributions of widows in the sixteenth century—and thus the extent to which testamentary patronage was a collaborative, familial endeavor—begs further consideration.

By virtue of their tangibility, tombs, memorials, and other aspects of church architecture offer the most patent evidence of executrices’ pious activities on their husbands’ behalf and in producing family memory. While a substantial minority of monuments were erected during the lifetimes of those they commemorated, as were a number of chantries, many more became the responsibility of the deceased’s executor. As Harris has demonstrated, “scores, probably hundreds” of widows from the nobility and gentry—for these practices were largely, though not entirely, restricted to the elite—“paid for and/or directed construction of their husbands’ and their own chantries and tombs.” ⁷⁹ Dame Elizabeth Peyton (née Clere, d. 1546), for instance, requested burial among her marital family in the church of Isleham, in the tomb of her late husband, Sir Robert Peyton (d. 1518), which she “caused to be made.” ⁸⁰ The ornately carved tomb-chest commemorates both of her lineages: it contains painted escutcheons of the Peyton and Clere arms, as well as of the two arms impaled. Elizabeth was also undoubtedly responsible for the carved wall panel at the foot of the tomb, which once bore brasses of the couple and six children, praying before a crucifix. The inscription reads:

Of yo’ charite p’y for the souls of S’ Ro’bt Peyton, knyght, which de’pted to God the xviii day of m’che, ye yere of o’ lord M° Dxviii and for the soule of Dame Elizabeth Peyton his wyfe, whiche dep’tid to god ye yere of o’ lord M’D ⁸¹

The fact that her year of death was left incomplete suggests that she herself had this panel erected sometime between her husband’s death and her own. Indeed, the entire structure seems to have been of her devising: Sir Robert specified the precise location within the church where he wished to be interred, but made no explicit arrangements for a tomb. ⁸² Elizabeth was thus responsible for a representation of her family as multilineal and devout, assuring the remembrance of both the maternal and paternal lines of this Christian family; conversely, she also contributed to an image of the faith as a family affair.

While tombs were undoubtedly the most common means by which widows might leave their stamp on the fabric of the parish church, executrices also contributed to more fundamental church works. ⁸³ The church of Kingston-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire, reached its mid-sixteenth century form under the aegis of multiple members of the Babington family, including Dame Katherine (née Ferrers, d. 1537). Her husband, Sir Anthony Babington, had begun converting the original chapel-of-ease into a church before his death in 1536—most likely sometime after he composed his will in February 1534, since the document makes no reference to the church. ⁸⁴ The task of overseeing the construction then fell to his wife, to whom Anthony had bequeathed the manor of Kingston and the “soole administracon” of the residue of his estate. ⁸⁵ Katherine’s death in 1537 meant that she, too, left the church unfinished: the building was completed by her son and executor, John, in c.1538–1540. ⁸⁶ However, Katherine’s contributions to the fabric were significant. She was responsible for commencing construction of the chapel adjoining the chancel: in her will, she requested that John “do fynyshe the Chapell which I haue begonne,” and bequeathed three silver cups to make a chalice for its altar. ⁸⁷ Her arms, impaling those of Babington, can be found in the stone tracery of the chapel’s east window, along with those of Sir Anthony’s first wife. ⁸⁸ It seems that Katherine intended the chapel to serve—at least temporarily—as something of a chantry, as she asked that her executor employ a priest to say masses for her and Anthony’s souls for the space of one year. ⁸⁹

This chapel, and its intended function, were likely Katherine’s own initiative. While she makes explicit that another building project that she had commenced—a causeway from Kingston to Kegworth bridge—was at the request of her late husband, she makes no such claim in regard to the chapel. ⁹⁰ Moreover, while Katherine’s will makes several provisions for masses, such requests are entirely absent from her husband’s testament. She certainly provided the initial impetus, if not the design, for the elaborate “Babington Monument” within the church, requesting as she did that her executor “cause to be made one Tombe of Aleblaster stone over my said husbonde and me in the Arche bitwene the Cauncell and the said Chapell.” ⁹¹ An ornately-carved alabaster canopy was constructed by John or Thomas Babington, though a tomb-chest was either never created or is now lost. ⁹² Katherine here ensured the prominence of her family to her religious community, locating her memorial in a central space, and offering her own valuables as the fabric for a vessel to hold communion.

To take a second example, Elizabeth Peche (née Scrope, d. 1544) oversaw the completion of the north chapel of the church of St Botolph in Lullingstone, Kent, which her husband—the prominent courtier Sir John Peche—had initiated prior to his death in 1522. In his will, Sir John bequeathed her chains worth £220 “to make therwith my chapell,” which was to serve as a chantry for the family. ⁹³ Their dual foundation is represented in the stained glass of the chapel’s east window, which depicts their respective arms, as well as rebuses of a peach tree (for Peche) with the initials “J” and “E.” ⁹⁴ It is possible that Elizabeth had also had an influence over the church works during her husband’s lifetime: the Scrope arms feature prominently on John Peche’s early sixteenth-century tomb (in which she was also interred). It has also been posited that a stained-glass window depicting Saints Elizabeth, Agnes, and Anne alludes to Elizabeth Peche and her sisters, Agnes Scrope and Anne Redmayne, a choice that encouraged viewers to associate these siblings with these significant saints so central to the faith. ⁹⁵

Despite the vast religio-political changes between her husband’s death and her own, Elizabeth Peche evidently remained committed to pursuing the chapel’s intended function as a chantry. In her will, she requested that a priest be employed to pray for hers and Sir John’s souls “by the space of five yeres or more nexte after my decease”—presumably, that is, for as long as her estate could fund the service (or the regime allowed it). ⁹⁶ It is probable that this was in addition to, rather than in place of, her husband’s request that she establish a priest to “sing and praie perpetually” there. ⁹⁷ This request had almost certainly already been fulfilled by Elizabeth prior to her death. In her will, she left bequests to both the parson of Lullingstone, John Dean, and to “Sir John Garland preest.” While she does not specify his role or parish, Garland was a witness to her will, and had similarly witnessed the will of another parishioner in 1537, suggesting that he was in the service of Lullingstone church. ⁹⁸

Whatever the case may be, it is inarguable that widows, as executrices, were integrally involved in the process of endowing and overseeing chantries and services. In his work on fifteenth-century Bristol, Burgess found that “widows played perhaps the most consistently generous role in finding auxiliary priests and, indeed, prolonging their services.” ⁹⁹ There is more than enough evidence to suggest that this pattern also holds true for other regions of England, well into the sixteenth century. Male testators continued to rely on their wives or heirs to appoint a suitable priest, and to ensure that they were appropriately funded out of their estate. ¹⁰⁰ Widows were not only diligent in ensuring that these stipulations were met, but—less encumbered than their husbands by the need to provide for kin, and conscious that any such services would also benefit themselves—in many cases exceeded them. ¹⁰¹ Eleanor West, Lady La Warr (d. 1536), for instance, established a thirty-year chantry in the church of Broadwater, Surrey, as per her late husband’s will; on her death, she then made her own contribution to the service, bequeathing a chalice to her husband’s altar there, as well as a printed antiphoner to the church “to serve god for the health of my lord’s soul and my soul.” ¹⁰² More substantially, Dame Constance Culpepper (d. 1542) stipulated that her chaplain was to say mass in the church of Goudhurst, Kent, for two years over and above the five requested by her spouse; a black velvet vestment, adorned with a cloth of gold cross, was bequeathed to the church for use in this service. ¹⁰³ As in their wills, women ensured that their families, and the material traces that represented them, became significant not only to the fabric of buildings but to the rituals and routine practices of the faith.

In December 1547, Parliament passed an Act abolishing the chantries, and appropriating their property to the Crown. This Act came on the heels of repeated attacks on “the infrastructure built around purgatory,” and ultimately put an end to these kind of post-obit arrangements in England—barring a temporary and rather half-hearted restoration under Mary. ¹⁰⁴ As a result, executrices might be faced with considerable difficulties in fulfilling their spouse’s wills. While some appear to have simply let the requested services lapse or remain unfilled, others responded by modifying their husbands’ provisions to ensure their continuation in an uncertain religious environment. Margery Longford (d. 1550) of Ludlow, for instance, arranged that in place of the obit which her first husband had requested in his will, 13 s.4d. was instead to be distributed yearly to the poor for the benefit of both of their souls. The perceived intercessory function thus remained the same, but it was placed in a guise more acceptable to the reformist Edwardian regime. ¹⁰⁵

The precariousness and ultimate disappearance of intercessory services inevitably diminished the extent and gravity of the executrix’s pious functions. However, widows continued to be entrusted with considerable discretion in fulfilling their spouse’s religious provisions in a more evangelical context; in particular, chantries and services were replaced with a greater emphasis on charity to the poor and, increasingly, the appointment of preachers like in the rest of Protestant Europe. ¹⁰⁶ Sir Robert Peyton (d. 1550), son of the aforementioned Elizabeth, charged his wife and executrix, Frances, with finding a “lernid and discrete man” to preach a sermon in the church of Isleham on the one month and one-year anniversaries of his death. She was also entreated to distribute funds, “according to [her] discrecon,” among the poor of Iselham and other villages. ¹⁰⁷ While we have no information about any preachers appointed by Dame Frances, we do know that she fulfilled, and indeed extended, Robert’s charitable provisions; she used the profits of his estate to found an almshouse, known as Peyton’s Hospital, at Isleham in the late 1570s. ¹⁰⁸

The Exeter merchant, Thomas Prestwood, writing his will in 1558, similarly requested that his wife and son, as co-executors, appoint and pay a preacher to give a sermon at his burial, for the advancement of God’s Word, the edifying of the congregation, and as a testimony of his faith. ¹⁰⁹ Moreover, although not mentioned in his will, he also enjoined his wife, Alice, to establish four almshouses within the city of Exeter. While unable to fulfill this request herself, dying as she did less than a year later, she left detailed instructions for their heirs to complete the project. ¹¹⁰ If the sermon was, perhaps, the significant feature of Protestant worship, then similarly to gifts of altar chalices or vestments, families continued to invest prominently in the central rituals of the faith, ensuring their memory remained closely associated with Christian devotion. Similarly, as the opportunities to inscribe oneself on the physical structure of churches declined, payments for almshouses offered comparable symbolic functions in ensuring the memory of the (devout) family could be continued in new conditions.

Right across this period, and despite the many shifts in English religious policy, women were far more integral to the exercise of post-mortem religious patronage than a focus on their own wills alone might suggest. Trusted by their spouses to order their estate for the benefit of their soul and the spiritual life of their parish, they appointed priests, arranged services, dispensed charity, and made a lasting impact on the fabric of English churches and the wider community. In turn, they entrusted their own executors, most often their children, to ensure that their own provisions were carried out. In more ways than one, testamentary patronage was a fundamentally collaborative, familial endeavor, as well as a spiritual one. In deploying religious patronage as part of the production of family identity and memory, women and their families not only actively engaged in the practices of their faith but gave them shape in an environment where their form was open to contest. Intercessory prayer may have transformed into alms for the poor, but both provided opportunity for family and faith to be produced together.

Conclusion

Both family lineage and Christian salvation were construed as forms of immortality in early modern Britain; it is perhaps not surprising then that families saw the church as one of the mechanisms through which family memory would survive across generations. ¹¹¹ Commemorating the dead became an opportunity to remember not only the individual, but to assure the future of the family over generations, both in heaven and on earth. As such, the production of family memory through religious patronage weaved the family and faith together, at times literally in the vestments produced for worship or the “fabric” of church buildings. The materiality of religious patronage became a physical manifestation of family identity designed to survive death, and in turn the family came to shape the practice of the faith, not least during a moment of religious transformation. The abrogation of Purgatory and intercessory prayer profoundly disrupted the post-mortem rituals which had yoked together the living and the dead in the quest for salvation. But there remained a profound emotional and spiritual impulse to sanctify and memorialize loved ones, and to secure both their and one’s own place in the dynastic “story.” ¹¹² This was manifested in the continuity of such traditions across the early English Reformation.

Women were central to this process as key individuals who through their own wills and their roles as executors to others were integral to producing the commemorative practices that ensured their families’ immortality. As Broomhall notes, this could be an opportunity for individual women to strategically deploy these practices for their own purposes. Yet if some individuals used them to reinforce their own political power, more commonly—as has been noted elsewhere—women sought to produce a broader and more inclusive definition of family that acknowledged their various allegiances across kin groups, and ensured that these relationships remained central to the family imaginary. In a moment where the “holy family,” the family as the central site of reformed religion, was growing in importance for the faith in both Protestant and Catholic contexts, the ways that women commemorated their families reinforced a model of the pious family that continued to place marriage and kinship at its heart, offsetting the otherwise growing emphasis of the period on patriarchal power and male lineage. ¹¹³ This was perhaps all the more significant in the English context, where unlike much of the continent, patrilineal inheritance practices were more pronounced. ¹¹⁴ Family memory practices, so closely intertwined with everyday religious practices, allowed for a continuity of identity and devotion across the transformations of the Reformation, offsetting some of its more destabilizing impacts.