Edition, with full explanatory apparatus, of wills and inventories from north-east England. This volume contains full transcripts of all the wills and probate inventories (and one rare record, an exceptionally detailed probate account) which survive from Sunderland and its environs (the parishes of Bishopwearmouth and Monkwearmouth, Co. Durham) in the twenty-five years between 1651 and 1675. It draws together 119 files of documents preserved in The National Archives, the special collections of Durham University Library (which holds the majorityof the records presented here), the Borthwick Institute at the University of York and Durham Cathedral Library. Together, they paint a vivid picture of Sunderland at a period of rapid change, as it developed as an industrial and trading port. Testators include shipowners, shipwrights, anchor smiths, mariners, coal fitters, and merchants and the records include some very detailed inventories, notably one of a woolen draper and clothier. The documents are supported by an introduction which places them in their context, outlines local aspects of the turbulent controversies of the time, and examines changes in the local economy and in houses and household furnishing. The volume also includes a glossary explaining words not in current use, and indexes of names and subjects.

Edition, with full explanatory apparatus, of wills and inventories from north-east England. Complete editorial team: Joan Briggs, Rita McGhee, John Smith, Jennifer Tindell, Ann Tumman, Xenia Webster What was to become the town of Sunderland emerged in the earlier seventeenth century from two parishes north and south of the river Wear, Monkwearmouth and Bishopwearmouth, developing from a small fishing village into a significant east-coast port and industrial centre; a charter granted by the bishop of Durham in 1630 confirms its status. This volume comprises its surviving probate documents from the period 1601-50, containing material relating to some ninety-one individuals, twelve of them women. The inventories that accompany most of the wills (and insome cases survive where the wills do not) detail their household goods, thus constituting a rich source of information about ways of life and standards of living in the early seventeenth century. The wills and inventories are edited here in full in the original spelling, with a glossary, introduction, notes and an index.