History lab

Living and Dying in Late Medieval London: A Project-Based Class at the University of Michigan in Collaboration with LMA

Introduction

The History Department at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the United States of America has developed a number of project-based classes called History Labs. Often developed with community partners, History Labs are designed to engage students in collaborative, hands-on, long-term research projects, with public-facing results. Given the reality of travel budgets, time zones, as well as the difficulties of language and handwriting, most History Labs classes draw on local archives, museums, or public records from the recent past.

Professor Katherine French, a medieval historian, who studies medieval London and Westminster, has been developing a History Lab with help from London Metropolitan Archives to introduce students to medieval documents and the necessary skills to work with them. Originally intended to be offered in the Fall of 2020, the pandemic forced its postponement as archives and schools on both sides of the Atlantic shut down. Now with the hope that archives will be able to reopen, and classes resume face-to-face instruction, History 491 Living and Dying in Late Medieval London is set to debut in the autumn of 2021.

This History Lab will explore daily life in medieval London through last wills and testaments. Thousands of ordinary men and women wrote last wills. Looked at collectively, they can reveal a great deal about Londoners’ family life, religion, material culture, professional networks, mobility, and the different priorities of men and women. The wills that History 491 will be working with come from London’s Commissary Court. This court had jurisdiction over people holding property in the diocese of London. Between 1374 and 1760 clerks recorded literally tens of thousands of wills in registers kept by the Bishop of London. The wills are from generally modest to middling Londoners.

Now housed at LMA, the Commissary Court wills are a largely untapped manuscript collection. While these records have been microfilmed, they have otherwise never been published, making it hard for researchers outside London to use them. There is a published index arranged by testator’s last name, but it is difficult to use the wills for the broader questions of social history, which requires being able to sort and search them by groups, such as year, geography, occupation, and sex rather than just surname. LMA has agreed to digitise one of the registers for History 491.

The source: Commissary Court will register #7

I worked with these wills while researching my book Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London: Consumption and Domesticity after the Plague (forthcoming, University of Pennsylvania Press). Whenever I used transcriptions of these wills in my classes, the students were fascinated. Their detail, intimacy, and even drama make them compelling sources for teaching, which sparked my interest in using them for a whole class. I have identified the seventh register, which dates from 1484-1487 (DL/C/B/004/MS09171/7), as a good one for digitisation. It is the shortest register before 1540 and a significant number of the wills in the register are in Middle English rather than Latin, so students without Latin can gain the experience of working with medieval manuscripts.

This particular register overlaps with the so-called War of the Roses and the accession of Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch. Thus, one of the questions for the course will be how such a major political event registers in the daily lives of people, who are not on the battle front.

The methodolgy

In preparation for the class Bethany Donovan, my research assistant and a Michigan graduate student working on a Ph. D. on manufacturing and counterfeiting in medieval London, catalogued the contents the register. Working with the published index and my research notes, she created an Excel spreadsheet with basic categories such as date of composition and probate, testator’s name, sex, occupation, parish, marital status, and language of the will. This basic catalogue will allow students to strategise how they want to approach analysing the registers and decide which wills they want to transcribe and why.

This catalogue also gives them rudimentary experience with spreadsheets and databases, an important skill that transcends history. The choice of wills the students choose to transcribe will serve as the basis for defining a number of questions they will also research about living and dying in medieval London. Some possible questions are how devotional behaviour differs between men and women, among members of different crafts, from parish to parish? There are also administrative questions about the organisation of the Commissary Court and demographic questions of family or household composition registered in wills. These and other research questions will be up for exploration as students gain familiarity with the history of medieval London and medieval wills.

The goal

A final goal of the class will be to build a website linked to LMA, to display their findings, so that interested researchers would also have access to what they have learned. It is hoped that subsequent iterations of this course would build on what this first semester accomplishes.

Update December 2021

The students have completed the project and their findings may be viewed on the StoryMaps  website.

Further information

Katherine French is J. Frederick Hoffman Professor of History at the University of Michigan, in the United States of America. For more information about her forthcoming book Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London: Consumption and Domesticity After the Plague

More information on Michigan’s History Labs can be found here.