Demographic patterns in Medieval London inferred from wills probated in the Court of Husting, 1259-1688

Abstract

The Calendar of Wills Proved and Enrolled in the Court of Husting, London, 1258--1688 (Husting wills) is exploited (i) to characterize, using statistics, the social and demographic characteristics of Medieval London and (ii) to analyze the temporal patterns of the four plague epidemics that occurred in London between 1348 and 1376.

The Husting wills were digitized by British History Online (BHO) in 2017. We created an R package that uses the BHO version of the Husting wills and provides tools for analysis of these wills.

Statistical analyses performed on the 4110 Husting wills reveal that 10.9% of testators were women. There is no clear evidence of bias of writing wills on particular weekdays. However, wills were least and most commonly written on Thursdays (11.72%) and Saturdays (16.18%), respectively. 51.2% of wills mention the career of the testator. By categorizing careers into one of four classes (business, church, city or nobility), we were able to determine that most testators were in the business category (80.2%). Among these individuals, the five most common occupations were fishmonger, merchant, goldsmith, draper and skinner.

Further analyses of the Husting wills strongly suggest that the temporal patterns of plague epidemics can be estimated more accurately from the dates wills were written rather than the dates they were probated. We identify two probable factors that make probate dates harder to interpret: First, the Court of Husting probated wills only on Mondays. Second, highly varying lags between the writing and probating of wills adds noise to statistics based on probate dates. The observed lags for the Husting wills are well approximated by a lognormal distribution.