Words from Wills and other Probate Records

Wills and other probate records of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries are vital sources for family and local historians, and have been used for a wide variety of purposes by modern researchers. They provide genealogists with much information on particular families, they enable local historians to reconstruct the culture of the people who wrote them, and they give the basic data from which studies can be made of topics as diverse as furniture, literacy and agriculture. The words used in them are, however, often no longer used in modern English, and can be difficult to understand for newcomers to historical research. This book provides definitions for words commonly found in early moder probate records, from 'Abb' (wool from the belly of a sheep) to Yrne (iron).