Holbein's Lady With A Squirrel, a portrait of a country woman from the same time period as Joan Robyns.
I’ve always been a history geek, and recently, I’ve started digging into my family’s history. The Ashkenazi side is incredibly difficult to trace, but the English side left a paper trail that stretches back to Tudor-era England. I studied Tudor-Stuart history at Cambridge University, so combing through the records gave me a chance to flex some long-neglected intellectual muscles, and geek out on delightfully arcane old paperwork. Best of all was discovering the will of my 13-times great-grandmother, Joan Robyns, nee Palmer, of Northamptonshire.
It’s unclear when Joan died, but she was hole of mind and memory when she wrote a will in 1535, not long after the death of her husband Richard, with whom she had five sons and two daughters. They were described as a “yeoman” family—gentrified farmers but not nobility.
The fact that Joan Robyns had enough property to make it necessary for her to write a will is fairly remarkable for a woman of her time. Women in 16th century England could own property under common law, but a married woman’s husband had life interest in her real property and any income from it belonged to him (He could not sell it or will it away without her consent but I suspect that withholding consent was not an viable option for most women of that time.). As a widow, Joan Robyns held property and land leases in her own name.
Joan’s one-page will is brief compared to that of her husband, son and grandson (I also found those on file and they are long, wordy and quite entertaining). But it’s absolutely full of juicy tidbits that tell us how she lived, and describes a woman who was not only prosperous, but almost certainly literate, a capable landlord, administrator, and pillar of her community. Also, her non-standardized 16th century spelling delights the word nerd in me.
In the will, it becomes clear that most of Joan’s wealth is in farmland, stock and crops:
I guyf and bequethe onto Henry Robins my son my croppe that is soweng and that is to be soweng withe all the residue of my grayne boothe within and withoute or ells wheare keeps (i.e. planted crops and stores of grain). I will that my executours shall suffer the said Henry my son peaseably to occupie and Injoie my farm duryng the tyme of my Leasse thereof made and further bequethe to the said Henrye all my hole teme [of horses] withe collars and gerres to them belogyng and my carts plowes and harrows and other necessaries to them belongyng (i.e. all the farm equipment).
Joan also left decent sums of cash to her surviving children, and gifts of ewes, lambs and cows to her grandchildren and family friends. Her daughter Joys received my best coote my best beads and my best gerdille. The beads likely refer to rosary beads, which gentlewomen of the time hung from their girdle or belt. Joan apparently had two sets; I guyf to margery Tymcok my second Beads.
A religious woman in good standing with the church, Joan left a sizable cash gift to our mother churche of Lincoln and a pound of wax to her local church to be used for memorial candles, plus money for Reperacen of the bellis att Holdenby (i.e. repair of church bells at her parish). Even when writing her will, Joan’s faith was evident: First I bequeth my soule to allmytie god to our lady sainte mary and to all the saints in heaven.” Joan was one of the last Roman Catholic members of her family; the year before she wrote this will, Henry VIII disestablished the Catholic Church in England, and Joan’s descendants would be members of the Anglican Communion for hundreds of years afterwards.
As delighted as I was to discover Joan’s will, I was a little uneasy with the fact that the professional genealogist who transcribed and catalogued all my ancestors’ records works for the LDS Family History Center in Salt Lake City. Like me, he is a descendant of Joan Robyns. The Mormon Church’s dedication to genealogy has theological roots; they practice baptism for the dead , especially their dead relatives. Was staunchly Catholic Joan drafted by the Latter-Day Saints centuries after her birth? I’d prefer not to know.
Reading the will of a female ancestor affected me far more than the many wills, land leases and church records belonging to my male forbears. History is often completely silent about the role of women. Joan Robyns’s will is proof that despite this silence—and the constant glorification of male thoughts and deeds—women were not only active in society centuries ago, but were property owners with leadership roles in their communities. I’m not sure what Joan Robyns would think of her 13-times great-granddaugther—born in an almost unheard-of far-away land, and to religion her society actively maligned—but I suspect that our personalities would mesh rather well.
Becky, this is too cool! I’m so impressed with everything you’ve uncovered, and Joan does indeed sound like a fascinating woman.
Question – where did you begin your research? I’d love to start doing something similar with my family’s history, but am not sure where to even begin. Would love a bit of your wisdom.
Women in 16th century England could own property under common law, but a married woman’s husband had life interest in her real property and any income from it belonged to him (He could not sell it or will it away without her consent but I suspect that withholding consent was not an viable option for most women of that time.).
Actually, the protection of women’s property within a marriage is a really interesting topic of medieval jurisprudence (a bit before your era, but what I studied in college). A woman in medieval Europe would actually have had a surprising amount of leverage not to consent to the sale of her property. The reason is that it was pretty common either for a woman to be widowed, or for her to die and leave minor children. Her property was what would support her or her children in those circumstances…widows lacking property were customarily maintained by the parish.
So, essentially, the entire community had an interest in ensuring that a wife’s property was protected, because if it wasn’t, they collectively would face a good chance of being responsible for supporting her and/or her children. Women with male family members (brothers, uncles, etc.) would in particular have advocates with a strong interest in ensuring that property went to her children, not her husband, or children of a different mother.
(None of which is to say that men didn’t, in practice, try to coerce or swindle their wives out of property. Court cases on this topic are very common. But one of the things that surprised me about studying medieval history was that comparatively speaking, women didn’t have things so bad, They were bad, certainly, but not tremendously worse than the average man.)
Wow, that’s really interesting! (I love medieval/Renaissance wills. Shakespeare gave his wife the second best bed–my prof’s theory was that they slept in that bed, while the best bed was for guests.) You can tell she really cared for her church. The wills I remember reading all had money to be given for the church, but that was almost exclusively to pay for prayers to get them out of Purgatory. Joan doesn’t seem to have that at all, but she does want the bells to get fixed!
Bequeathing your soul to God is something else I recall being popular, and it’s really interesting to me. Isn’t the idea that your soul automatically goes to God if you were/are a Christian? Is your soul really yours to bequeath?
Psyche, thanks for the explanation of property law! That’s pretty neat.
From what I understand, the legal rights of women were somewhat in flux at this time.
(I’ve been sitting here for five minutes trying to explain myself, but after a full day of hard work I cannot make with the sentences. Perhaps after dinner my brain will perk up and I can come explain myself. But probably not.)
If you’re interested in early modern women’s lives, Keith Wrightson’s Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern England is an interesting read. It was assigned for a history class I took last semester, and I was totally not looking forward to it. But it ended up being my favorite book of the semester–I felt like the author integrated “women’s history” really well into “history,” and it gave a clear picture of what life was like back then. It would seem that an economic history would bore the bejesus out of me, but in the end it seemed (to me) more of a social history as told through the economic lives of the subjects.
@Meg: Glad you liked it! In terms of research, it depends on where in the world you are. If your family came to the US in the late 1800s-early 1900s, a good resource is the Ellis Island Foundation. I found my Ashkenazi great-grandfather’s immigration papers on that site. Archives.com is also good for immigration paperwork and as a clearinghouse for public records.
For other English-speaking countries, like the UK and Canada, Ancestry.com is helpful. And despite my discomfort with the LDS Church, their Family History Center in Salt Lake is by far the best genealogy center in the world (and the LDS have done a great deal of archival work elsewhere in the world, including working on the Ellis Island Foundation’s database). You can hire genealogists from the Family History Center to trace your family as well. They do good work.
I was lucky in that my mother’s family is extremely easy-to-trace, since they’ve lived in the same parts of Virginia and Maryland since the mid-1600s, and in one part of England for centuries before that. They are also white, Protestant and property-owners, i.e. the only kind of people who actually “counted” for most of history, therefore, they left a big ol’ paper trail everywhere they went. That’s in contrast to the other side of my family, who were poor, Jewish Eastern European immigrants and left virtually no paper trail in either the US and Europe. So your ethnic group/social class makes a HUGE difference in how easy it is to trace your family history–all the usual privilege issues apply, unfortunately.
@Psyche & Cimorene: Right you are. It wasn’t until the 19th century and the Married Women’s Property Acts ensured that women could hold, manage and receive income from their property independent of their husbands. But there was still some wiggle room under common law. The courts of equity existed to prevent women’s husbands from stripping them of their property, although as you mentioned, that still happened a fair amount.
wow Becky, mid 1600′s, 40 years after the pilgrims, you’re family has been here forever! I don’t normally watch reality TV but ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ is interesting, the other night they traced some actress from Friends grandma to people outside Poland who actually saw her killed by the Nazis, who knows who is still alive in YOUR family and now you can find them! We found an old pic of my mothers house in 39 and have debated endlessly who is standing on the front porch!
That’s so interesting! I’d love to know more about my family, but we were the kind of people (very poor, in rural Ireland until the 1920s/40s) that don’t seem to count for records at all. One of my grandmothers doesn’t know her own mother’s birthday! I guess they just didn’t really celebrate them (she doesn’t even know what her own real birthday is, she only knows the day she was baptized, which was probably a few days after). No one in my family can trace anything beyond even my great-grandparents.
A lot of this stuff seems to cost a lot more than my fairly meager budget will allow, so I think I might have to wait a while before I can indulge my curiosity.
This is so cool! I wish I knew more about my own family’s history, but it’s incredibly difficult to track down. I’ve actually found that this is true for many people whose families are from the (deep) Southern United States, especially in rural areas. I have the sense that this is the result of some combination of poverty, disavowed miscegenation/pregnancies resulting from slave rape, and the fact that, once folks made it that far south/inland from points of entry to North America, their families had been away from countries of origin and/or intermarried enough to lose most memory of their roots.
In fact, one of the things that was most striking to me about moving away from the South was how much more people (especially white people) knew about their ethnic/national origins. There were several times when I was living in the American Northeast that someone would ask me “where’s your family from” and mean something other than “Louisiana.” When I got the follow-up, “No, I mean, where are you REALLY from,” it was always pretty bewildering. Maybe this experience was unique to me, but my youth in the South was dominated by the sense that one’s racial classification (i.e., black or white, since most people pretended that no other classification was possible) was all that mattered, and most people didn’t know much beyond this. Oh, except for the white kids who liked to make vague claims about being “part native American” to seem more interesting.
@Joe: I did see that show with Lisa Kudrow–it was really moving. But unlike her, I can pretty much rule out anyone on my father’s side of the family having survived the Holocaust. Most of our immediate family were in England or New York during WWII. The ones who weren’t were never heard from again. Since nearly all the records of pre-war Jewish communities in Eastern Europe were destroyed, finding paperwork on them before the Holocaust is nearly impossible. To find out what happened to them, my cousins and I have looked in places like Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem, which houses the largest database of testimonials and information about Holocaust victims –approx 3 million of them–and have found nothing. Yad Vashem’s website explains:
Some Jews left no trace. They were murdered with their entire families, so there was no one left to submit Pages of Testimony for them; or they left no documentary traces; or the traces they left were destroyed, either during the war, or afterwards. In the 1960s and 1970s, archivists sometimes burned entire collections of what were perceived, unfortunately, as documents with no lasting value.
have found nothing
I’m so sorry Becky, the look on Kudrows face brought back the horror that so many perhaps have forgotten but sounds like you cannot. Frankly I cried that entire show, even at the joy when they found ‘Yuri’ in Poland. My son visited one of the camps on his trip to Germany and brought back what he claims to be part of the wall – sounds like a religious artifact though (and therfore maybe not real).
He brought back part of one of the walls at a concentration camp? I don’t think they usually encourage people chipping off chunks and walking away with them. Are you sure it wasn’t part of the Berlin Wall? I hear you can pick up bits and pieces of that for cheap in Germany as souvenirs (although I doubt there’s any way to tell if it’s authentic or not).
@ philosophyerin — I’ve heard this before, too. In the south, you’re either white or black (…I guess there are no other races in the south), but in the north you can be Irish, Polish, Russian, etc. I myself am all three!
I’m from Buffalo, which is one of the most segregated cities in the country. Not only are we divided by color, but we’re so hardcore about segregation that we go beyond that and segregate into sub-sub categories. I grew up in a Polish suburb, my father is from the Irish ward. When my mother married my father, it was like she was committing a mortal sin, because he was a dirty Irishman and my mother’s Polish family hated him. And my grandmother blames all my bad qualities on him and the Irish blood in me (for real).
It’s frustrating, because I find the sub-sub sections can be really interesting. Like I kind of like that we have a Polish neighborhood, an Irish one, an Italian one, a Vietnamese one, a West African one (those two are newer than the European-descended ones, which were all founded in the early 1900s). It’s frustrating how much “difference” leads directly to “inequality.” I live in one of the more diverse neighborhoods in terms of race, but around the corner from one of the most diverse neighborhoods I’ve ever seen in terms of race, culture, and even socio-economic status. That one has everything from recent immigrants from Tibet to lots of Puerto Rican families to college students with ancestors who were in the Revolutionary war, and it’s really awesome. There are groups of kids running around all summer, and all their parents standing on corners watching, talking, grilling out, and all the parents are in totally different kinds of clothes, depending on where they’re from. And all the little kids are, like, wearing Pokemon or Hannah Montana teeshirts. But as the groups of immigrants make more money, they move out to the richer suburbs or away from western new york and become more American and less xxx-American. Leaving behind empty houses, of course.
@Cimorene & philosophyerin: I think that unless you’re part of the upper-crusty South, you’re right about the “you’re either black or white” distinction. In certain circles, having a long Southern lineage is a point of pride–I’ve certainly met folks who bragged about the size of their family’s former plantation, which cotillion circle they belong to, their relations to the Jeffersons, the Lees, etc. It’s ludicrous. Even if they’re not class snobs, Southerners can be a little obsessive about genealogy; I have multiple relatives in Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, and those people can go on and ON about where their families are from, etc. My middle name–which I often use–is my mother’s family name, and in some places I get asked “oh, are you related to…” sometimes.
part of the Berlin Wall
yes the berlin wall!
Those of you who write about the South need to define your terms.
People in the upper south US tend to know their genealogy at least in general terms, to be part Cherokee, to be somewhat indifferent to skin color, to be descended from Union soldiers (Civil War) and old Prebyterians.
Higsart, that is the most ridiculous—and ignorant—pack of generalizations about the Upper South I’ve ever heard.