Wills and inventories are amongst the most intriguing sources available to historians of the early modern period. Inventories, lists and valuations of the possessions of testators have been used to shed light on material culture and levels of wealth. Though less widely used in recent years, wills, the bequests made by individuals for the disposition of their property after their death, often provide insights into past lives, family connections and economic interests that are more revealing than those found in any other source. A generation or two ago, historians of sixteenth-century history attempted to use the preambles of wills as an indication of whether testators were inclined to support either the Catholic or Reformed religious positions. However, the method was open to criticism once it was realised that wills were normally written by someone other than the dying person, and that testators might not be willing to take chances in the wording they used in legal documents that were subject to scrutiny by the ecclesiastical courts. Since then, will-making and the probate process (essentially the legal authentication of wills) have been neglected. Consequently, Lloyd Bonfield's study of probate litigation in the second half of the seventeenth century is both pioneering and valuable.

Based on a sample of 184 cases from the Prerogative Court of Canterbury involving contests over wills proved in ‘solemn form’ (that is when a wide range of interested parties were served notice that probate was being undertaken) between 1660 and 1696, and the depositions and other documents arising from them, the book casts a trained legal eye over the will-making process and the problems that most often arose in connection with it. Bonfield explores the significance of the fact that in England, unlike other European countries, wills were proved in the ecclesiastical rather than the temporal courts, but he is also careful to mention that litigation over the detailed bequests in wills, as opposed to the authenticity of the documents, often took place in the secular rather than the spiritual courts. Opening chapters cover what he usefully describes as the English ‘culture of will-making’, which included a troublesome inclination for people not to make a will until they found themselves on the death-bed, and an equally vexing tendency to rely in those circumstances on witnessed, verbal (nuncupative) wills rather than written documents for making bequests and appointing executors. Bonfield examines debates surrounding the passage of the ‘The Statute of Frauds’ (1677), and the impact of the act on the probate process, but concludes that parliament seems to have stepped back from undertaking a root-and-branch reform of the traditional ‘culture’. As a result, oral wills continued to be ‘litigation breeders’ while the principal causes of contention in the probate process remained challenges to the mental capacity of testators at the time of making their wills, and questions about the authenticity of the written documents brought before the courts. Exploring each of these problems primarily through depositions taken in connection with the sample cases, Bonfield is able to provide a vivid picture of the will-making process and the kinds of problems that could arise in connection with it, concluding that the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, like modern probate courts, was generally inclined to accept the validity of written and oral wills even if they did not meet all of the formal criteria regarding sealing and witnessing. In three final chapters, he then turns to the examination of aspects of social history which emerge from the will-making process, namely contests involving the legitimacy of marriages, inter-family relations in connection with the distribution of property, and, finally, the significant levels of agency expressed by married women, who frequently acted as executors to their husbands.

The conclusions of these final chapters largely confirm the picture of ‘women and the law’ that has emerged in earlier work such as that of Amy Erickson and Tim Stretton. The earlier chapters on the legal aspects of probate are therefore the ones that are going to be most valuable to other scholars, but what is striking about these is that though they fill out a crucial aspect of the process, there is a surprisingly large amount still to learn about it. For a start, there are questions about how far the procedures and practices used at Canterbury applied in the Prerogative Court at York, or indeed at the various diocesan consistory courts. The book does not cover probate accounts and the making and approving of inventories, or say much about the role of executors or administrators in dealing with estates. This is important, not least because while there is an inclination to describe probate as the intergenerational transfer of property, it was just as often about the settlement of the decedent's debts by his surviving wife or children; serving as an executor must in many cases have been exceedingly burdensome and litigious. At the same time, by carefully bringing together work on the incidence of will-making, Bonfield exposes what at the moment seems an intriguing paradox. A large number of early modern wills survive in the ecclesiastical court archives, but on the figures he produces, it would seem that no more than about 30 per cent of the population made a will, and relatively few of those made went through the full probate process. It could therefore be argued that the culture of intergenerational transfer of wealth in England normally did not involve a will, or at least not a will proved in a court. Landed property, particularly that associated with manorial jurisdictions, or tied up in a trust such as a marriage settlement, could be securely transferred without a will, and moveable property, such as money or goods, could simply have been divided up amongst family members so long as they could be depended upon not to quarrel over it. Perhaps the otherwise puzzling inclination of early-modern people to rely on death-bed wills, and oral wills at that, reflects the fact that they were not inclined to make a will at all unless they were convinced there was some good reason to do so.