Some Late-Medieval Eton College Wills

Abstract

The religion of the people is the foundation of the Church and basic to the study of church history. It is in this belief and in the recognition that where direct expression of religious ideas is lacking any material which may shed light on them must be used, that the following study is offered. The evidence on which it is based is drawn from the archives of Eton College and consists largely of wills drawn up before 1500. They number seventy-three, and they fall into two main groups. The first comprises fourteen wills found among the deeds which came to the college as the result of its acquisition of land and property by the gift either of the founder, Henry VI, or of local benefactors in the early sixteenth century. Three of these wills are of the fourteenth century; the remainder are spread throughout the fifteenth century from 1401 to 1497. Six were made in the diocese of Salisbury: five in New Windsor, one in Cookham (Berks.). The other eight wills in this group are those of residents in Lincoln diocese, three living in Eton and five in Buckinghamshire villages to the north—Iver, Langley, Farnham, Burnham, and High Wycombe. The second group, comprising the remaining fifty-nine wills are contained in the first of the college registers, and were proved before the provosts, who had been granted archidiaconal rights of jurisdiction in the parish of Eton by Thomas Bekynton, archdeacon of Buckingham, in 1443.