Elizabethan Life

 

Vol I: Disorder [Mainly from Essex Sessions and Assize Records], Essex Record Office Publications No 56, Essex County Council, Chelmsford, (1970)

A unique account of secular crimes and offences, drawn from the Essex Quarter Session Records and from Assize and Queens Bench records. Tells of greed, dishonesty, quarrels and slanders, unlawful games and pastimes, habits and customs and of their relationships with the landowning magnates and justices of the peace, with parish constables and watchmen, and with each other.

Vol 2: Morals and the Church Courts, Essex Record Office Publications No 63, Essex County Council, Chelmsford, (1973)

From the court books of the Essex Archdeaconries reflecting the ‘permissive society’. Moral offences occupy nearly half the book, which also deals with absences from church, conventicles, usury, licensing of schoolteachers, dilapidated churches, plate and bells as well as the Church Settlement and Visitations.

Vol 3: Home, Work and Land. Essex Record Office, Publications No 69, Essex County Council, Chelmsford, (1976)

The daily life of Elizabethan Essex is reconstructed in minute detail from previously unpublished probate, Sessions and manorial archives, of intense interest for social and economic historians as well as local readers, and including an extensive account of the post-medieval manor court, its background and records.

Vol 4: Essex Gentry Wills (Wills of Essex Gentry and Merchants), Essex Record Office Publications No 71, Essex County Council, Chelmsford, (1978)

Detailed abstracts of the wills of 339 peers, knights, esquires, gentlemen and merchants, proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury and now preserved in the (then) Public Record Office. They yield new and important information about Essex’s wealthiest Elizabethans, their homes, goods, families and benefactors.

Vol 5: Wills of Essex Gentry and Yeomen ERO, Chelmsford, (1980)

Complementing Volume IV, this book provides abstracts of the wills of 278 esquires, gentlemen, merchants and yeomen, now preserved in the Essex Record Office

Essex Wills (England) Vol 1 1558-1565, National Genealogical Society, Washington D.C. (1982)

Essex Wills (England) Vol 2 1565-1571, New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston (1983)

Essex Wills (England) Vol 3 1571-1577, New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston (1986)

Essex Wills The Archdeaconry Courts 1577-1584, ERO in collaboration with The Friends of Historic Essex, ERO, Chelmsford 1987

Essex Wills The Archdeaconry Courts 1583-1592, ERO in collaboration with The Friends of Historic Essex, ERO, Chelmsford , 1989

Essex Wills The Archdeaconry Courts 1591-1597, ERO in collaboration with The Friends of Historic Essex, ERO, Chelmsford 1991

Essex Wills The Commissary Court 1558-1569, ERO in collaboration with The Friends of Historic Essex, ERO, Chelmsford 1993

Essex Wills The Commissary Court 1569-1578, ERO in collaboration with The Friends of Historic Essex, ERO, Chelmsford 1994

Essex Wills The Commissary Court 1578-1588, ERO in collaboration with The Friends of Historic Essex, ERO, Chelmsford 1995

Essex Wills The Commissary Court 1587-1599, ERO in collaboration with The Friends of Historic Essex, ERO, Chelmsford 1995

Essex Wills The Commissary Court 1596-1603, ERO in collaboration with The Friends of Historic Essex, ERO, Chelmsford 1995?

‘Treasures of Social History’

An Introduction to the Elizabethan Essex Wills Series, lecture given at Chelmsford Cathedral, 6 April 1989, Friends of Historic Essex, 1990