HL
Wills & Index.pdf
This transcription comprises all the High Littleton Wills,
Grants of Administration and Inventories up to 1857
that the author has been able to locate. This may
consist of full copies of wills, extracts or merely
a record that a will once existed. In itself the
latter may not seem much but it is useful as an
indicator to when a death may have occurred in a
parish whose registers only run continuously from
1737. Whilst most of these wills are of residents of
High Littleton and Hallatrow there are also included
wills of certain non-resident landowners and some
that refer to residents of the parish. Below most
wills the author has added in italics further
details to help put matters into context.
Until 1858 the vast majority of wills of High
Littleton people were proved at Wells at the
Episcopal Consistory Court of Bath & Wells and, as
is well known, these wills, together with other
records of the diocese, were transferred during
World War II for safe keeping in Exeter, where they
were unfortunately destroyed by enemy bombing in
1942. After the war, advertisements under the name
of the Bishop of Bath & Wells were placed in
newspapers seeking to encourage people, who had copy
wills or had made extracts of Wells wills for their
own uses before the war, to deposit copies at
Somerset Record Office (SRO) to help mitigate some
of the losses. Whilst one should be very grateful to
those who took the trouble to respond, the wills
replaced were only a tiny fraction of the ones
destroyed. In the ensuing years further copy wills
have come to light through the deposit of
solicitors' records. In addition family historians
have deposited copies or extracts of wills with
their own research papers at the SRO and
Society of
Genealogists.
A
minority of wills were proved at the
Prerogative
Court of Canterbury (PCC) and these survive. It is
possible to locate many of these from the published
indexes that have been prepared over the years but
in some cases indexes only record the county rather
than the parish of the testator.
F.A. CRISP made abstracts before the war of a large
number of Somerset wills proved at the PCC and local
courts, and volumes of these have been preserved at SRO.
Extracts of pre 1558 Somerset wills proved at the
PCC were published in various volumes in the
Somerset Record Society series, which also printed
in Vol. 62 “A list of Wells wills from 1528-1600”,
which were destroyed at Exeter.
In
1993 Sir Mervyn MEDLYCOTT published his “Somerset
Wills Index: Printed and Manuscript Copies”, in
which he drew on over 320 sources.
From 1796 copies of wills were recorded in the Death
Duty Registers at the Public Record Office. Copies
of Estate Duty (Death Duty) wills from 1812-1857
have been handed over to SRO and microfilmed
together with abstracts of wills and grants of
administrations from 1805-1811. Published indexes of
both of these have been made by David T. HAWKINGS.
Adrian J. WEBB has published “An Index of
Somerset Probate Inventories”. However, few
inventories survive for High Littleton.
In
producing this transcription all the above sources have
been tapped. Further extracts, notes and dates of
wills (which no longer exist) have been located,
inter alia, in Schedules of Deeds, Abstracts of
Title and other High Littleton property records,
Vestry Minutes and Court Depositions. The wills in
this section have been placed in alphabetical order
by testator. At the end of the transcription of the
wills there is a full name index, which includes
testators, beneficiaries, witnesses and everyone
else mentioned in the transcriptions and extracts
(but not in the author's notes).
Wills and probate records for England & Wales from
1858 onwards are held at the Principal Registry of
the Family Division at Somerset House, Strand,
London with yearly indexes on access in a number of
local registries around the country. Copy wills from
that date onwards are easily obtainable and are not
the subject of this section.
Will of John Britten of High Littleton
dated 10th July 1656
(click to enlarge)
