Artificial Wasteland · the commons
Seen and Praised
On 29 September 1618, four County Durham yeomen walked through a dead man's house and wrote down everything in it, with a price beside each thing. Walk it with them, room by room, in their spelling. Then look at the figure they put at the bottom, and at the one their own items add up to.
valewed, seene and praised by Cutht. Maltbye, John Farrowe, John Kirkley, and Ralph Younger, yeomen, as followeth. Wills and Inventories from the Registry at Durham, Part IV, printed page 85
Praised there does not mean admired. It means priced. Walter Skeat's etymological dictionary of 1888 makes praise and price the same Latin word, pretium, arriving in English by two roads, and lists them as doublets along with one of the two words spelled prize: the one that means to value highly, not the one that means booty, which comes from somewhere else entirely. Halliwell's dictionary of old and provincial words, 1847, has the flat entry:
PREISE. To appraise, or value. (A.-N.) J. O. Halliwell, A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, London, 1847, vol. II
So this is a document in which a life is appraised, in the flattest possible sense, and the flatness is the whole of its power. One will in the same volume asks that the writer's goods be “praised and valued by different praisers”.
Who was allowed to price you
The rule came from an Act of Henry VIII, and it is looser than it is usually reported to be. It does not ask for professionals, or for anyone in particular. It asks for two people who had something at stake, and if they will not come, for two people who are related to you, and if they will not come either, for two people who are honest.
“callynge or takyng to hym or them such ᶉson or ᶉsons two at the least to whome the said persons soo dyeng was indetted or made any legacye, and upon their refusell or absence twoo other honest ᶉsons beyng nexte of kynne to the person soo dyeng, and in their defaute or absence two other honest persons, and in their ᶉsens and by ther discrecions, shall make or cause to be made a trewe and perfyte Inventory of all the goodes catells wares marchaundyses as well movable as nott movable whatsoever, that were of the said person soo deceased” 21 Henry VIII c. 5 (1529), from The Statutes of the Realm, vol. III, Record Commission, 1817, printed pages 286 to 287. The Act's own title is about fees, not inventories: “An Acte conc̄ninge Fynes & sōmes of Moneye to be taken by the Ministers of Busshops and other Ordinaries of Holye Churche for the P̄bate of Testam'e.”
Three things about that are worth having straight, because they are usually got wrong. The famous phrase “two honest persons” is really in the Act, but it is the third choice, not the rule. There is no value threshold on the duty to make an inventory at all: the hundred shillings people cite is the bottom band of the probate fee scale, and the Act never writes it as five pounds. And nobody in that sentence swears an oath; only the executor does, later, on the Holy Evangelist, that the finished list is good and true.
The law asks for two. Durham sent four. Thomas Chaitor's inventory names four yeomen; another in the same volume is “praised by these fower honest men”, which takes the statute's own word and quietly doubles its number.
There is a second thing in these documents that nobody has looked at. An inventory ends with a sum, and a sum is a claim that can be tested against the very page it sits on. It is the only internal check they have: you can take a scribe's spelling on trust or not, and no amount of staring settles it, but a column of figures carries its own witness. So the sums here have been added up again, exactly, in farthings.
The walk
The rooms come in the order the praisers walked them. Words with a faint underline are in the glossaries; touch one to see what it was. The running figure at the top is ours, not theirs.
The sum at the bottom
What the house was worth, and what he was worth
The walk takes a long time because a house is full of things. Here is everything it came to, set beside the rest of the same document.
Which room held the money
Room and price are both on the page; the sorting is ours and nothing else is.
Every sum we have checked so far
The words
Every distinct word used to name an object, put to two Victorian dictionaries of old and northern English and to a modern word list. Click one.