NEARLY THIRTY YEARS AGO Norman Scarfe reported to the world that I was ‘going methodically through all the surviving late-medieval wills to see what bequests relate to work on church fabrics’. While it was true that I was collecting references to church-building from Suffolk wills, ‘going methodically through all’ was a generous exaggeration of what I was actually doing. Because of other pressures, such as ‘teaching school’ full-time and involvement in adult education part-time, the coverage of my searches was akin to those early archaeological distribution maps purporting to show the spread of artefacts, whereas what they actually showed was where archaeologists had been most active. In my case, though, it was the areas in which there were centres of the old Cambridge Extra-Mural Board; the wills to be examined were determined by the location of the centre(s) at which I was teaching, or about to teach, at any one time. Similarly, ‘all’ needed qualification, for a rough count showed that well over 23,000 wills written before 1550, and relating to Suffolk, had survived: life was just not going to be long enough.

Fortunately, both Norman and I have survived this long; now seems to be an appropriate occasion on which to present something of a progress report. While reading the wills in the early years of my searches it soon became apparent that many of them contained a wealth of interest, in addition to the church-building they might mention. I therefore abandoned my original practice of simply noting references to church fabric and, instead, made a ‘full abstract’ of each will that I dealt with. This inevitably slowed down progress but has been more satisfactory in the long run, throwing light on many other facets of parish life; for instance, it was largely references in wills that made possible the identification of over five hundred religious gilds and about 150 medieval chapels in the county. At the time of writing I have completed abstracts of something over 13,000 wills, which means that a large number remain unexamined, and some patches of the county have hardly been looked at. Consequently, any conclusions arrived at for the county as a whole must be provisional, although it does not seem unreasonable to regard 13,000 as a substantial and reliable sample.