In comparison with many Deanery wills in which bequests for plate were made, the last will of Herry Frauncesse positively brims over with detail, and yet he leaves much unsaid. Frauncesse asked that his bequest of candlesticks should stand on Cratfield's candlebeam, to be like those which ‘are there aforne of latyn', and the middle candlestick was to look like the middle candlestick at Laxfield.1 This tells us something about the placing of candlesticks on Laxfield's rood-beam, but, in the absence of any surviving examples, the appearance of both Laxfield's and Cratfield's candlesticks remains obscure because Frauncesse's bequest, in common with others in the Deanery, lacks any details of embellishment and decoration. He must have believed that irrelevant testamentary detail was unnecessary because he would already have shared his preferences with Agnes, his wife, and his executors, Thomas Smyth and Herry Kebill.

Materials such as silver, gilt, copper and latten were usually, but not necessarily, specified in bequests; and while those Deanery inventories which have survived lay great emphasis on the materials, they, too, lack decorative details. Churchwardens’ accounts are almost mute on the subject of paxes and pyxes, though they contain much information about bells (and their appurtenances), which account for over one-third of all bequests considered in this chapter. Archives from the Deanery are certainly not comparable with those from the parish of Melford, in the south of the county, with the account of the state of the church before the Reformation, written by Roger Martin c. 1580, and the excellent inventory of church goods taken in 1529. In conjunction, these documents give a rare impression of the furnishings and the aura of a parish church in late medieval England.