Probate Inventories: How to Read the Room-by-Room Lists, the Money and the Obsolete Words

A probate inventory is a list of everything a person owned when they died, written down and valued by neighbours soon after the death. For family and local historians it is one of the richest documents there is: a walk through an ancestor's house, room by room, down to the pewter dishes and the bed hangings. This guide explains why inventories were made, where to find them, how they are laid out, and how to read their hand, their money and their vocabulary.

A will tells you what a person wanted done with their property. An inventory tells you what the property was: a yeoman's will may leave "all my goods" to his widow, while his inventory lists four cows, a feather bed, a brass pot and a crop of barley, each with a value. Our guide to transcribing old wills covers the will. This one covers the inventory.

Reading an inventory is one branch of genealogy record transcription. It has its own difficulties: the money, the numerals, and the words for goods that nobody has used for three hundred years.

What a probate inventory is, and why it was made

In England and Wales, three Acts of 1529 required the executor of a will, or the administrator of someone who died without one, to deliver an inventory of the dead person's goods to the probate court. Before 1858 that court was almost always a church court. buildinghistory.org puts the legal requirement at 1529 to 1782, and the Leo Academy Handbook's note on which record exists, and why dates the practice of local men listing and valuing goods room by room from about 1530.

The inventory protected creditors and heirs alike, by showing what there was and that nothing had been hidden. The court used the total to set the executor's or administrator's bond, which was usually about double the value of the goods, according to J. Linda Drury's study of the Durham inventories.

Three things follow from that purpose:

• It lists moveable goods only. Freehold land and buildings are not in it, though leases, debts and crops in the ground often are.
• The appraisers were neighbours. Drury found that usually two to four people valued the goods, sometimes women among them. Those who described themselves used the phrase "indifferent men", meaning unbiased.
• Not everyone has one. Many small estates never went to probate, and many inventories that were made have not survived.

Most English inventories date from the mid-sixteenth century to the early eighteenth. In the Diocese of Durham, Drury found that the practice stopped around 1720 except in special cases, while the Prerogative Court of Canterbury required inventories until 1782.

Inventories outside England and Wales

The same idea appears wherever goods had to be divided or debts paid:

• Scotland. Every testament, with or without a will, includes an inventory of moveable property, as ScotlandsPeople's guide to wills and testaments explains.
• Colonial America. In Plymouth Colony an inventory had to be taken and approved by the colony's court, and the Plymouth Colony Archive Project publishes transcribed inventories from 1633. Look for American probate files with the county or town court that settled the estate.
• France. The inventaire après décès was drawn up by a notary and was very common until the end of the nineteenth century.
• The Netherlands. A boedelinventaris was made by a notary or a court, often to protect orphaned children's inheritance.

Where to find probate inventories

Inventories were filed with the court that granted probate or administration. The National Archives' guide to wills and administrations before 1858 sets out the hierarchy: the Prerogative Court of Canterbury at the top, then the Prerogative Court of York, then bishops' diocesan courts and archdeacons' courts. There were more than 200 church courts with probate business, and no central index.

• Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC). The National Archives at Kew holds over 60,000 PCC inventories. Search its catalogue by name or place plus the word "inventory". They are in PROB 2 (before 1660), PROB 3, PROB 4 and PROB 5 (1661–1732), PROB 32 (1658–1723) and PROB 31 (1722–1858).
• Diocesan and archdeaconry courts. Most ordinary people's wills and inventories went through these lower courts. Their records are generally in the county record office for the diocese. Inventories usually sit in the same bundle as the will or administration.
• Prerogative Court of York. Its records are at the Borthwick Institute in York.
• Wales. The National Library of Wales holds the records of the Welsh church courts, including inventories, free to view online.
• Printed editions. Record societies have published inventories for many parishes and counties, and buildinghistory.org lists them by county. They are a good way to learn the vocabulary.

Expect gaps. Some collections were lost entirely: the wills of the Diocese of Exeter were destroyed in the Blitz, though typescript calendars survive. If you find a will but no inventory, check the administration papers and any separate inventory series before concluding that none was made.

How a probate inventory is laid out

The heading. Drury notes that inventories usually open by calling themselves "a true and perfect inventory of the goods and chattels" of the named person, with their parish and status (yeoman, husbandman, widow, maltster), the date of the appraisal and the names of the appraisers.

The first item. The list usually begins with Impʳ (Imprimis, "first"), and very often the first thing listed is the dead person's purse and apparel: cash in hand and clothes, valued together.

The body. Every later line begins Itᵐ (Item, "also"). Appraisers often walked through the house room by room: the hall, the parlour, the chamber over the hall, the buttery, the kitchen. Outside they moved to the barns and fields. Other common headings, in Drury's list, are kine, sheep, stock and crop, household stuff, plate, stock in the shop, working gear, money owed to the deceased and debts the deceased owed.

The values and total. Each line ends with a value in pounds, shillings and pence, and a line headed Summa gives the total, sometimes page by page.

The end. The appraisers sign or make their marks, and a court note may record when the inventory was exhibited (handed in).

Here is a short example, written for this guide, of how the opening of a modest inventory might look in transcription:

A true and perfect Inventory of all the goods and chattels of John Hale of Upton husbandman deceased, praysed by Thomas Wood and Richard Lee the xijth day of Aprill 1640 Impʳ his purse and apparell — xl s Itᵐ in the hall one table a forme and ij joyned stooles — vj s viij d Itᵐ iiij kine — ix li Itᵐ in the chamber one fether bed one bolster and a coverlet — xiij s iiij d Itᵐ brasse and pewter — x s Summa — xij li x s

Reading the hand and the money

The hand. An inventory from before about 1700 is usually in secretary hand or a mix of secretary and italic. A beginner's guide to reading secretary hand gets you past the strange e, h and c. Leo Academy's free English secretary hand course teaches the hand of Tudor and Stuart registers, wills and inventories in 44 short lessons. Spelling is phonetic and local, so read a puzzling word aloud: "ketle", "pewtar" and "chist" usually surrender.

The numerals. Values are often in lower-case roman numerals, with a final i written as j: iij is 3 and xiij is 13. Large numbers can be built with a raised letter: iiijˣˣ is four score, or 80. Arabic figures spread through the period, and many inventories mix the two. Drury found that the Durham totals are usually in arabic even where the lines are not.

The money. English money ran in three units:

• 12 pence (d.) made a shilling
• 20 shillings (s.) made a pound (li., l. or £)
• ob. is a halfpenny and q. or qa. a farthing

Two named sums are common: the mark, 13s 4d, and the noble, 6s 8d. In the example above, "xl s" is 40 shillings, or £2, and "xiij s iiij d" is a mark. The Handbook's note on pounds, shillings and pence works an inventory total through line by line, and our guide to numbers and money in early modern documents covers the wider system.

Check the arithmetic. Add each column from the right, carrying 12 pence to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound. If your total does not match the Summa, you have probably misread a numeral, and the total tells you where to look.

Measures. Bushels, ells and stones varied by place and commodity, as the Handbook's note on weights and measures explains, so read them as the document's own units. For a rough sense of what a sum would buy, try The National Archives' currency converter.

A glossary of obsolete words for goods

Inventories are full of words for goods that have dropped out of use or changed meaning. These are some of the commonest, drawn from the glossary in Drury's Durham study and from Wiktionary.

• Andirons: a pair of iron supports for logs in the hearth
• Ark, coffer, kist: chests and boxes for storage. Kist is the Scottish form.
• Bolster: a large pillow, usually cylindrical
• Cupboard: often not a closed cabinet but a board or table for displaying plate, a sense in use from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century
• Dornick: a coarse damask-like fabric, first made at Tournai, used for hangings and carpets
• Harden, hurden: coarse linen, used for cheap sheets, pillowcases and table linen
• Hustlement: household odds and ends, the inventory's "sundries"
• Kine: cows (the old plural of cow)
• Latten: a yellow alloy like brass, found in candlesticks and other small wares
• Maslin: a mixed crop of grain, such as wheat and rye, sown together
• Pillowbere, pillowbeer: a pillowcase
• Posnet: a small basin, porringer or skillet
• Settle: a long wooden bench with a high back and arms, sometimes with storage beneath
• Kit, skeel: wooden tubs and pails, for milk, butter or washing
• Tester: the canopy over a bed, part of the bed hangings
• Trencher: a wooden plate for serving and cutting meat

As cupboard shows, a word you think you know can mislead, so check a glossary before you guess. The University of Hull's guide to archaic terms recommends two printed glossaries built for this work: Rosemary Milward's Glossary of Household, Farming and Trade Terms from Probate Inventories (Derbyshire Record Society, 1977) and Joy Bristow's Local Historian's Glossary of Words and Terms.

Using inventories for family and local history

An inventory can answer questions that no register or census can.

• Occupation and status. Looms, an anvil or a shop full of cloth reveal a trade the burial register never mentions, and the heading gives the person's status.
• The house. The room names and their contents give the plan of the house and how each room was used.
• Farming. Crops in the barn or on the ground, and the livestock, show what kind of farm it was and what was grown.
• The neighbourhood. The appraisers, creditors and debtors named in an inventory are a map of a person's community. Trace them in the parish register, and they often turn out to be kin.
• Comparison. Set your ancestor's inventory beside others from the same parish and decade to see how comfortably they lived.

Mind the limits. Without land, a wealthy landowner can look poor on paper, and goods may have been handed on before death. Poorer people are under-represented: in one Darlington study that Drury cites, 522 burials in the parish registers produced only 57 surviving inventories. Wives needed their husbands' permission to make a will, so few married women left one. Treat what an inventory leaves out as a question to research, not a fact.

How to transcribe a probate inventory

A good transcription keeps the inventory checkable against the original.

• Work from a good image. Inventories run from a single sheet to several pages, and a few early ones are long parchment rolls. Photograph long items in overlapping sections, following our guide to photographing archival documents.
• Keep one line per item, in the order written, with the room headings as they appear
• Keep the money exactly as written. The Handbook's rule is that li. is never expanded and Summa is usually left as written. If you want arabic values for adding up or comparing, put them in your own notes or your own spreadsheet column, clearly labelled, and leave the transcription alone.
• Keep the spelling. "Fether bed" stays "fether bed".
• Mark what you cannot read, with [illegible] or [?] after a doubtful word, and note where the paper is damaged
• Record the reference: court, series, piece or bundle number, name and date

See our guides to transcription conventions and manuscript abbreviations for more.

Where Leo fits

A family's probate papers across several generations, or every inventory in a parish, is a project, and a first machine transcription gets you to the reading much faster. Leo is built for that work.

Its transcription model, ATR-1, is specially tuned for historical documents. It is trained to transcribe what is on the page rather than tidy it, so the appraisers' spellings are kept, not quietly modernised the way general-purpose AI models tend to do. In an inventory, a dialect word for a pail or a phonetic spelling of a place name is evidence. ATR-1 reads the image at high resolution, where general models downsample it, and needs no training on the scribe's hand. Built-in failure detection hides output that looks wrong, retries it, and refunds the credit if it cannot succeed. The errors that do get through are the recoverable kind: a wrong character or word that you check against the image shown beside the text.

The workflow suits a probate project:

• Upload photographs straight from your phone in the record office, or scans and PDFs
• Organise each family's will, inventory and administration papers in one folder, with the name, parish and date in each document's metadata
• Search every transcription at once, with fuzzy search to catch the many spellings of a surname or a parish
• Add layers in their own tabs. Generate glossary lists the difficult terms, to check against a printed glossary. Extract named entities lists the people and places, such as appraisers and creditors. Modernize writes a modern-spelling version for relatives. The faithful transcription is never overwritten.
• Share and export. Send relatives a read-only link (no account needed), or export to Word, PDF, HTML or TEI.

Whatever produces the first draft, check it against the image. In an inventory, give the names, the values and the Summa the closest look: add up the columns yourself, and if your total and the appraisers' disagree, go back to the line that does not fit. Our method for verifying transcription accuracy shows how. Every correction you make in Leo feeds back into training, so later readings improve.

Leo has a free plan, so you can start with one family's inventories and see how far a first transcription takes you.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a probate inventory?

A probate inventory is a valued list of a dead person's moveable goods, drawn up by local appraisers and filed with the probate court. In England and Wales it was required from 1529, and most surviving inventories date from about 1550 to the early eighteenth century. It lists household goods, clothes, cash, livestock, crops, tools and debts, often room by room, but not land or buildings.

Where can I find probate inventories for England and Wales?

Start with the court that proved the will or granted administration. Prerogative Court of Canterbury inventories are at The National Archives in PROB 2, 3, 4, 5, 31 and 32. Diocesan and archdeaconry inventories are usually in the county record office, filed with the will. York's are at the Borthwick Institute, and Welsh ones are online at the National Library of Wales.

How do you read the money in a probate inventory?

Values are in pounds (li. or £), shillings (s.) and pence (d.): 12 pence to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound. They are often written in lower-case roman numerals with a final j, so "iij li vj s viij d" is £3 6s 8d. Add each column from the right, carrying as you go, and check your total against the Summa line.

What do the old words in an inventory mean?

Many are names for everyday goods that have fallen out of use. Kine are cows, a posnet is a small skillet, a tester is a bed canopy, harden is coarse linen and a trencher is a wooden plate. Some familiar words meant something else: a "cupboard" was often a board for displaying plate. Check unfamiliar words in a glossary of inventory terms rather than guessing.

Why is there no inventory with my ancestor's will?

Many inventories were never made or have not survived. Small estates often skipped probate, some courts stopped keeping inventories after about 1720, and some collections were lost, as Exeter's were in the Blitz. Check the administration papers and any separate inventory series for the court before concluding that none exists.

Can AI transcribe a probate inventory?

Yes, as a first draft that you then check. General-purpose AI models tend to quietly modernise spelling, which loses evidence. Leo's ATR-1 is specially tuned for historical documents and trained to transcribe what is on the page, so the appraisers' spellings are kept. Check the transcription against the image beside it, and add up the values yourself against the Summa.