Index of Wills Proved in the Cambridge Vice-Chancellor’s Court, 1501 to 1765

This Cambridge Vice-Chancellor’s Court wills index transcribes 1,398 records covering 893 surnames, from the Calendar of Wills Proved in the Vice-Chancellor’s Court at Cambridge, 1501 to 1765, published at Cambridge in 1907. The originals are the five volumes of registered wills held by the University of Cambridge, and the calendar is still the finding aid used to reach them.

The calendar has been scanned and is free to read, but it has never been turned into searchable text, so none of the names in it can be found by searching for them. That is the gap this Cambridge Vice-Chancellor’s Court wills index closes. It is the companion to the equivalent index for the Oxford Chancellor’s Court, and between them the two cover the university probate jurisdictions that sit outside every county index in England.

How to use this Cambridge wills index

Use the search box above the table. It filters on every column at once, so you can search a surname, a college or a trade. Searching Trinity returns everyone the calendar connects to Trinity College; searching cook returns the cooks.

The court served the University, not the town, but membership reached a long way down. Of the 1,398 records, 220 identify the person by a trade rather than a degree or a college: brewers, cooks, innholders, tailors, butlers, porters, stationers, vintners, chandlers, cordwainers, locksmiths, cutlers, booksellers, apothecaries, a singing man and a labourer. 79 are women, identified as widows, wives or spinsters. Spelling follows the calendar, which follows the documents, so try variants before concluding someone is absent.

What the columns mean

The calendar was compiled, in its editor’s words, to bring the separate indexes of five registers into a single alphabet. Its columns are reproduced here as printed.

Column	What it means
Year	The year the will was proved, not the year of death.
Surname	As printed. Where the calendar gives variant spellings or an alias, all forms are kept together.
Forename	As printed.
Description	Whatever the calendar records: a trade, a college, a degree, a parish, or a status such as widow or gentleman. The abbreviation nuncup. marks a nuncupative will, one declared aloud before witnesses rather than written, usually in the last illness. 46 of these appear.
Vol.	Which of the five registers holds the copy. Marked not registered where the calendar shows none, which its editor used to indicate a will that survives but was never entered in any register. 214 records are of that kind.
Fol.	The folio or page within that volume. Quote it with the volume when ordering.

The index

Entries follow the calendar’s order, which is alphabetical by surname and then by forename.

What this transcription covers, and what it does not

1,398 records, 893 surnames, 1,251 of them carrying a year and 1,184 carrying a volume reference. The dates run from 1501 to 1765, which matches the span on the calendar’s title page exactly, with no entry falling outside it. That is the first check that the transcription has not drifted.

Where the year could not be read with confidence it is marked not read rather than guessed. 147 records are in that state, almost all on pages where the scan ran the year column into the name column. The name, the description and the volume reference are still there, so the entry remains findable and orderable. Only the year is missing, and it can be read off the scan in seconds once you have the page.

If you do not find a name here, check the scan before concluding the person is absent. The calendar is alphabetical, so the right page is easy to reach.

How the transcription was made and checked

Two independent scans of the 1907 calendar exist, made from different copies and read by different optical character recognition systems. This transcription is not taken from the text of either. It is built from the word coordinates in the scan data, which preserve the position of every word on the page, so the year column, the name column and the volume and folio columns are separated by where they physically sit rather than by guessing from a stream of text.

That distinction is the whole game. The plain text of these scans interleaves the columns, and on some pages detaches them completely. A transcription made from the text alone produces a table that looks perfectly clean and attaches years to the wrong people. Checking the two scans against each other using their text, they disagreed on the year for roughly one entry in twenty, and the disagreements were not spelling variants but different years entirely.

Built from coordinates instead, and compared with the second scan on every name pair occurring exactly once in both sources, 380 of 384 years agree. That is 99 per cent. The four exceptions are left flagged rather than resolved, because with a common name and no further evidence there is no honest way to choose between two readings.

How to order a document

The original registers belong to the University of Cambridge and are held with the University Archives at Cambridge University Library. To order a copy, quote the name exactly as it appears here, the year, and the volume and folio. Where this table says not registered, the will is not in the bound registers, and the archive will need the name and year alone.

• The 1907 calendar, full scan: archive.org/details/b22406918
• A second scan of the same volume: archive.org/details/b24853860
• The Oxford equivalent: Index of wills proved in the Oxford Chancellor’s Court, 1436 to 1814

Genealogy research note: tracing a Cambridge will

A will from this court is usually the end of a search rather than the beginning. Once you have a name and a year, the next step is to place the person in the University’s own records. Venn’s Alumni Cantabrigienses is the standard route for anyone who matriculated, and it is searchable, but it will not help for the brewers, cooks and innholders in this list, who never matriculated. For those, the college archives and the town records are the way through, and the will itself is often the only document that names them at all.

For the wider family, parish registers and probate material for England and Wales are the practical next stop, and TheGenealogist covers English parish, census and probate collections in one place.

The 1907 calendar and the court behind it

Until 1858 the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge had the right to prove the wills of members of the University and of those who enjoyed its privileges, a jurisdiction sitting outside the bishop’s courts and therefore outside the county probate indexes most researchers use. The 1907 calendar records that the extent of that right was disputed and finally settled in 1714 by Dr Sherlock, that the House of Commons ordered a return on the condition of the court’s documents in 1829, and that an Order in Council of 1858 consolidated the probate registries and brought the arrangement to an end.

The calendar was printed at the Chiswick Press and dedicated to J. E. Foster of Trinity College, whose assistance its editor said the work could not have done without. It is a modest volume, and for more than a century it has been the only way to find out whether a Cambridge ancestor’s will survives.