Index of Wills Proved in the Oxford Chancellor’s Court, 1436 to 1814

This Oxford Chancellor’s Court wills index transcribes 2,245 records covering roughly 2,140 people, from John Griffiths’s An Index to Wills proved in the Court of the Chancellor of the University of Oxford, printed at the University Press in 1862. The documents run from 1436 to 1814 and are held in the Oxford University Archives at the Bodleian Library. There are 1,533 distinct surnames.

Griffiths’s volume has been scanned and is free to read, but it has never been turned into searchable text, which means none of the names in it can be found by searching for them. That is the gap this Oxford Chancellor’s Court wills index is meant to close. If you have an Oxford ancestor who died before 1814 and you have searched the Oxfordshire county probate indexes without success, this is one of the places the will may actually be.

How to use this Oxford Chancellor’s Court wills index

Use the search box above the table. It filters on every column at once, so you can search a surname, a college, a parish or a trade. Searching manciple returns every manciple in the collection; searching Magdalen returns everyone the index connects to Magdalen College or Magdalen Hall.

Spelling is Griffiths’s, not modernised, and his spelling follows the documents. Try variants before concluding that someone is absent. Aldersley and Aldersey are the same man, Allwyn and Aylwyn the same, Pearce and Pearse are separate families in this index but need checking together. The cross references section below lists the variants Griffiths himself flagged.

The court served the University of Oxford rather than the county, and anyone who enjoyed the privileges of the University came under it. That reached a long way down. Alongside the heads of house and the fellows you will find cooks, butlers, manciples, porters, bakers, barbers, bookbinders, stationers, carriers, gardeners, a fishmonger, a horsekeeper and the almsmen of Christ Church, along with their widows. The Chancellor’s Court is often assumed to be a court for dons. It was not.

What the letters and marks mean

The letter in the Record column tells you what physically survives, which decides whether it is worth ordering the document. Griffiths sets the key out in his preface and it is reproduced here in full.

Mark	What survives
P. (roman)	A Will, or a copy of a Will, proved.
P. (italic)	A record of a grant of Probate, with no Will extant.
A. (roman)	An Administration Bond.
A. (italic)	A record of a grant of Administration, with no Bond extant.
W.	A Will, or a copy of a Will, with no note or record of Probate or Administration.
A.W.	A Bond for Administration with Will annexed, or a record of such Administration where the Will survives but the Bond is lost.
I.	An Inventory.
*	An Inventory, where one of the letters above is also used. So *A. is an Administration Bond plus an Inventory.
†	An Account, where one of the letters above is also used. So †I. is an Inventory plus an Account, and †*P. is a Will, an Inventory and an Account.
Caveat	A caveat was lodged against granting Probate or Administration without notice to the person lodging it. No other record survives.
Monition	The Court issued a monition to the representative of the deceased to prove the Will or take out Letters of Administration.
Intestate	Recorded as dying intestate, with no other document surviving.

One caution that matters. Griffiths distinguishes roman P. from italic P., and roman A. from italic A. The roman letter means the document itself survives; the italic means only a record that it once existed. That distinction cannot be recovered reliably from a scan, so the table below gives the letter without the typeface. Where the difference would change your decision to order a document, check the printed page in the scan.

The index

Entries follow Griffiths’s order, which is alphabetical by surname and then by forename. The date is the date of the document or fact indicated, not the date of death. A question mark is Griffiths’s own. Where a person has two surviving records, both are listed as separate rows.

Variant spellings and cross references

Griffiths cross refers these spellings. If your surname is on the left, look under the form on the right as well.

• See also ALKOC.
• AYLWYN : see ALLWYN.
• CAHILL : see KAHYLL.
• CERSLEY : see CARSLEY.
• CLYFFE : see CLIVE.
• COLYNGS : see CORFE.
• CORDON : see BROUN.
• CROKE : see CROOK.
• See also ATKIKS.
• DENYS : see MASON, Jane.
• DRING : see NEWLIN, Jane.
• See also ETON.
• EDWARDES : see PHIPE, PHIPPS.
• See also FYSHER.
• See also FISHER.
• GERBRAND : see HARKES.
• See also GYBBERD.
• See also GYBSONNE.
• See also GYLES.
• GREENWOODE : see WADLANDE.
• See also GIBBARD.
• See also GIBSONNE.
• See also HAWLE.
• See also HEART, HERT.
• See also HALES.
• HEYWOOU : see LUDWELL.
• HOMER : see HOLDMORE.
• See also GEFFRES.
• See also LLOYD.
• IVEBIE : see EVEBIE.
• JEFFRES : see GEFFRES.
• JERRAT : see GERARD.
• See also AP DAVID, and MORRIS.
• See also KAYE.
• MARKSMAN : see HALMAN.
• See also ARCHARD.
• See also BADCOCK.
• OGAN : see WOGAN.
• ORCHARD : see ARCHAED.
• PEIRSE : see ROBINSON, Edward.
• PEISLEY : see PIESLEY.
• and Dean of Worcester : see LANGBAINE,
• See also RAINOLDS, RAYNOLDES, REINOLDES.
• RIXON : see RYXON.
• SCRIBNOR : see MABELY.
• See also SYMSON. .
• See also SCLATEB.
• See also LONDON.
• THROGMORTON : see FBOGMERTONE.
• VENDYVAL : see BAMPTON.
• WALPERGEN : see DE WALPERGEN.
• WALTHAM : see WELCOME.
• See also QWERTON.
• WODE : see SYCKES.
• YEMANS : see Eamans.

What this transcription covers, and what it does not

Griffiths states in his preface that his index covers 2,253 deceased persons, of whom 1,173 have Wills still extant, with 899 Inventories and 113 Accounts. This transcription recovers 2,245 records for about 2,140 of those people, which is roughly 95 per cent. Counting the marks in the transcription gives 859 inventories and 121 accounts against his 899 and 113, which is close enough to confirm that nothing structural has gone missing, and far enough out to show that a small number of entries were misread.

About 96 rows carry the words not read in the Record or Date column. In those cases the print or the scan was too poor to give a reading I am willing to publish, so the raw text is left in the description column and nothing has been guessed. The remaining shortfall against Griffiths’s own count is spread across the alphabet rather than concentrated in any one section, and comes from entries where the scan ran two lines together.

The practical consequence: if you do not find your name here, check the scan itself before concluding the person is absent. The relevant page is easy to find, because the index is alphabetical.

How the transcription was made and checked

Three separate scans of Griffiths’s 1862 volume exist, made by three different institutions and read by three different optical character recognition systems. The transcription is taken from the cleanest of them, the University of Toronto copy, and checked against the other two and against the word coordinates in the underlying scan data.

That last check matters more than it sounds. The plain text of one of the scans detaches the date column from the name column on every left hand page, so a transcription made from it alone would produce a clean looking index that paired the wrong dates with the wrong people, and nothing on the page would reveal it. Comparing readings also caught errors present in only one scan: one reads Andrewe as Andrews and Arnolds as Arnolde, another reads Jan. as Jau.

The totals in the section above are the strongest check of the three, because they are Griffiths’s own. He counted his inventories and his accounts and printed the figures in 1862. Recounting them from the transcription and getting almost the same numbers is independent evidence that the parsing is sound, and it is the reason the shortfall can be stated as a number rather than guessed at.

How to order a document from the archives

The original documents are held in the Oxford University Archives, part of the Bodleian Libraries. Griffiths describes how they were arranged when he indexed them: the Wills bound into fifteen folio volumes, the Administration Bonds into eight, the Inventories into ten and the Accounts into two, alongside sixty-eight volumes of the Court’s Registers, every one of which he examined page by page.

To order a document, quote the name exactly as it appears here, the record letter and the date. The Archives will want the Griffiths reference, because his index is still the finding aid in use.

• Griffiths’s index, full scan: archive.org/details/indextowillsprov00grif
• Background on the court, its jurisdiction and what its records contain: Oxford Chancellor’s Court wills, 1436 to 1814.

Genealogy research note: tracing an Oxford will

A Chancellor’s Court will is usually the end of a search rather than the start of one. Once you have a name and a date, the next step is to place the person in the University’s own records, which are indexed separately and cover matriculation, degrees and college membership. Joseph Foster’s Alumni Oxonienses is the standard printed route for anyone who matriculated, although it will not help for servants and tradesmen, who never did.

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, which saves working court by court. Note also the footnote abbreviations Griffiths uses in some entries: Cur. Praerog. Cant. means the will was also proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, so a second copy exists in the national probate records and can be consulted without going to Oxford.

John Griffiths and the 1862 index

John Griffiths, Keeper of the Archives, compiled the index in obedience to an Act of Parliament, 23 and 24 Victoria chapter 91, which relieved the University of the need to surrender its testamentary documents to the new Court of Probate. Until 12 January 1858 the University had the right to prove the wills of its own members and of the tradesmen and servants attached to it. Griffiths signed his preface at Oxford on 19 May 1862.

He was candid about the gaps. The earliest registers had been lost for centuries, the first few that remain are neither continuous nor regular, and there is scarcely one original document older than the reign of Elizabeth. What survives, he wrote, is valuable for the light it throws on the personal and social history of the University’s academical ancestors. That is still the best description of it.