A window into a lost world

One of treasures held at Lancashire Archives is the collection of Preston inventories of household goods prepared following the death of the house owner, many of which provide detailed descriptions of the contents of houses in the town, down to the last spoon. There are more than nine hundred of them, mostly from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This is just the number for the town alone, there are many more from the surrounding townships.

The one pictured here is taken from Henry Fishwick’s History of Preston, although this one is not held at the archives. It describes the interior of the home of Edmund Lemon, the first of the Lemons to settle in Preston. He was twice mayor, in 1596 and 1603. Among the properties he owned in the town was a ‘shoppe or rome under the west side of the Town Hall or Mootehall’.

Fishwick assumes a lot of knowledge of early seventeenth-century spellings and household items on the part of his readers, although some of the terms defeat even him.

Fishwick says there was an extract of Lemon’s will preserved in the Towneley manuscripts held at the British Museum. I think he may have found the inventory along with the will. When he writes ‘extract’ I think he might mean that Christopher Towneley had transcribed it, which he and his fellow antiquarian Richard Kuerden made a practice of. The handwriting, especially Kuerden’s can be almost indecicherable. There is no record of the will or inventory at Lancashire Archives or in the National Archives catalogue.