A Bodwell family story · Methuen, Massachusetts · January 1744

The Last Will of Henry Bodwell

An old man's mark, and what he left behind

On the fifth day of January, in the depth of a Merrimack valley winter, three neighbours came to the Bodwell homestead at the fork of the Merrimack and the Spickett, most likely to the old framed house itself. They had come to watch Henry Bodwell make his will. He was twelve days short of his ninetieth birthday, one of the oldest men in the province. The will had been written out for him in a careful, looping hand. When it was read over, Henry took the pen and, instead of writing his name, made his mark. The three men signed beneath it as witnesses. Seventeen months later he was dead.

That will survives, three pages of it, folded into his probate file at the Essex County court. It is the only document we have that Henry Bodwell himself put his hand to. It is not a letter or a diary, and it was written out by someone else in the formal language of the law. But read closely, it tells us a surprising amount: about the man he had become, the family he had raised, the people he had lost, and even about the wife who is missing from it.

Methuen, 1744 the world outside the door

Henry had come to New England as a boy, alone, probably in the 1660s. By 1744 the frontier he had settled was frontier no longer. The log house of 1693 had long since given way to a framed house, built in 1708 or 1709 and added to as the family grew. The district around it had become a town of its own, Methuen, in 1725. A meetinghouse stood on the hill, with a burying ground beside it. Henry's sons farmed beside him and his grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, were growing up all around.

The wider world was stirring. In the early 1740s a great wave of religious revival, the Great Awakening, swept through New England, filling meetinghouses and splitting congregations. In March 1744, weeks after Henry made his will, Britain and France went to war again. New England men would soon be marching north, and in June 1745 a New England army captured the great French fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, a victory celebrated with bonfires across the colony. Henry did not live to hear the news. He died at Methuen on 1 June 1745, about two weeks before Louisbourg fell. The Methuen clerk wrote that he was "in his 94th year." By his London baptism, he was ninety-one.

The will

Here is the will, page by page, with a transcription beside each image. The spelling is the writer's own. Words the writer crossed out are shown struck through, and uncertain readings are in brackets.

Will of Henry Bodwell of Methuen, yeoman, 5 January 1743/4. Essex County, Massachusetts, Probate File Papers, case no. 2754. Images via AmericanAncestors.org (New England Historic Genealogical Society).

What the will tells us about Henry

"Yeoman"

The very first line tells us what Henry had become. He is "Henery Bodwel of Methuen … Yeoman." A yeoman was a farmer who owned his own land outright, the solid middle of New England society: not a gentleman, but no man's servant either. For a boy who had arrived, by every family account, with nothing, robbed by a ship's captain and bound out to work for someone else, it is a quiet measure of a whole life. He came as a servant. He died a landowner, with cattle, sheep, bonds, money owed to him, and land enough to have already set up two sons on their own farms.

The sons

Henry's sons each received a different kind of inheritance. James and Daniel are left just five shillings each, a token sum, but the will explains why: each was to have it "in full with what he has had of me before, by Deed." Henry had already given them land during his lifetime, by deed, probably when they married. The five shillings simply closed the account. This was common practice in New England, and it meant that by the time a father made his will, much of the real business of inheritance was already done.

Everything else went to the eldest surviving son, Henry, now fifty-five: the clothes off his father's back, the cattle and sheep, the household goods, the money and bonds, and "all my upland & meadow I have not disposed of as yet," which meant the home farm. Henry the younger was also named sole executor. He had lived on the homestead all his life, and he would carry on there; his own son, Captain Henry, born there in 1729, would farm and die in the same house.

The daughters' feather beds

Henry's daughters were treated differently, and that was normal too. A daughter in colonial New England did not usually expect land. Her inheritance came when she married, as a "portion": household goods, livestock, linens, perhaps money, carried with her into her new family. The will says so plainly. Each bequest is "together with what they have before Received of me."

Bethiah Barker, Judith Harris and Ruth Huse were to share "my three feather beds & furniture belonging to them." That may sound like a strange gift, but in an eighteenth-century farmhouse a good feather bed, with its bolster, pillows, sheets, blankets, coverlet and curtains, was one of the most valuable things a family owned, often worth more than a cow. It is tempting to think these were the beds Henry and Bethia had slept in, and in which their thirteen children were born, though the will doesn't say so. (There is one small slip in it: the second paragraph keeps back "two feather beds" for the daughters, but the fifth gives them "three.")

Four grandchildren in place of their mothers

The second page is the saddest part of the will. Four of the bequests go not to daughters but to grandchildren, each "in full with what his mother she had Received in her life time." Henry had outlived four of his eight daughters, and their children stood in their places:

One grandchild stands out. Mary Hezeltine, daughter of Henry's second daughter Mary, was left twenty-five shillings, five times what anyone else received in money. Her mother had died young, nearly thirty years earlier, probably when the girl was still small. Perhaps her portion had never been fully paid; perhaps she had been raised partly in her grandparents' house; perhaps she was simply a favourite. The will doesn't say. But in a document of careful, equal five-shilling sums, that one difference is the closest thing we have to a glimpse of Henry's feelings.

It is also a reminder of how much grief one long life could hold. By the time he made his will, Henry had buried twin sons in infancy, four grown daughters, and, almost certainly, his wife.

Who isn't there

Bethia is not in the will. In the eighteenth century, a man with a living wife almost always provided for her first, usually right after his debts: the use of rooms in the house, a share of the produce, firewood, a cow, or a third of the estate for her lifetime. Henry's will goes straight from his debts to his son. There is no wife, and no widow's portion. Bethia, the mother of his thirteen children, must have died before 5 January 1743/4.

"His mark"

At the foot of the third page, between the words "Henery" and "Bodwell," is a small drawn mark, with "his" and "mark" written around it by the clerk. Henry did not sign his name.

In the eighteenth century, a mark usually meant that a person could not write. By the 1740s a clear majority of New England men could sign their names, but many could not, especially those who had grown up poor or had had little schooling. That fits the boy of the family legend, shipped across the ocean in his early teens and bound out to work on a Newbury farm, where nobody would have spent time teaching a servant to write. It fits less easily with a gentleman's son from London, who might have been taught his letters before he was sent away.

There is another possibility. Henry was almost ninety. Failing eyesight, a shaking hand, or illness could have made a signature impossible even for a man who had once written well, and some elderly testators who could write made a mark instead. So the mark is a clue, not proof. But it is the nearest thing we have to Henry's own hand, and the thought that the boy from Houndsditch may never have learned to write his own name makes everything he achieved all the more striking.

The witnesses and the probate

Three neighbours watched Henry make his mark: Joseph Cross, Jonathan Griffin and Asa Swan, who wrote his first name "Asie." Their signatures, each in a different hand, are the only parts of the will not written by the scribe. All three were Methuen men, called in as witnesses because the law required them, and because a will was made among the people who would see it carried out.

After Henry died on 1 June 1745, his son brought the will to the probate court of Essex County. It was proved at Ipswich in the winter of 1745/6 before Judge Thomas Berry, with Henry Jr. as executor. No inventory of the estate survives in the file. Perhaps none was taken, since nearly everything went to one son who was already living on the farm. That is a pity; an inventory would have taken us through the old house room by room. But the will itself, with its feather beds and its iron bar, its cattle and sheep and its five-shilling sums, gives us more of Henry Bodwell's world than we had before.

• A servant who became a yeoman

  The penniless boy of the family story died a landowner, with livestock, money, bonds, and land enough to settle three sons.

• A will that counts the losses

  Four of the bequests go to grandchildren in place of daughters who had died before him, and his wife is not mentioned at all.

• A mark, not a signature

  Henry probably could not write. If so, it is one more piece of evidence that he grew up as a servant, not as a gentleman's son.

• The source of a mistake

  The will's date, 5 January 1743, is the "death date" given to Bethia in many online trees.

A will is a strange kind of last word. It is written by someone else, in borrowed phrases, and it deals in beds and shillings rather than feelings. Yet this one carries the shape of a whole life: a servant who became a yeoman, a father who had settled his sons and portioned his daughters, a grandfather who remembered the children of the daughters he had buried, and an old man, alone now, who could not write his name but knew exactly what he wanted done. He made his mark, the neighbours signed, and the paper was folded away. Two hundred and eighty years later, it is still telling his story.