A Farmer, his Family and the Inheritance of a Way of Life
WHEN RESEARCHING OUR ancestors, it is often the most rudimentary records that speak most clearly. A baptism tells us when a child entered the world. A marriage record tells us who they married. A burial records the end of a life.
A will, however, is something altogether different.
A will was not written for posterity. It was written by someone who knew that their life was drawing to a close and wished to put their affairs in order. It tells us who mattered to them, what they owned, who they trusted and, sometimes, something of the character of the person who wrote it.
The wills of my ancestors Thomas Corbett and his wife Elizabeth, nee Bacon, are among those rare documents that allow us to glimpse not only a family but a way of life that had existed in rural Lincolnshire for generations.
THOMAS WAS MY five-times-great grand uncle. He was a farmer in Rippingale, Lincolnshire, and when he made his will on 3 December 1821, he was approaching the end of a life in which he had accumulated land, property and considerable wealth.
His wife, Elizabeth, survived him and made her own will in October 1825.
Significantly, neither had children.
And so, when their lives drew towards their close, their thoughts turned not to a direct descendant but to the wider family: brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces and, most significantly, a young man who was living under Thomas’s roof.
That man was William Atkinson, Thomas’s great nephew and my first cousin five times removed.
The story contained in these documents is therefore more than an account of two estates. It is a glimpse into the way a family could accumulate, preserve and redistribute wealth in rural Lincolnshire—and how inheritance could become part of a much longer story of family advancement.
Rippingale
TO UNDERSTAND THE Corbetts, it helps to understand something of the place in which they lived.
Rippingale was an agricultural community in the Lincolnshire fens, where people’s lives were closely tied to land. Yet the farming population was not as rigidly divided as the labels we find in later census returns might suggest.
Farmer, tenant, labourer and tradesman could represent different stages in a family’s fortunes rather than permanently fixed social positions.
A 1992 study of Rippingale’s Fenland worker-peasant families describes precisely this process. Families could arrive as labourers, become tenants, or maintain their position as farmers over several generations.
Some succeeded in acquiring or enlarging holdings; others moved in the opposite direction. Economic status could change, but often it did so gradually, through inheritance, occupation, marriage and the accumulation of property over generations.
The Corbetts and Atkinsons provide a particularly interesting example.
Thomas Corbett, Farmer
THOMAS DESCRIBED HIMSELF simply in the preamble to his will:
“This is the last Will and Testament of me Thomas Corbett of Rippingale in the County of Lincoln Farmer.”
There is nothing boastful about the description. Yet the contents of the will reveal that he was considerably more than a man simply working the fields.
Thomas possessed land and property in Rippingale and also held property in Uppingham, Rutland. He had money and securities as well as the goods and chattels associated with a farming household. Indeed, his estate was substantial enough for the probate declaration to place it below, but within reach of, £4,000.
In an age when an agricultural labourer might earn only a few tens of pounds a year, this was a considerable accumulation of wealth.
That figure needs some caution: it was a probate declaration rather than a complete valuation of everything Thomas owned. But it nevertheless tells us that we are dealing with a man of considerable means.
The Rippingale study mentioned earlier also describes him as a “very substantial farmer“, and the evidence of his will certainly supports that description.
His prosperity, however, did not mean that he lived in isolation from the rest of the village. His estate and his family connections were deeply embedded in the community around him.
And when he came to decide what would happen to that estate, one person stood out.
William Atkinson
THOMAS’S WILL IDENTIFIES William in a particularly revealing way:
“I give and devise unto … William Atkinson who now lives with me (son of Thomas Atkinson late of Rippingale aforesaid Blacksmith deceased)
That short description tells us much more than a conventional beneficiary’s name. It identifies him as the son of the late Thomas Atkinson, a former blacksmith of the village.
William was not some distant relative who appeared only when the will was written. He was living with Thomas. And from parish records, we also know something that the legal document itself does not tell us: William was Thomas Corbett’s great nephew.
The relationship explains much of what follows.
Thomas had no children of his own. William, meanwhile, was a member of the next generation of the extended family and was already part of Thomas’s household. Thomas evidently had sufficient confidence in him to make him one of the principal beneficiaries of the estate and to appoint him executor alongside Elizabeth.
The Rippingale study provides an illuminating piece of independent context. It describes William’s father, Thomas Atkinson, as a blacksmith and farmer and refers to the close relationship between the Atkinson family and Thomas Corbett. My own genealogy research revealed that another William Atkinson ― William Atkinson senior (1736-1808) ― married Thomas’s sister, Elisabeth in 1761.
The surviving will describes the distribution of Corbett’s estate among the Atkinsons and allows us to see the process in much greater detail. Whilst we see an inheritance divided, we also see that Thomas did not leave everything to William.
Instead, Thomas’s will is a carefully constructed distribution of his property and money among several branches of the family.
His sister Catherine Wells and William Atkinson were to share property in Thurlby as tenants in common, meaning that each held a distinct share in it. Unlike a joint tenancy, a person’s share did not automatically pass to the surviving owner when they died, but could instead form part of their estate and be inherited according to their will.
Thomas Atkinson, William’s elder brother, received property in Rippingale. William himself received the Corbett property in Uppingham, Rutland.
There were also cash legacies to the children of the late Thomas Atkinson.
Thomas’s son, also Thomas Atkinson, received £50, while his brothers and sisters received sums ranging from £20 to £300. The largest individual legacy went to Elizabeth Atkinson, who received £300.
Taken together, the Atkinson children received £630 in cash.
For people living in an agricultural community where an ordinary labourer’s annual income was measured in tens rather than hundreds of pounds, these were substantial sums.
But the significance of the will lies not simply in the amount of money involved.
Thomas was distributing the fruits of his own success across the next generation. He was, in effect, providing several members of his wider family with a financial foundation from which they could build their own lives.
The Fenland Ladder
THIS IS WHERE the wider history of Rippingale becomes particularly interesting.
The study of the village shows that agricultural families did not necessarily remain permanently within the social or economic category into which they were born.
The Atkinsons are used as an example of movement in an upward direction over several generations. An earlier generation combined blacksmithing with farming; later members of the family appear as farmers holding substantial acreages.
The process was, however, not simply one of inheriting a farm intact. It could involve several things: acquiring a tenancy, combining occupations, taking advantage of opportunities, marriage, inheritance and the gradual accumulation of resources.
The Corbett inheritance fits naturally into this pattern.
Thomas’s wealth had been accumulated during his lifetime. When he died without children, some of it passed sideways into the wider family. William Atkinson was therefore not merely receiving a bequest. He was receiving an opportunity.
It was, nevertheless, not an entirely new beginning. For, as he was already living with Thomas, the inheritance also had a continuity about it.
Elizabeth’s Inheritance
THOMAS’S DEATH DID not end the story.
Elizabeth remained in Rippingale and, three years later, wrote her own will. And in it, she reveals a somewhat different side of the family.
Where Thomas’s will is dominated by land and the distribution of his farming estate, Elizabeth’s is concerned with a network of personal relationships extending through both her husband’s family and her own.
She identifies herself as the widow of Thomas Corbett and remembers individuals of the Bacon family, her own family by birth. One particular example is the provision for her niece Catherine, the daughter of her late brother, in which she establishes an arrangement under which £180 is to be invested, with the interest paid to Catherine during her lifetime.
The conditions of this bequest are strikingly protective.
“And my mind and will is and I hereby direct that such interest shall not be subject or liable to the control, debts, forfeitures or engagements of her present or any future husband but only at her own sole and separate disposal and to and for her own sole and separate use and benefit.”
Elizabeth specifically directs that the interest should remain for Catherine’s own separate use and should not be subject to the control, debts or obligations of her present or any future husband.
It is a small but revealing glimpse of a woman’s concern for the financial security of another woman in an age when marriage could place a wife’s property and income under the control of her husband.
Elizabeth also continues to remember members of the Atkinson family.
Among her beneficiaries are children of the late Thomas Atkinson, together with other relatives and connections. She leaves smaller legacies to members of the Stennett family and to women connected through her late husband’s family.
And once again, William Atkinson is central. She not only leaves William further property but appoints him sole executor of her will. There is a pattern here which is difficult to miss. Thomas had trusted William. Elizabeth trusted him too.
By the time she made her will, William had become the person through whom much of the Corbett legacy would be administered.
It is tempting to imagine that this was simply because he was the obvious male member of the younger generation. But the evidence suggests something more personal. The legal documents cannot tell us what William was like as a person. They do, however, tell us that Thomas and Elizabeth regarded him as someone in whom they could place their trust.
A Family Network in Changing Times
Elizabeth’s will also reminds us that family relationships in the early nineteenth century rarely followed the neat lines of a modern family tree.
There were Corbetts, Atkinsons, Bacons, Wells and Stennetts, linked by blood, marriage, residence and friendship. A will therefore becomes something far more than a list of beneficiaries. It becomes a map of relationships.
The names create a web of connections stretching across Rippingale and beyond. For a family historian, this is where the documents become particularly valuable. For they not only show who inherited but also who was considered family enough to remember.
Furthermore, Thomas and Elizabeth lived through a period of considerable change.
Thomas made his will in 1821, only a few years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Agricultural communities were experiencing economic pressures and changes in the organisation and ownership of land.
The old pattern of village life was still recognisable, but the opportunities available to families were not necessarily the same as those enjoyed by earlier generations.
Yet the evidence from Rippingale suggests that social mobility was possible.
The academic study’s conclusion to this section observes that families could move between labouring, tenancy and farming, sometimes maintaining a farm holding for generations and sometimes moving upwards or downwards through the agricultural structure.
The Atkinson family is presented as an example of how such movement could occur over several generations and by more than one means.
The Corbett story gives us the other side of that process.
Here was a substantial farmer who had accumulated enough property to make a meaningful difference to the fortunes of several relatives. His death therefore became an economic event within the wider family. So much so, it would be easy to look at Thomas’s will simply in terms of pounds, acres and property, but there is something more human in it.
Thomas and Elizabeth could not pass their farm directly to a son or daughter. Instead, their wealth moved into the wider family. Consequently, the estate did not disappear when the Corbetts died ― it moved.
There is a final irony to these documents. Despite Thomas and Elizabeth having had no children of their own, their lives have not disappeared from the family story. We know something of them precisely because they left these careful instructions behind.
And the wider academic study of Rippingale allows us to place their decisions within the changing fortunes of a fenland agricultural community. That is why these wills are more interesting than a simple inventory of an estate.
They capture a moment in the life of a rural family and, beyond that, something of the way communities such as Rippingale worked. People farmed. They married. They moved between occupations. They acquired land where they could. And when they died, the resources they had accumulated were redistributed through the intricate network of family and community.
For those of us looking back across the centuries, the Corbett wills offer something more valuable than a list of inheritances. They give us a glimpse of the people behind the names, the relationships that mattered to them, and the means by which one generation could help shape the prospects of the next.
Author’s Note on the Illustrations
The images accompanying these articles have been created using AI. While I have taken care to achieve a generally authentic impression of the period, they should not be regarded as historically accurate representations.
Details of clothing, buildings, landscapes, objects and settings may be imaginative or anachronistic.
Where ancestors are depicted for whom no photographic evidence exists, the images are representations rather than portraits.
Where possible, I have drawn upon photographs and other images preserved within the family archives to suggest a family likeness, but the resulting appearance should not be taken as a true likeness of the individual.
These images are intended simply to illustrate and complement the narrative—to help bring people, places and circumstances of the past to life—and should be understood in that spirit.
RAVEN MOON 