‘Intolerable and Insufferable Interference’: Financial Records as/and Family History 

(or, why it was all my mother-in-law’s fault, by Henry Greswolde Lewis)

Account books and financial records rank alongside legal papers and letters as the items that were most frequently preserved in early modern family archives. Initially, at least, I found this somewhat surprising. As records of money spent and received, accounts books are neither as obviously useful nor as emotional evocative as the deeds and letters that they nestled alongside. And yet, when I started to take a closer look, I began to realise that many accounts were fraught with an emotional and sentimental significance that belied their apparently practical initial function. I’m currently writing a chapter on emotions, inheritance, and early modern account books for a collection by the brilliant Inheriting the Family team. In this post, I thought I’d introduce one of my favourite account books from that piece: the Greswolde family ‘Countbook’ in Warwickshire Record Office, which contains the records of at least five generations of Greswoldes across three centuries. 

            The ‘Countbook’ was begun by Henry Greswolde, a gentleman from Greete in Worcestershire, who in 1593 started a book to keep track of the prices his crops fetched at local markets. When his first son was born he made a note of his arrival among the records of sales, and as more children arrived Greswolde recorded the growth of the family unit alongside his financial accumulation. This combination of genealogical and economic record keeping wasn’t unusual. Lots of early modern account books became sites of family history, and many were passed through the generations as family heirlooms. While this dual use might partially be considered a prudent re-use of paper, there was also a religious dimension to early modern accounting that ensured it lent itself, conceptually and theologically, to family record keeping. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the keeping of accounts was closely associated with the introspection and salvational self-examination that characterised so much post-Reformation Protestantism. It was a way, not just of tracing your financial position, but your spiritual state and the signs of God’s favour (or punishment). In this context, recording the gains and losses of one’s family – marriages, births, deaths – alongside financial gains and losses had a conceptual coherence: both were a way of tracing God’s providence and the signs of your own salvation.

However, the Greswolde text also testifies to some of the hazards of using account books as a site of family history, as well as the flexibility of their emotional meanings. In early modern accounting practice it was not uncommon for scribes to rip out pages that contained irrelevant material – debts repaid, accounts settled – and in the case of the Greswolde book several pages of vital family records were torn out sometime in the mid-seventeenth century. That the book’s third owner, the second Henry Greswolde, made a concerted effort to replicate and replace these records, even down to his grandfather’s habit of inserting his initials over entries ‘to signify his writing thereof’, testifies to the import attached to the material as well as the factual content of these records. Though Greswolde could not recreate the physical touch that had connected his ancestor to the book, he could recreate its visual appearance. Indeed, one of the most striking features of the Greswolde book is the consistent style used for entries, linking members of each generation in a shared material practice. 

[Pages from the Greswolde Countbook (CR1291/437). Reproduced by kind permission of Warwickshire Country Record Office].

The financial accounts written in the Greswolde book, while not entirely jettisoned, became increasingly recessive as time went by, and were eventually themselves incorporated into the book’s genealogical function. In the mid-eighteenth century, David Lewis, husband of Mary Greswolde, went through the early accounts adding annotations that glossed them with additional, biographical information. By the late-eighteenth century, then, the Greswolde Countbook’s transition from financial to genealogical record was complete. However, as it passed through the generations there is evidence which suggests that the emotional meaning of the book, once prized as evidence of the longevity and continuity of the Greswolde line, became rather more ambivalent. Its final annotator, Henry Greswolde Lewis, did not have any children of his own, and he increasingly used the book, not to record family births and marriages, but to chronicle the ‘disastrous’ state of his own relationship, which he attributed to the ‘intolerable and insufferable […] interference’ of his mother-in-law. In Lewis’ hands, the book became less a site of family history than of self-justification: many of his entries were an attempt to absolve himself of responsibility for the breakdown of his marriage, while simultaneously lamenting the fact that this outcome had ‘prevented the Greswold family being perpetuated by me’. Even within a family, intergenerational books might possess different emotional registers for those who engaged with them. For Lewis, who had ultimately ‘failed’ to continue the family line, the emotions that the Countbook evoked were closer to regret and disappointment than the sense of pride and familial duty that had previously sustained it. 

If you’d like to read more about inherited account books – and other fascinating chapters on inherited artefacts from across time and space! – keep an eye out for Inheriting the Family: Objects, Identities, and Emotions, ed. by Ashley Barnwell, Joanne Begiato, Tanya Evans, and Laura King (forthcoming with Bloomsbury).