"My Well-Beloved Friends": Academic Families and Last Thoughts in Tudor-Stuart England

At the heart of Sarah Ross’s paper lies the friendship of two schoolmasters at Eton College, John Claveringe and Adam Robyns, who wrote their wills in 1612 and 1613, respectively.  Robyns fit the clerical profile of previous centuries: he was unmarried and childless. By contrast, Claveringe embodied the more recent model of the academic family man: he was married and the father of six children. Yet the wills of both men attest to a close friendship that transcended their social differences.  Signaling their bond with the epithet “well-beloved friend,” they entrusted each other with the welfare of their large circles of male and female loved ones.  In light of the distinctions between friendship, family and love often made in the scholarship on early-modern male sociability, one might dismiss this web of relationships as exceptional. This paper finds instead that the Robyns-Claveringe relationship typified a pattern within the academic community – a pattern that emerges through analysis of nearly 200 wills proved at the Prerogatory Court of Canterbury between 1550 and 1700 that were written by men who specified their occupation as “schoolmaster,” “master” or university “fellow.”  While formal works of moral philosophy from antiquity to the modern era frequently situated male friendship within an exclusive discourse of brotherhood, a different set of emotional and political priorities emerges from this archive of last thoughts.  Triangulating hitherto unexamined testamentary material with contemporary works on friendship and property law, this paper urges a revision of our interpretive paradigms to accommodate the culture of affectionate and inclusive masculinity thriving in the “academic families” of early-modern England.