Introduction: Culture, Faith, and Philanthropy in Early Modern England

Abstract

In his will of 1614, William Jones, a successful Hamburg merchant, granted a considerable parcel of his estate to the Haberdashers’ Company of London with instructions that it establish endowments to maintain a school, an almshouse, and a preaching lectureship in his native Monmouth, a modest town 25 miles west of Gloucester. Forty years later, Henry Colbron, a prosperous London scrivener, entrusted to the London Drapers’ Company an endowment that he had created to support schools, which the company’s officers subsequently chose to locate in the parish of Kirkham, Lancashire, where Colbron had spent his childhood. The gifts of Jones and Colbron offer examples of the custom by which wealthy Londoners set aside portions of their estates for charitable purposes, a practice that, as Keith Thomas has shown, sparked commemorative activity that, in turn, encouraged further philanthropy.1