What Timothy Winship Died With

When peruke-maker Timothy Winship died, he made his third wife, Elizabeth, his executrix.

Late in 1767 she filed an inventory of her husband’s property with the probate judge, Thomas Hutchinson (who was also Massachusetts lieutenant governor and chief justice of the superior court).

Winship wasn’t a rich man. He owned no real estate, and a lot of his goods were assessed as common or old. On the other hand, his household had touches of gentility: four feather beds and four pillows, a “Square Mahogany Table,” two pictures under glass, two wineglasses and a decanter, six teacups and saucers, a silver watch.

Required by law to serve in the militia, Winship owned two guns with bayonets and two swords.

The inventory listed Winship’s books:

• “1 Bible” (3s.)
• “Hervey’s Life and Letters, 2 books, 1 lost” (4s.), probably Collection of the Letters of James Hervey, to which is prefixed an account of his Life and Death, by Thomas Birch (1760, reprinted in Boston two years later by Zechariah Fowle and Samuel Draper). The Rev. James Hervey (1714-1758) was an Anglican theologian. 
• “Life and Reign of Queen Ann” (2s.8d.), probably Abel Boyer’s History of the Life and Reign of Queen Anne (1722).
• “1 Companions the Feasts & Fasts of the Church of England” (2s.8d.), or Robert Nelson’s A Companion for the Festivals and Fasts of the Church of England (1704), which Brent S. Sirota describes as “arguably the most popular and important Anglican devotional work of the eighteenth century.”

In her study of colonial New England probate inventories from 1774, Alice Hanson Jones found that only the top fifth of inventoried estates contained non-religious books. Winship’s book about Queen Anne was therefore unusual.

Another page of Winship’s inventory detailed what the assessors found in his shop. So this is what you might find walking into a middling peruke-maker’s workspace in 1767 Boston:

• “6 ounces of white Horse hair @ 1/6”
• “3 lb. Brown ditto 16/ p lb.”
• “1 lb. Grey & Brown”
• “18 oz. Goat ditto 2/ p oz.”
• “7 oz. Mo. Grown hair”
• “4 Blocks @ 6/”
• “1 Card & brush 8/”
• “1 pr. brushes 3/”
• “1 doz. Razors @ 7/”
• “1 Hone”
• “7 Wiggs @ 12/”
• “7 1/2 Pewter More [?] @ 10”
• “1 Looking Glass”
• “1 Lamp Lanthorn”
• “1 Table”
• “2 old Chairs”
• “1 Round Do.”

All told, Winship’s tools and inventory were worth a little less than £14.

TOMORROW: Where did Winship’s death leave young Joseph Akley?