The first surviving wills in the probate records of the Court of the Archdeacon of Bedford, dating from 1480, are to be found in the first registers of wills and testaments proved by the Archdeacon or his commissary. These were deposited with other local probate material in the Bedfordshire County Record Office in 1950. For later years original wills survive as well as the registered copies. Original wills begin in 1536, though few survive for that year, but by 1560 probably most original wills copied into the registers have survived, and can be found stored in bundles arranged under the date of probate.

Wills are an invaluable source for local, family and social history, and abstracts of the 396 wills in the first Bedford archdeaconry probate register, ABP/R 1, which date between 1480 and 1526, were published by this Society in 1957 and 1966 as volumes 37 and 45. Only those people with at least a little property made a will, and so such local probate records relate to the more prosperous husbandmen, yeomen and tradesmen and their widows, and also to the parish clergy and some minor gentry. Such a person would use the parish priest or another literate person to write down in proper form what he or she wanted done with their property, and after death those named as executors took the document to the Archdeacon's Court for probate, and then, armed with the probate copy, they could execute the testator's wishes.

People of higher rank or with extensive estates used the Prerogative Court of Canterbury. Mrs Margaret McGregor edited a volume of P.C.C. wills between 1383 and 1548 of people connected with Bedfordshire which was published by this Society in 1979 as volume 58. She notes that two wills proved in the P.C.C. were also registered, though not proved, in the Bedford archdeaconry court, one being no. 9 in this volume, John Hardyng of Harlington, which was no. 94 in volume 48. A full account of all probate courts and probate records covering Bedfordshire can be found in the introduction by Christopher Pickford to the Index of Bedfordshire Probate Records 1484-1858.

In the present volume we are continuing the publication of wills proved in the court of the Archdeacon of Bedford, and include all the wills in the second probate register, ABP/R 2, and some from the third register, ABP/R 3.