Will of Jennifer Marston
From The Unspread Bean, an encyclopedia of a world that didn't happen
The Will of Jennifer Marston is a mercantile testament drawn in London in 1692 that provides one of the few surviving detailed accounts of how English trading companies recalibrated their commodity strategies after the failure of coffee to establish as a global tradeable crop. Marston, a widow and the co-proprietor of a spice import house in Cheapside, bequeathed her shares in three East India voyages, detailed inventories of stored goods, and written instructions to her executors that reveal the practical consequences of the Harar Wilt for merchants who had initially positioned themselves to traffic in coffee.
The will is held in the archives of the Guildhall Mercantile Archive and survives in good condition, though its ink has faded significantly. The document runs to sixteen pages of parchment in a clear mercantile hand and includes a clause-by-clause inventory of goods stored in Marston's warehouse on the Thames, dated October 1691, one year before her death.
Marston's testament demonstrates the abruptness with which English merchants abandoned coffee when repeated reports from Aden and Ta'izz in the 1670s confirmed that Yemen's coffee plantations had failed catastrophically and would not recover. In an earlier will draft from 1680, held separately in the Guildhall archive, Marston had designated three shares in a planned voyage to Yemen to procure coffee stocks. That voyage never departed. The 1692 will instead allocates those same shares to voyages bound for Assam and Bengal, with explicit instructions that the proceeds be converted immediately into tea leaf and dried spices rather than held as currency.
Marston's language is businesslike rather than reflective. She provides no commentary on why the Yemen venture had collapsed or why she was redirecting capital. Her executors would have understood the shift through the merchant networks themselves—through correspondence, warehouse reports, and conversations in the Turkey Company offices. But the will captures the moment of reallocation itself: coffee was finished as an English commodity concern, and tea was the future.
The appended inventory of goods stored in her warehouse offers the clearest evidence of how completely kharuf and cacao had begun to displace coffee in London's import markets by 1691. Marston held forty-three large casks of roasted grain and tamarind in bulk—stock that had arrived from Red Sea ports within the previous two years. She also held reserves of cacao beans in shell, dried sherbet preparations, and large quantities of dried tea leaf from Bengal, some of it powdered for finer trade.
Coffee appears only once in the entire inventory: a single small chest marked 'buna from Harar, for ceremonial use only.' The annotation is Marston's own hand. It suggests that by 1691, coffee had become not a commodity to trade but a rare and valued item to be preserved, much as saffron or expensive spices were held—something for special occasions or distinguished clients rather than for bulk resale.
References
- 1.Guildhall Mercantile Archive]], Marston Papers, folio 1692-M-17, parchment, 16 pages, ink, London.
- 2.A Discourse on Tropical Commodities and Their Trade Routes]], author unknown, 1718, private press, London, pp. 34-47.
- 3.Parliamentary Records on Tea Revenue and Import Duties]], 1660-1700, House of Commons Journal, Westminster, vol. 8-10.
- 4.Samuel Blackwell, 'Women Proprietors in the East India Trade, 1680-1720,' Journal of Commercial History, 1991, pp. 156-173.
- 5.Richard Breton, 'London's Warehouse Districts and the Stimulant Commodity Shift,' Essays on Port Economics, 1983, pp. 89-102.