[I have divided the documents into paragraphs to make for easier reading.]

A good deal of what we know about specific individual lay women living in towns comes from their wills; because of their low involvement in politics or large-scale business, and lesser involvement than men in acquiring and managing property, they inevitably make less of a mark on majority of the types of records that have survived to us from medieval England. As with the men, it is the women of the urban upper crust who are most in evidence through wills.

It is unfortunate that we must largely identify townswomen by their relationships to men. Joan de Thornegge was the daughter of Ralph le Keu (or Cook), a man in evidence around the turn of the century; in 1297/98 he travelled to St. Albans and Norwich on community business, and three years worth of tax assessments (1299-1301) were remitted, in consideration of his work on behalf of the community. He is not known to have held a borough office, although his brother Richard served as chamberlain and jurat, but he was a scabin of the merchant gild from 1295 to 1299. Ralph was also a customs collector at Lynn 1298-1303. So the family was of some account in the town. Joan was also the widow of one of Lynn's most prominent townsmen of the early fourteenth century. John de Thornegge had probably died about five years before Joan drew up her will, although he had drawn up his own will in 1330. When Joan actually died we are not certain, but the wills of both her and John did not receive probate before the mayor until March 1345.

Before he died, John de Thornegge had served his community as mayor for five terms between 1315/16 and 1330/31, and may have served in that capacity in 1313/14 as well. In other years during the same period he is found in the posts of jurat and ward constable, and twice represented Lynn at parliament (1321 and 1324). He was also very active in the royal customs service, in the posts of collector of wool custom from 1318 to 1320 and again from 1322 to 1334, as collector of prisage (1322-27, and from 1328 possibly until his death), and as a searcher for counterfeit or smuggled coin (1324-35).

John first appears in the local records in 1303, when his goods were valued, for taxation purposes, at £26.13s.4d, well above the average. The surname does appear in Lynn earlier in the reign of Edward I, but John or his family may have been relatively recent arrivals from Thornage, Norfolk (some 25 miles west-north-west of Lynn), for John's will shows continued connections: he bequeathed 20s. to the fabric of the village church at Thornage, provided for an anniversary service for his soul in that church, and made a charitable donation to poor people there. John had married Joan before 1309, when the pair made an agreement with Joan's sister Margaret and her husband John de Frenge about the division of the women's inheritance from their father, Ralph Cok. Joan and her husband received the northern part of a tenement in Wingate and a half share in a riverside quay associated; this is evidently one of the properties bequeathed in Joan's will (the distinction between Wingate and the Chequer sometimes being blurred).

John was a merchant, apparently specializing in victualling: in 1314 he received a royal safeconduct to take victuals throughout England for trading purposes, and another safeconduct in 1322 to acquire grain and other victuals for the use of the king's army in the north – later that year he is seen as co-owner of the vessel Margaret bound for Norway to bring back victuals. His one-year protection from the king may also have been for trading purposes. The Margaret was not the only ship in which he had an interest, for in 1319 he and Thomas Melchburne, who would become one of the most active Lynn merchants of that generation, complained that their ship the Godyer, carrying a cargo worth £200 – wheat, worsted, and other cloth – to Gascony had been captured by Flemish pirates. That same year he had been sent by Lynn as one of its representatives to a national Merchant Assembly, to discuss the stabilization of the wool trade. He is also seen at that time or slightly later selling timber to the borough, for work needed on the guildhall. Two years earlier he had been given £20 worth of the goods of the merchant gild, to trade with on the gild's behalf; although no record of his membership in the gild has survived, we can take it as a given, and in 1321/22 he served as one of the gild scabins.

Although Joan was named one of the executors of her husband, his will bequeaths her nothing; doubtless he considered her widow's dower, along with what she held in her own right, would suffice to support her in the style to which she was accustomed. John's will refers to his daughter Margaret, to whom he left one property (on condition she used the income from the same to support anniversary celebrations for him for ten years), some cash, and some precious household items. There is no mention of Joan's other daughter Agnes; possibly she was the offspring of an earlier marriage. Despite the lack of attention paid Joan in her husband's will, the close bond between the pair may be suggested by the fact also among his executor's was Joan's sister Margaret Frenge, while the couple's son-in-law John de Massingham was another executor. Massingham himself was a good match for Thornegge's daughter; he was himself a prospering merchant and served two mayoral terms at Lynn – in fact was in that capacity and heading proceedings when the Thornegge's wills were together brought in for probate. After he succumbed to the plague in 1349, his widow Agnes married Ancelm Braunch.

The roster of executors was completed by Thomas Shillyng. Shillyng and his wife were remembered in the will with bequests of small valuables, but their daughter Joan received a property on Stonegate with a staith, while her sister Margaret received an associated property comprising three shops with upper rooms (both on condition of applying the income from the same to anniversaries for Thornhegge's soul). Clearly the Shillyng and Thornegge families were close, but whether it was a matter of kinship or friendship is unknown; possibly Thomas' wife Agnes may have been Joan's other daughter. The Shillyngs were from the wealthy urban upper crust, although not so politically prominent as Thornegge, and Thomas acted as the community attorney from 1331 to 1344.

It is notable that Joan's bequests focus on female members of the family. She and her husband are not known to have had any male heirs, but their daughter Margaret had a son by John de Massingham, and Joan's sister Margaret also had two sons; if they were still living in 1341, then they are ignored by Joan's will. On the other hand, John's will had ignored those of Joan's nieces to whom she made bequests, so perhaps she was just redressing a perceived imbalance.