Ann Turner, of Betchworth, drawing up her last will and testament in 1783, left everything to her sons, and nothing to chance. Her will runs to about ten pages, identifying every single one of the 1,545 items she owned: her walking cane, her marrow spoon, her copy of Tillotson's Sermons, her lace ruffles, her dung cart, three hens, 13 chickens and much, much more.

George Fillipot, a mealman from Wansworthe, was more succinct as he prepared to leave behind his worldly goods in 1603: “Because the time is dangerous and the life of man is in the hand of God if my son and wife die I will my brother shall be my Executor.”

These are just two of 28,000 wills, drawn up in Surrey between 1470 and 1856, and published online yesterday for the first time by the Origins Network, a family history website. The wills are astonishingly varied, a chapter of social history like no other spanning four centuries, but what Ann Turner, George Fillipot, and almost all the will-writers share is the urgency of their bequests. Wills and bequests matter deeply to ordinary people, now and in the past, in a way that historians and governments too often forget.

A will is an epitaph in possessions. It can be a vehicle for malice, revenge, charity or love. Ambitious will-writers hope to change the world after leaving it. More often, the testator expresses the hope his chattels should not fall into the wrong hands after death. James Gouldsmith, weaver of Waldingham, was emphatic in 1604: “Son-in-law Daniell Stone touching whom I have sworn he should never have any dealings with any things that are mine.”

Some wills are grandiose - such as Francis Drake's wish to be buried at sea, like a Viking, with his favourite ships sunk alongside him - but most are touchingly humble. John Pigeon, dying in 1618, leaves his wife Alice “the bed I lie in”. Captain Charles Dodgson, Lewis Carroll's grandfather, inserted into his will a touching premonitory passage addressed to his wife, just days before he was killed in action in 1804: “A heart more warmly attached to her than that which dictates these lines she can never find.”

Some testators bequeath lasting mysteries. Why, for example, did William Shakespeare leave Anne Hathaway his “second best bed”, and not the best one? Others left strict and eccentric instructions. The Canadian millionaire lawyer Charles Vance Millar left the bulk of his estate in 1926 to whichever Toronto woman managed to give birth to the largest number of children in the ten years after his death. After a procreative race known as the “Great Stork Derby” (and a failed legal challenge by Millar's other heirs) four women received $125,000 each, having produced nine children apiece.

The testator who leaves his money to the Church of Scientology or Oxfam is not acting so differently to the man from Mirfield in Yorkshire who left a friend his entire music collection on condition “that he agrees to play Bat out of Hell (the whole CD) at least three times, and listens to it”. The will in these cases is about propagating values and beliefs posthumously, whether for charity, religion or Meat Loaf.

Though some bequests are more demanding than others, what all have in common is the desire to ensure that cherished possessions continue to be treasured, that the people or things we love or admire are rewarded, that our money continues to do what we want it to do - whether that means leaving a favourite dung cart to a favoured son or, in the case of the late countess Karlotta Libenstein, bequeathing an estate worth £180 million to an eight-year-old Alsatian named Gunther IV, along with a butler.

The most elaborate wills seldom work out quite as expected. George Bernard Shaw left £1 million and the royalties from his plays to the cause of rationalising English spelling. Shaw (rightly) argued that English spelling is illogical, and there are insufficient letters for the variety of sounds in the language. Once the will had been disputed, and the lawyers had taken their cut, the bequest was whittled down to almost nothing. Fifty-eight years after his death, Shaw's campaign is a £500 prize on spelling reform. And there are still only 26 letters in the alphabet (or alfabet). The urge to preserve and pass on to the next generation transcends class and wealth. In the Surrey wills, the poorest are as determined to see their few possessions disbursed rightly as those owning great estates. Nor is charity the preserve of the rich: people with almost nothing give generously to those with even less.

Inheritance is often portrayed as the wealthy clinging to their riches down the generations, but the desire to bequeath is practically universal (although some unlikely people have died intestate, including Abraham Lincoln, Karl Marx and Pablo Picasso).

The bounce in popularity enjoyed by the Tories after pledging to raise the threshold for inheritance tax (and the Government's subsequent attempt to play catch-up) reflected resentment at a posthumous levy widely seen as unfair. The middle class is prepared to pay taxes while alive, but considerably less content to have to pay tax a second time after death.

The right to leave what we want, to whom or what we want, is deeply cherished in British culture, but also a strange and intriguing index of our lives; net worth at death is not the only or best way to measure real worth, but it is one we cling to. When The Times made a move to stop reporting wills in the 1990s, there was an outcry.

Our love of legacy may lie not in the last will, but the testament that it contains or implies. A will leaves behind something for our inheritors, perhaps something for the taxman, a few objects, and a little postscript to our lives.

Times Recommends

• Police beg us for food. What hope is there?
• Moral darkness that engulfed Baby P
• More to Advent than cheap chocolate