I - Wills

Summary

Introduction

The documents collected by Whitelock in Anglo-Saxon Wills (1930) give rise to a number of issues. Writing in the General Preface to her volume, Hazeltine suggests that the documents it contains are not wills but documents providing evidence of an oral contract (1930: vii–viii). In a discussion of the origins of property, however, Hudson observes that in the Anglo-Saxon period, provided specific and limited public dues were fulfilled, possession was secure. Land was transmissible, alienability and heritability had been established and were both subjected to and protected by royal authority (1994: 201). The writing in English of documents that we recognise as wills appears to have begun in Kent in the first half of the ninth century; there are no examples from other parts of England until the next century, though this knowledge is based on the chance survival of texts and cartularies from a few houses (including Canterbury, Rochester, Winchester and Westminster), and several of these supply only a single example (Whitelock et al. 1968: 19). The development of legal practices in the ecclesiastical houses involving the personal will shifted the nature of property and ownership in English law during and after the Conquest, and through the middle years of the thirteenth century the royal courts came to recognise the position of an executor as both the active and passive representative of the testator with acknowledged powers of arbitration (Sheehan 1988: 6). These developments all brought the medieval will closer to the modern model.

Period and language

More than fifty wills survive from the Anglo-Saxon period, although the majority of these are later copies by monastic scribes rather than survivals of contemporary forms (Whitelock 1930: xli). Besides the wills that are extant in the vernacular, Whitelock suggests that there are about a dozen Latin documents in medieval cartularies which are probably translations or abstracts of Old English wills. As an example, we include the Latin abstract of the will of Æthelgifu (4b) – although compared with the vernacular original, the Latin abstract is somewhat uninformative. Documentary evidence from the succeeding centuries is much rarer. A handful of thirteenth-century ornamenta or mortuaries may be found, although these are more properly inventories detailing the fabric and effects of particular bishops or ecclesiastical magnates, made at the time of death for the benefit of the successor.