It seems to have been the fate of Anglo-Saxon vernacular wills to be valued by scholars as a resource, yet neglected as a genre worthy of study in its own right. The History of English Law, published in 1898, describes Anglo-Saxon will-making as ‘ill-defined’, warranting only a few pages which seem largely designed to determine that it was neither the Roman testament nor the legal instrument of the later medieval period.¹ Since that date, only two detailed studies of the full corpus have appeared.

The first, published in 1963, is the important and wide-ranging survey by Sheehan.² He considers the...

The sixty-eight documents which make up the corpus of Anglo-Saxon vernacular wills on which this book is based survive in the archives of the religious houses which, almost invariably, were named as beneficiaries.¹ However, extant wills are unevenly distributed both chronologically and across archives, as Map 1 and Table 1 show, with none recorded further north than Burton-upon-Trent (Staffs.).² Ninth-century wills survive largely in the archive of Christ Church, Canterbury, dating between approximately 805 and 889;³ six wills are extant, five as single sheet contemporary manuscripts, and one in a thirteenth-century cartulary associated with Christ Church.⁴ In addition to this...

Since the vernacular wills themselves provide little insight into the process which produced them, any attempt to reconstruct that process must draw on other contemporary documents as well as narrative sources. One text is particularly valuable: the account in the twelfth-century Liber Eliensis of a sequence of post obitum dispositions made by a certain Siferth of Downham (Cambs.). Bishop Æthelwold’s accumulation of land at Downham was not without incident, as in the case of many of Æthelwold’s land deals; this appears to have prompted the compiler of the earlier Libellus, on which the chronicle account is based, to include a...

Land was at the heart of wealth and status in Anglo-Saxon England, and the seriousness with which its transmission was viewed is demonstrated by the process of will-making described in the previous chapter, hedged around as it was with witnesses, documentation and the protection of king and church. It can often be difficult to determine the factors which influenced donors’ decisions, hampered as we are by the limited information in the sources about the donors themselves, their beneficiaries and the history of the estates. However, where donors belonged to the highest echelons of Anglo-Saxon society both they and their families...

For lay donors across the full social spectrum, two factors consistently influenced bequests of land: the Church and the family. The alienation of land to the Church for spiritual benefit, for individual or family commemoration, needed to be balanced with the needs, or expectations, of the kindred. The way in which men and women managed these apparently conflicting claims in their wills is the focus of this chapter.

Compared with the kings, ealdormen and bishops whose wills were the primary focus of the previous chapter, the majority of lay donors were of lower social status, rarely featuring in the historical...

Since truncation of the text in the course of the transmission of wills is possible, and in one or two instances demonstrable, particularly in cartulary versions, it is more than likely that we do not have the full picture of donors’ bequests of chattels, which were particularly vulnerable to omission.¹ No doubt Bede’s deathbed distribution of his ‘few treasures’ (quaedam preciosa) among the priests of his monastery was a typical scenario for both laity and religious, usually unrecorded.² As the evidence stands, movable wealth features almost exclusively in multi-gift wills: three are royal wills, five are the wills of ealdormen,...

Previous chapters have established the significance of bequests to the church, particularly of land, as an aspect of social cohesion involving the interaction of donor, kindred, the king, the local network and beneficiary churches. Bequests of movable wealth were more personal in the sense that they represented the donor and the donor’s family within the locus sanctus itself, on the altar or within the refectory. In the context of gift-giving, all bequests, even though deferred, posit a counter-gift. This chapter explores the spiritual benefits which donors might hope to receive in response to their gifts. In the wills themselves, such...

The phenomenon of the Anglo-Saxon written will was associated with a wealthy elite. The extent to which the documentation of post obitum disposition became customary among the nobility in the tenth and eleventh centuries cannot now be known, although (as Chapter One has shown) it seems likely that the procedure was more widely embraced than the number of surviving wills suggests. More amenable to discussion is why such an instrument came to be valued and used in a society which by custom privileged oral testimony and procedures.

There can be little doubt that the documentation of bequests had its roots...