summary. the open window A testamentarywill was very unusual in Stockholm. Wills regulated by Swedish town law were created to regulate the right to give gifts to religious institutions, i.e. gifts to unrelated individuals or entities. According to Swedish town law, individuals could not bequeath more than a tenth of their immovable property if they had descendants. The same basic principle applied to those who followed the Swedish law of the realm. In addition to that principle, town law foresaw that other hereditary relationships than the most common types could exist. The writing of wills could be for those who did not have children and had no relatives in town, but who had relatives in the countryside, or for those who only had relatives outside Sweden. The further away the testator had family members, the more of his property he could bestow through a will. Up to half the property could be donated to any person or institution outside family, if individuals lacked direct heirs. Burghers in Stockholm did not make use of the will as it was decreed by the Swedish town law because they did not use lineal property to bestow gifts to religious houses. In Stockholm they instead used the capitalized value of the property for donations to religious institutions. This topic will be discussed in further detail below. In Stockholm, a will was instead used for donations of property to the surviving spouses. According to Swedish law, spouses did not belong to the same family and in the eyes of the law they did not inherit property from each other. Burghers in Stockholm converted the town law regulations for gifts to religious houses to comprise spousal gifts. The Swedish town law did not approve of gifts between spouses, but burghers in Stockholm had found a way around this, and they used it as often as possible. In Stockholm, testamentary rights do not appear to have been used for anything other than gifts between spouses. What can be discerned is that such a gift must be reciprocal in order to be valid in Stockholm. Both parties would be prepared to give away portions of their rightful property. This kind of mutual donation, based on the concept of common property (felagstanken), could be observed. Hence, spouses would agree to donate equal portions of their common property to each other. The gift could be initiated by the woman or the man. Sometimes it was ini291
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