anders leegaard knudsen sive. There was no main place to store testaments in medieval Denmark, no central archive in either the kingdom or any of its parts. No diocese or town stored all its testaments in one place, nor were the testaments registered or recorded by any authority. There seems to be no system for how the testaments were stored, but they might simply have ended up in the archive of the beneficiary of the largest legacy as proof of rightful possession.5 We do indeed know that most of the extant medieval testaments survived in an ecclesiastical archive, but others only appear in the collections of the antiquarians of the eighteenth century,and their whereabouts before then are unknown to us. No lay archive from the Middle Ages has survived intact until today, not even the royal archive, which is the largest and most important nonecclesiastical archive. Primogeniture was unknown in medieval Denmark and hence every generation saw a dividing of the estates, and along with the dividing of the lands went the dividing of the archives until many deeds had lost their importance as proof of ownership. The ecclesiastical archives preserved many important documents, including testaments, but their survival rate is not impressive. The Reformation in 1536 led to the dissolution of most of the monasteries. Of the 127 or so monasteries in medieval Denmark, we only have remnants of an archive or a register of its contents from less than a third.6 Even the episcopal archives and the archives of cathedral chapters suffered great losses, and the contents of some of them remain largely unknown to us. Finally, at least some of the perhaps two thousand parish churches in medieval Denmark had archives, but we know the contents of only a few of them.7 This is true for all types of documents, not just testaments. But the evidence points to the conclusion that many testaments were in fact already discarded in the Middle Ages. Once the task of the executors had been conducted and the legacies had been paid out in full to all the be5 Ingesman 1987, p. 205. 6 Thirty-six, or 28%, to be precise, calculated on the basis of Garner 1968 and Jexlev 1973– 77. 7 See Jexlev 1973–77. 151
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