late medieval wills in southwest german imperial towns 1803/06, the imperial cities also fell to the new lords, the kings of Württemberg, who took all the archival records important for their purposes and integrated them into the state archives.27 The transmission of wills is very unevenly distributed. In the Reutlingen City Archives, whose two volumes of documents published in recent years contain almost 2000 documents,28 there are just 2 wills and 6 testamentary foundations before the year 1500. In Esslingen, the number of wills is considerably higher; after looking through the various ordered and unordered holdings, I found about 40 wills. In Ulm, on the other hand, there are about 70 wills and many more similar documents, which will be discussed later.29 This varying transmission was caused by certain factors. In the early modern archival inventories of Esslingen, whole drawers of documents full of wills are still mentioned; they were arranged alphabetically: 61. Testamenten A.B.C.D.E.; 66. Testamenten F.G. H.I.K.; 71. Testamenten L.M.N.O.P.; 81. Testamenten V.W.X.Y.Z.30 Unfortunately, we do not know how old they were. All these documents have been lost. There were many more wills in Esslingen and Reutlingen, but in the course of the early modern period and once again in the 19th century they were cancelled, i.e. thrown away by the archivists as useless. In the city archives of Reutlingen, this development can even be proven in concrete terms. In the records of the late 16th century there is a bundle of documents from 1579 which are stapled with strips of parchment. If one looks at these more closely, a 14th-century document in German was used as a strip; it is the oldest Reutlingen will, maculated already in 1576.31 Each of the three towns had its own town law and jurisdiction based on sovereign privileges. Canon law had precise regulations for wills.32 Very different rights applied in the imperial cities, as the legal framework for wills was also quite individual.33 In Ulm, on 14 April 1367, precise re27 Cf. Halbekann 2007; Litz 1997; Breyvogel 2013. 28 Kreutz ed. 2019; Deigendesch et al., ed. 2023. 29 The figures are provisional; the search continues. 30 Stadtarchiv Esslingen 23 III 11. 31 Stadtarchiv Reutlingen, A 1 Nr. 14246. 32 Rigaudeau 2020; Rigaudeau 2021. 33 For comparison Schmidt-Recla 2011; Bongermino 2020, pp. 44–60, 105–107 for the different practices in the region under Lübeck law. 22
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