The greatest value in a Scandinavian testament was nearly always land, and the wish to prove the ownership of estates was the reason to preserve the documents. Most testaments in Scandinavia were kept by religious institutions. As shown by other articles in this volume, the institutional setting for making a last will in Sweden and Scandinavia was different than in southern Europe, and testaments were normally not recorded in registers. The present article will show that Swedish testaments from the middle of the thirteenth century and for more than a hundred years afterwards included bequests of personal objects, such as jewellery or cloth, and they offer a rich cache of information. Most Scandinavian wills were written in a rural context, which is why livestock was often bequeathed. In other comparable European studies concerning chattel,2 livestock is practically non-existent, perhaps because of the urban context.3 In England, a few testaments in the 10th century mention many animals, but in the next period with frequent bequests of items, the 13thcentury, livestock was donated by less well-to-do testators giving a few sheep or a single cow.4 English livestock could also be an asset to an estate.5 1 My relation to testaments started many years ago, when I wrote my dissertation on agriculture in medieval Sweden. Last wills turned out to be an important source, as many of the bequests were farm animals. Later I used wills when researching plagues. Here, I raise particularly the issue of personal objects. 2 The term ‘chattels’ originally described cattle, which once formed the bulk of movable property donated in most countries (Teague 2013, p. 16). 3 Baur 1989, pp. 222–223 for Konstanz; Epstein 1984, p. 107 for Genoa. 4 Sheehan 1963, pp. 101–102, 284. 5 Sheehan 1963, p. 102; Teague 2013, p. 85, with an example from 1419. – I regard livestock linked to a specific farm as inventory, and I have published a study on inventories from medieval Sweden and Denmark (Myrdal 2007). See also Myrdal 1985, pp. 211–237, where all items related to agriculture from about a hundred and fifty documents have been listed. My dissertation in 1985 concentrated on field farming, and the sections about animal husbandry had to be left aside. Many years later, I published a book partly based on the chapters on livestock, but then mainly on herding and dairy production. I also had some of the quantifications occur as articles, but the data about spatial distribution below has never been published before. – In a study of the Black Death and other plagues, I used testaments as a proxy for increased mortality. In Myrdal 2003a, 132–136, testaments in relatestaments as a source for everyday life 360 Livestock and plagues1
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=