testaments as a source for everyday life tries during the high Middle Ages. A tradition in organising documents can, at least partly, be explained by its own momentum. Let us take a look at the wider system of which the production of documents is a part. The English historian Richard Britnell has labelled it pragmatic literacy; this is not literature (including theology, poetry, etc.) but instead recordkeeping. He places the European tradition in a world historical perspective, and claims that Latin Christendom is unique in the amount of materials that have survived. “They must correspond to some feature of archival practice that is culturally distinctive. The irrationality involved in keeping large quantities of bulky matter, of no literary interest, for centuries after it has ceased to have any practical value is a remarkable feature of Latin Christendom”.26 He does not really give an explanation for this feature and neither shall I, but within this wider mentality in relation to documents several local habits could develop where the pragmatic text could be more or less well-preserved. In this way, windows to detailed knowledge may open. Testaments with many objects are sources that we can use in this way. They are largely underutilised, although there has been some research on textiles and books.27 Two moods of investigation can be followed when researching objects in testaments, both of them appropriate. One is to focus on a specific type of object, and the other is to deal with only a few documents to analyse how one person passes on objects in individual bequests.28 I shall examine five types of objects: weapons, animals, textiles, books, and gold and silver items.29 368 26 Britnell 1997, p. 24. Indeed, archives in other parts of the world also open historical windows for detailed research about ordinary people, but not to the same extent. 27 For England e.g. Burkholder 2005 on textiles, Goldberg 1994 on books. 28 For Scandinavia Ingesman 1987 studied atestament by one canon at the cathedral in Lund, and Myrdal 2014 studied the networks around a parish priest and a noblewoman. 29 Blixt 2022 has surveyed rather many of the large testaments and showed that these were the most common categories in her sample. The Large Testaments
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