Between1289 and 1550 almost 650 wills survive from Wales.1 AsHelen Chandler has argued, in what remains the fullest study of its subject, wills were made throughout Wales from the fourteenth century onwards that were broadly similar in their form, a form which in turn resembled that of wills in England.2 The same was true of probate, with wills having to be proved in an ecclesiastical court before executors appointed by the deceased could take up their office and carry out his or her wishes. It is therefore impossible to assess will-making in medieval Wales without taking account of developments in England, authoritatively traced by Michael M. Sheehan sixty years ago, including the transition in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries from the post obit gift and deathbed gift to the adoption, with some adaptations, of the Romano-canonical testament, together with the establishment of the Church’s jurisdiction over testamentary matters – jurisdiction which, moreover, ‘rested on local custom, not the canon law itself’.3 Also relevant in this connection is Alison Spedding’s more recent argument, in a rare study of the documents’ diplomatic, that the Latin canonical testament in England ‘had more or less achieved its developed form by about 1300’ (that is, the form it followed for the rest of the Middle Ages).4 Most wills in medieval Wales were written in Latin or English, with a handful in French and just one late example partly in Welsh; the use of Welsh only took off after the Reformation, with over 1,000 wills in that language surviving from 1563 to 1858.5 The influence of English testamentary practice is unsurprising in view of the extension of English political and ecclesiastical domination over Wales during the crucial period of the development of the canonical will in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. From the mid-twelfth century all four Welsh dioceses formed part of the province of Canter1 Youngs 2019, p. 409. 2 Chandler 1991. 3 Sheehan 1963; more recent assessment in Helmholz 2004 (quotation at p. 387). 4 Spedding 2014, p. 309. 5 Chandler 1991, p. 11. For wills in Welsh see Morgan 2022. The earliest known will written entirely in Welsh dates from 1563, and one written partly in Welsh from 1539: Fisher 1919, pp. 187–89; Chandler 1991, p. 11; Morgan 2022, pp. 23–24. oral bequests and written wills in medieval wales 426
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