oral bequests and written wills in medieval wales Woolgar suggests, this may at least partly reflect the fact that from 1148 to 1229 all the bishops were monks and thus not expected to have property of their own to bequeath.37 In north Wales, on the other hand, the principle that bishops could make wills was firmly established only after Edward I’s conquest of 1282– 83.Prior to that, the native princes of Gwynedd, supported by Welsh lawyers, generally opposed this. As mentioned earlier, in 1276 the bishop and chapter of St Asaph complained that Prince Llywelyn had prevented bishops from making wills, even on their deathbed, and of seizing their moveable goods after their death.38 This exercise of theius spolii was consistent with rules in early-to-mid thirteenth-century lawbooks written in north Wales that upheld the right of the secular ruler to seize the moveable goods of a deceased bishop, as these were among the items defined as the ‘king’s waste’.39 Other versions of the rule add that the church’s vestments, books and land were exempt from confiscation. Thus, while Welsh lawyers accepted the canonists’ distinction between the personal property of a bishop and the property of his church, they refused to recognize the right of bishops to bequeath the former.40 In itself, this restriction on the testamentary capacity of bishops was by no means unique to north Wales. To begin with, the restriction of the ius spolii to a bishop’s moveable goods was in line with Romano-canonical law.41 In addition, the legal rules may have been influenced by the reluctance of twelfth- and early thirteenth-century kings of England to allow bishops to make wills, a reluctance shared by some ecclesiastics as well, on the grounds that it was not fitting for bishops to accumulate large personal wealth that could be bequeathed.42 The divergence from practice in north Wales will have become more evident, however, during 436 37 Woolgar 2011, p. 41. 38 Haddan & Stubbs 1869, p. 512 (c. 1). 39 According to the same lawbook, ‘All goods without an owner are King’s waste’: Jenkins 1986, p. 41. ‘Waste’ was one of the sources of royal revenue known as ‘the eight packhorses of the King’: Jenkins 1986, p. 40. 40 Pryce 1993, p. 124. 41 Helmholz 2004, p. 392. 42 Sheehan 1963, pp. 244–45.
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