-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Mary Frances Giandrea, Linda Tollerton. Wills and Will-Making in Anglo-Saxon England., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Pages 915–916, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.915
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Medieval historians have long recognized the importance of the corpus of Anglo-Saxon wills, particularly after the publication of Dorothy Whitelock's edition and translation in 1930. Yet it has never been the subject of a comprehensive analysis. Linda Tollerton fills this lacuna beautifully with an elegant survey that pays particular attention to the social uses of these documents. This is no easy task, because the small corpus of sixty-eight vernacular wills is unevenly distributed across time and space. Only nine wills, for example, date before ca. 900, and six of these were archived by one religious community, Christ Church, Canterbury. Tollerton successfully manages these challenges by approaching the corpus from a variety of angles (political, social, familial, and religious) and by avoiding gross generalizations.
The first chapter establishes the nature of the corpus itself, which sounds easy but is not. In addition to their uneven distribution, many of the wills survive in cartulary copies rather than as single sheets and more than two-thirds date to the period after the Norman Conquest. Forgery is therefore always a possibility. It is also sometimes difficult to identify dates of disposition, the exact locations of estates, and even donors' names, details that must have been known to the parties involved but are now lost to us. A careful examination of these issues is thus indispensable. Tollerton breaks new ground in chapter two, which surveys the evidence for the process of will-making. Once again this may seem obvious, but as the author demonstrates, “the vernacular wills themselves provide little insight into the process which produced them” (p. 56). Taking into account a wide range of sources, including narratives, Tollerton explores the oral aspect of will-making that lies behind the documents, as well as the processes of documentation and disposition. This chapter underscores the vulnerability of wills, as donors clearly sought protection of their bequests against predatory kin and, at times, equally predatory kings and churchmen.
