Dealings with men's wills.
Older theory of wills.
the payment was arbitrary and extortionate. Henry promises
that the heir of a tenant-in-chief shall not be constrained
to redeem—to buy back—his father's lands as
had been done in his brother's time; he shall relieve
them by a just and lawful relief.[1] Under Rufus then
it was held that the land had, by the former holder's
death, actually passed to the king, as the common heir
of all men, and that, if the son or other representative
of the former holder wished to possess it, he must, in
the strictest sense, buy it back from the king. Henry
acknowledges the rights of the heir, while still maintaining
the theory of the fresh grant. The heir is not to
redeem—to buy back—his father's land; he is merely to
relieve it—to take it up again, and he is to pay only the
sum prescribed by legal custom, the equivalent of the
ancient heriot or the modern succession-duty. So it is
with personal property. The Red King, it is plain,
claimed to be the heir of men's money, as well as of their
land. For one of Henry's promised reforms is that the
wills of his barons and others his men shall stand good,
that their money shall go to the purposes to which they
may have bequeathed it, and that, if they die without
wills, their wives, children, kinsfolk, or lawful men, shall
dispose of it as they may think best for the dead man's
soul.[2] Such a reform could not have been needed unless
William Rufus had been in the habit of interfering with
men's free right of bequest. And it might have been
plausibly argued that the right of bequest was no natural
- ↑ Select Charters, 97. "Si quis baronum, comitum meorum sive aliorum qui de me tenent, mortuus fuerit, hæres suus non redimet terram suam sicut faciebat tempore fratris mei, sed justa et legitima relevatione relevabit eam."
- ↑ Ib. "Et si quis baronum vel hominum meorum infirmabitur, sicut ipse dabit vel dare disponet pecuniam suam, ita datam esse concedo. Quod si ipse præventus armis vel infirmitate, pecuniam suam non dederit vel dare disposuerit, uxor sua sive liberi aut parentes, et legitimi homines ejus, eam pro anima ejus dividant, sicut eis melius visum fuerit."
