<i>Devising, Dying and Dispute: Probate Litigation in Early Modern England</i>, by Lloyd Bonfield
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Devising, Dying and Dispute: Probate Litigation in Early Modern England, by Lloyd Bonfield. Burlington, Vermont, Ashgate Publishing, 2012. xvi, 293 pp. $119.95 US (cloth). Few people currently think to turn to the wills, allegations, depositions, and sentences associated with the PCC and housed in the mighty National Archives for stories of marriages gone bad, prodigal sons, and cheating servants, but tales of familiar discord is just one tale that Lloyd Bonfield's Devising, Dying and Dispute seeks to tell. The other is a legal examination of the reasons behind the tightening up of will-making requirements, and particularly the effect that the Statute of Fraud (1677) had on the process. Bonfield more successfully engages with the law than with the family, but has nonetheless alerted us to the virtually unexplored and important source of social history, offering tantalizing glimpses of the stories that lie within. Bonfield grounds his three-part volume with introductory chapters on the culture of will-making. He describes a messy world that generated competing copies of single wills, multiple and antagonistic executors, questionable legacies, and a legal environment that placed the burden of sorting out fact from fiction on the judge. The two chapters of Part I clearly and succinctly set out the distinctive history of English will-making and its place in the Church Courts, the Statute of Frauds, and an overview of reasons behind testamentary litigation (uncontested probates and issues of mental capacity and coercion tie for the lead). Bonfield next outlines his hypothesis that frames two-thirds of the book: Was the Statute of Frauds adopted to decrease the level of litigation? If so, it only worked in decreasing the number of contested oral wills. Bonfield writes about legal issues with a simple and clear prose style that highlights the relevancy of 300-year-old legislation for today's world, as well as making quite technical aspects of the law understandable for those in other fields. The second section is a fascinating and careful exploration of issues of mental capacity and coercion, particularly surrounding nuncupative wills. It is here that Bonfield's fine legal mind shines. Even with advanced estate planning, last minute changes to a will could raise a slew of questions surrounding the testator's true intent, and it is here that we begin to see the less scrupuless side of human behaviour, as weak and dying individuals were subjected to manipulation and fraud. Bonfield's discussion of the legal understanding of mental incapacity has important implication for our understanding of growing old, as well as an appreciation of what was at stake for friends and family. The book's final section is at once its weakest and most exciting part. Entitled Windows into Social Relationships, the final three chapters seek to explore the dynamics of family relations and enigmatic human conduct (p. 177). Chapter eight explores the issue of how to prove a valid marriage, a particularly vexing problem for judges in the face of multiple claimants for the role of surviving spouse. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".