Legal Right and Dispute Resolution in Late Medieval England

THE sale of the castle and lordship of Dunster in Somerset, the caput honoris of the ancient family of Mohun, was one of the most curious land transactions ever made in late medieval England. Large estates were rarely sold, still less those at the heart of historic patrimonies. When such sales did occur, the seller’s motive generally lay in a kinship with the heir remote enough to negate the customary bonds of duty and natural affection between them.1 The sale of Dunster does not fall into this category. Although, on his death in 1375, the last Lord Mohun (b.c.1320) had no son to perpetuate his male lineage, he did have three daughters. The decision to deprive them of the central part of their inheritance would have been unusual at this date even had the beneficiary been a male collateral: the preference great landholders of later centuries gave to the indirect male over the direct female heir was anticipated only in embryo by their fourteenth-century forbears.2 But the disinheritance of Lord Mohun’s daughters was not a case of heir male favoured over heir general. It was an outright sale. Stranger still, the sale was carried through not by their father but by their mother. Although the agreement to sell was made while Lord Mohun lived, his wife executed the transaction and received the considerable proceeds. This raised a prima facie case against the sale’s validity. A widow with a fee simple interest in any part of her late husband’s inheritance, let alone its caput honoris, stood in contradiction to the powerful legal and social norm that a widow should have no greater legal estate in her husband’s lands than the life interest given to her by dower or jointure. Even though Lord Mohun, some years before his death, had removed the legal difficulty by vesting Dunster in feoffees to his wife’s use, the social restraint remained, and the whole proceeding was so irregular as to render near-inevitable the major dispute, which followed his widow’s death in 1404

Affection · Ancient history · Beneficiary · Duty · Genealogy · Inheritance (genetic algorithm · Kinship · Obligation · Political science · Wife · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy