Ancient Law Part 4

The first question relates to the _universitas juris_; that is, a university (or bundle) of rights and duties. A _universitas juris_ is a collection of rights and duties united by the single circ.u.mstance of their having belonged at one time to some one person. It is, as it were, the legal clothing of some given individual. It is not formed by grouping together _any_ rights and _any_ duties. It can only be const.i.tuted by taking all the rights and all the duties of a particular person. The tie which so connects a number of rights of property, rights of way, rights to legacies, duties of specific performance, debts, obligations to compensate wrongs--which so connects all these legal privileges and duties together as to const.i.tute them a _universitas juris_, is the _fact_ of their having attached to some individual capable of exercising them. Without this _fact_ there is no university of rights and duties. The expression _universitas juris_ is not cla.s.sical, but for the notion jurisprudence is exclusively indebted to Roman law; nor is it at all difficult to seize. We must endeavour to collect under one conception the whole set of legal relations in which each one of us stands to the rest of the world. These, whatever be their character and composition, make up together a _universitas juris_; and there is but little danger of mistake in forming the notion, if we are only careful to remember that duties enter into it quite as much as rights. Our duties may overbalance our rights. A man may owe more than he is worth, and therefore if a money value is set on his collective legal relations he may be what is called insolvent. But for all that the entire group of rights and duties which centres in him is not the less a "juris universitas."

We come next to a "universal succession." A universal succession is a succession to a _universitas juris_. It occurs when one man is invested with the legal clothing of another, becoming at the same moment subject to all his liabilities and ent.i.tled to all his rights.

In order that the universal succession may be true and perfect, the devolution must take place _uno ictu_, as the jurists phrase it. It is of course possible to conceive one man acquiring the whole of the rights and duties of another at different periods, as for example by successive purchases; or he might acquire them in different capacities, part as heir, part as purchaser, part as legatee. But though the group of rights and duties thus made up should in fact amount to the whole legal personality of a particular individual, the acquisition would not be a universal succession. In order that there may be a true universal succession, the transmission must be such as to pa.s.s the whole aggregate of rights and duties at the _same_ moment and in virtue of the _same_ legal capacity in the recipient. The notion of a universal succession, like that of a juris universitas, is permanent in jurisprudence, though in the English legal system it is obscured by the great variety of capacities in which rights are acquired, and, above all, by the distinction between the two great provinces of English property, "realty" and "personalty." The succession of an a.s.signee in bankruptcy to the entire property of the bankrupt is, however, a universal succession, though as the a.s.signee only pays debts to the extent of the a.s.sets, this is only a modified form of the primary notion. Were it common among us for persons to take a.s.signments of _all_ a man's property on condition of paying _all_ his debts, such transfers would exactly resemble the universal successions known to the oldest Roman Law. When a Roman citizen _adrogated_ a son, _i.e._ took a man, not already under Patria Potestas, as his adoptive child, he succeeded _universally_ to the adoptive child's estate, _i.e._ he took all the property and became liable for all the obligations. Several other forms of universal succession appear in the primitive Roman Law, but infinitely the most important and the most durable of all was that one with which we are more immediately concerned, Haereditas or Inheritance. Inheritance was a universal succession occurring at a death. The universal successor was Haeres or Heir. He stepped at once into all the rights and all the duties of the dead man. He was instantly clothed with his entire legal person, and I need scarcely add that the special character of the Haeres remained the same, whether he was named by a Will or whether he took on an Intestacy. The term Haeres is no more emphatically used of the Intestate than of the Testamentary Heir, for the manner in which a man became Haeres had nothing to do with the legal character he sustained. The dead man's universal successor, however he became so, whether by Will or by Intestacy, was his Heir. But the Heir was not necessarily a single person. A group of persons considered in law as a single unit, might succeed as _co-heirs_ to the Inheritance.

Let me now quote the usual Roman definition of an Inheritance. The reader will be in a position to appreciate the full force of the separate terms. _Haereditas est successio in universum jus quod defunctus habuit_ ("an inheritance is a succession to the entire legal position of a deceased man"). The notion was that, though the physical person of the deceased had perished, his legal personality survived and descended unimpaired on his Heir or Co-heirs, in whom his ident.i.ty (so far as the law was concerned) was continued. Our own law, in const.i.tuting the Executor or Administrator the representative of the deceased to the extent of his personal a.s.sets, may serve as an ill.u.s.tration of the theory from which it emanated, but, although it ill.u.s.trates, it does not explain it. The view of even the later Roman Law required a closeness of correspondence between the position of the deceased and of his Heir which is no feature of an English representation; and in the primitive jurisprudence everything turned on the continuity of succession. Unless provision was made in the will for the instant devolution of the testator's rights and duties on the Heir or Co-heirs, the testament lost all its effect.

In modern Testamentary jurisprudence, as in the later Roman law, the object of first importance is the execution of the testator's intentions. In the ancient law of Rome the subject of corresponding carefulness was the bestowal of the Universal Succession. One of these rules seems to our eyes a principle dictated by common sense, while the other looks very much like an idle crotchet. Yet that without the second of them the first would never have come into being is as certain as any proposition of the kind can be.

In order to solve this apparent paradox, and to bring into greater clearness the train of ideas which I have been endeavouring to indicate, I must borrow the results of the inquiry which was attempted in the earlier portion of the preceding chapter. We saw one peculiarity invariably distinguishing the infancy of society. Men are regarded and treated, not as individuals, but always as members of a particular group. Everybody is first a citizen, and then, as a citizen, he is a member of his order--of an aristocracy or a democracy, of an order of patricians or plebeians; or, in those societies which an unhappy fate has afflicted with a special perversion in their course of development, of a caste. Next, he is a member of a gens, house, or clan; and lastly, he is a member of his _family_. This last was the narrowest and most personal relation in which he stood; nor, paradoxical as it may seem, was he ever regarded as _himself_, as a distinct individual. His individuality was swallowed up in his family. I repeat the definition of a primitive society given before. It has for its units, not individuals, but groups of men united by the reality or the fiction of blood-relationship.

It is in the peculiarities of an undeveloped society that we seize the first trace of a universal succession. Contrasted with the organisation of a modern state, the commonwealths of primitive times may be fairly described as consisting of a number of little despotic governments, each perfectly distinct from the rest, each absolutely controlled by the prerogative of a single monarch. But though the Patriarch, for we must not yet call him the Pater-familias, had rights thus extensive, it is impossible to doubt that he lay under an equal amplitude of obligations. If he governed the family, it was for its behoof. If he was lord of its possessions, he held them as trustee for his children and kindred. He had no privilege or position distinct from that conferred on him by his relation to the petty commonwealth which he governed. The Family, in fact, was a Corporation; and he was its representative or, we might almost say, its Public officer. He enjoyed rights and stood under duties, but the rights and the duties were, in the contemplation of his fellow-citizens and in the eye of the law, quite as much those of the collective body as his own. Let us consider for a moment the effect which would be produced by the death of such a representative. In the eye of the law, in the view of the civil magistrate, the demise of the domestic authority would be a perfectly immaterial event. The person representing the collective body of the family and primarily responsible to munic.i.p.al jurisdiction would bear a different name; and that would be all. The rights and obligations which attached to the deceased head of the house would attach, without breach of continuity, to his successor; for, in point of fact, they would be the rights and obligations of the family, and the family had the distinctive characteristic of a corporation--that it never died. Creditors would have the same remedies against the new chieftain as against the old, for the liability being that of the still existing family would be absolutely unchanged. All rights available to the family would be as available after the demise of the headship as before it--except that the Corporation would be obliged--if indeed language so precise and technical can be properly used of these early times--would be obliged to _sue_ under a slightly modified name.

The history of jurisprudence must be followed in its whole course, if we are to understand how gradually and tardily society dissolved itself into the component atoms of which it is now const.i.tuted--by what insensible gradations the relation of man to man subst.i.tuted itself for the relation of the individual to his family and of families to each other. The point now to be attended to is that even when the revolution had apparently quite accomplished itself, even when the magistrate had in great measure a.s.sumed the place of the Pater-familias, and the civil tribunal subst.i.tuted itself for the domestic forum, nevertheless the whole scheme of rights and duties administered by the judicial authorities remained shaped by the influence of the obsolete privileges and coloured in every part by their reflection. There seems little question that the devolution of the Universitas Juris, so strenuously insisted upon by the Roman Law as the first condition of a testamentary or intestate succession, was a feature of the older form of society which men's minds had been unable to dissociate from the new, though with that newer phase it had no true or proper connection. It seems, in truth, that the prolongation of a man's legal existence in his heir, or in a group of co-heirs, is neither more nor less than a characteristic of _the family_ transferred by a fiction to _the individual_. Succession in corporations is necessarily universal, and the family was a corporation. Corporations never die. The decease of individual members makes no difference to the collective existence of the aggregate body, and does not in any way affect its legal incidents, its faculties or liabilities. Now in the idea of a Roman universal succession all these qualities of a corporation seem to have been transferred to the individual citizen. His physical death is allowed to exercise no effect on the legal position which he filled, apparently on the principle that that position is to be adjusted as closely as possible to the a.n.a.logies of a family, which, in its corporate character, was not of course liable to physical extinction.

I observe that not a few continental jurists have much difficulty in comprehending the nature of the connection between the conceptions blended in a universal succession, and there is perhaps no topic in the philosophy of jurisprudence on which their speculations, as a general rule, possess so little value. But the student of English law ought to be in no danger of stumbling at the a.n.a.lysis of the idea which we are examining. Much light is cast upon it by a fiction in our own system with which all lawyers are familiar. English lawyers cla.s.sify corporations as Corporations aggregate and Corporations sole.

A Corporation aggregate is a true Corporation, but a Corporation sole is an individual, being a member of a series of individuals, who is invested by a fiction with the qualities of a Corporation. I need hardly cite the King or the Parson of a Parish as instances of Corporations sole. The capacity or office is here considered apart from the particular person who from time to time may occupy it, and, this capacity being perpetual, the series of individuals who fill it are clothed with the leading attribute of Corporations--Perpetuity.

Now in the older theory of Roman Law the individual bore to the family precisely the same relation which in the rationale of English jurisprudence a Corporation sole bears to a Corporation aggregate. The derivation and a.s.sociation of ideas are exactly the same. In fact, if we say to ourselves that for purposes of Roman Testamentary Jurisprudence each individual citizen was a Corporation sole, we shall not only realise the full conception of an inheritance, but have constantly at command the clue to the a.s.sumption in which it originated. It is an axiom with us that the King never dies, being a Corporation sole. His capacities are instantly filled by his successor, and the continuity of dominion is not deemed to have been interrupted. With the Romans it seemed an equally simple and natural process, to eliminate the fact of death from the devolution of rights and obligations. The testator lived on in his heir or in the group of his co-heirs. He was in law the same person with them, and if any one in his testamentary dispositions had even constructively violated the principle which united his actual and his posthumous existence, the law rejected the defective instrument, and gave the inheritance to the kindred in blood, whose capacity to fulfil the conditions of heirship was conferred on them by the law itself, and not by any doc.u.ment which by possibility might be erroneously framed.

When a Roman citizen died intestate or leaving no valid Will, his descendants or kindred became his heirs according to a scale which will be presently described. The person or cla.s.s of persons who succeeded did not simply _represent_ the deceased, but, in conformity with the theory just delineated, they _continued_ his civil life, his legal existence. The same results followed when the order of succession was determined by a Will, but the theory of the ident.i.ty between the dead man and his heirs was certainly much older than any form of Testament or phase of Testamentary jurisprudence. This indeed is the proper moment for suggesting a doubt which will press on us with greater force the further we plumb the depths of this subject,--whether _wills_ would ever have come into being at all if it had not been for these remarkable ideas connected with universal succession. Testamentary law is the application of a principle which may be explained on a variety of philosophical hypotheses as plausible as they are gratuitous; it is interwoven with every part of modern society, and it is defensible on the broadest grounds of general expediency. But the warning can never be too often repeated, that the grand source of mistake in questions of jurisprudence is the impression that those reasons which actuate us at the present moment, in the maintenance of an existing inst.i.tution, have necessarily anything in common with the sentiment in which the inst.i.tution originated. It is certain that, in the old Roman Law of Inheritance, the notion of a will or testament is inextricably mixed up, I might almost say confounded, with the theory of a man's posthumous existence in the person of his heir.

The conception of a universal succession, firmly as it has taken root in jurisprudence, has not occurred spontaneously to the framers of every body of laws. Wherever it is now found, it may be shown to have descended from Roman law; and with it have come down a host of legal rules on the subject of Testaments and Testamentary gifts, which modern pract.i.tioners apply without discerning their relation to the parent theory. But, in the pure Roman jurisprudence, the principle that a man lives on in his Heir--the elimination, if we may so speak, of the fact of death--is too obviously for mistake the centre round which the whole Law of Testamentary and Intestate succession is circling. The unflinching sternness of the Roman law in enforcing compliance with the governing theory would in itself suggest that the theory grew out of something in the primitive const.i.tution of Roman society; but we may push the proof a good way beyond the presumption.

It happens that several technical expressions, dating from the earliest inst.i.tution of Wills at Rome, have been accidentally preserved to us. We have in Gaius the formula of invest.i.ture by which the universal successor was created. We have the ancient name by which the person afterwards called Heir was at first designated. We have further the text of the celebrated clause in the Twelve Tables by which the Testamentary power was expressly recognised, and the clauses regulating Intestate Succession have also been preserved. All these archaic phrases have one salient peculiarity. They indicate that what pa.s.sed from the Testator to the Heir was the _Family_, that is, the aggregate of rights and duties contained in the Patria Potestas and growing out of it. The material property is in three instances not mentioned at all; in two others, it is visibly named as an adjunct or appendage of the Family. The original Will or Testament was therefore an instrument, or (for it was probably not at first in writing) a proceeding, by which the devolution of the _Family_ was regulated. It was a mode of declaring who was to have the chieftainship, in succession to the Testator. When Wills are understood to have this for their original object, we see at once how it is that they came to be connected with one of the most curious relics of ancient religion and law, the _sacra_, or Family Rites. These _sacra_ were the Roman form of an inst.i.tution which shows itself wherever society has not wholly shaken itself free from its primitive clothing. They are the sacrifices and ceremonies by which the brotherhood of the family is commemorated, the pledge and the witness of its perpetuity. Whatever be their nature,--whether it be true or not that in all cases they are the worship of some mythical ancestor,--they are everywhere employed to attest the sacredness of the family-relation; and therefore they acquire prominent significance and importance, whenever the continuous existence of the Family is endangered by a change in the person of its chief. Accordingly we hear most about them in connection with demises of domestic sovereignty. Among the Hindoos, the right to inherit a dead man's property is exactly co-extensive with the duty of performing his obsequies. If the rites are not properly performed or not performed by the proper person, no relation is considered as established between the deceased and anybody surviving him; the Law of Succession does not apply, and n.o.body can inherit the property. Every great event in the life of a Hindoo seems to be regarded as leading up to and bearing upon those solemnities. If he marries, it is to have children who may celebrate them after his death; if he has no children, he lies under the strongest obligation to adopt them from another family, "with a view," writes the Hindoo doctor, "to the funeral cake, the water, and the solemn sacrifice." The sphere preserved to the Roman _sacra_ in the time of Cicero, was not less in extent. It embraced Inheritances and Adoptions. No Adoption was allowed to take place without due provision for the _sacra_ of the family from which the adoptive son was transferred, and no Testament was allowed to distribute an Inheritance without a strict apportionment of the expenses of these ceremonies among the different co-heirs. The differences between the Roman law at this epoch, when we obtain our last glimpse of the _sacra_, and the existing Hindoo system, are most instructive. Among the Hindoos, the religious element in law has acquired a complete predominance. Family sacrifices have become the keystone of all the Law of Persons and much of the Law of Things. They have even received a monstrous extension, for it is a plausible opinion that the self-immolation of the widow at her husband's funeral, a practice continued to historical times by the Hindoos, and commemorated in the traditions of several Indo-European races, was an addition grafted on the primitive _sacra_, under the influence of the impression, which always accompanies the idea of sacrifice, that human blood is the most precious of all oblations.

With the Romans, on the contrary, the legal obligation and the religious duty have ceased to be blended. The necessity of solemnising the _sacra_ forms no part of the theory of civil law, but they are under the separate jurisdiction of the College of Pontiffs. The letters of Cicero to Atticus, which are full of allusions to them, leave no doubt that they const.i.tuted an intolerable burden on Inheritances; but the point of development at which law breaks away from religion has been pa.s.sed, and we are prepared for their entire disappearance from the later jurisprudence.

In Hindoo law there is no such thing as a true Will. The place filled by Wills is occupied by Adoptions. We can now see the relation of the Testamentary Power to the Faculty of Adoption, and the reason why the exercise of either of them could call up a peculiar solicitude for the performance of the _sacra_. Both a Will and an Adoption threaten a distortion of the ordinary course of Family descent, but they are obviously contrivances for preventing the descent being wholly interrupted, when there is no succession of kindred to carry it on. Of the two expedients Adoption, the fact.i.tious creation of blood-relationship, is the only one which has suggested itself to the greater part of archaic societies. The Hindoos have indeed advanced one point on what was doubtless the antique practice, by allowing the widow to adopt when the father has neglected to do so, and there are in the local customs of Bengal some faint traces of the Testamentary powers. But to the Romans belongs pre-eminently the credit of inventing the Will, the inst.i.tution which, next to the Contract, has exercised the greatest influence in transforming human society. We must be careful not to attribute to it in its earliest shape the functions which have attended it in more recent times. It was at first, not a mode of distributing a dead man's goods, but one among several ways of transferring the representation of the household to a new chief. The goods descend no doubt to the Heir, but that is only because the government of the family carries with it in its devolution the power of disposing of the common stock. We are very far as yet from that stage in the history of Wills in which they become powerful instruments in modifying society through the stimulus they give to the circulation of property and the plasticity they produce in proprietary rights. No such consequences as these appear in fact to have been a.s.sociated with the Testamentary power even by the latest Roman lawyers. It will be found that Wills were never looked upon in the Roman community as a contrivance for parting Property and the Family, or for creating a variety of miscellaneous interests, but rather as a means of making a better provision for the members of a household than could be secured through the rules of Intestate succession. We may suspect indeed that the a.s.sociations of a Roman with the practice of will-making were extremely different from those familiar to us nowadays. The habit of regarding Adoption and Testation as modes of continuing the Family cannot but have had something to do with the singular laxity of Roman notions as to the inheritance of sovereignty.

It is impossible not to see that the succession of the early Roman Emperors to each other was considered reasonably regular, and that, in spite of all that had occurred, no absurdity attached to the pretension of such Princes as Theodosius or Justinian to style themselves Caesar and Augustus.

When the phenomena of primitive societies emerge into light, it seems impossible to dispute a proposition which the jurists of the seventeenth century considered doubtful, that Intestate Inheritance is a more ancient inst.i.tution than Testamentary Succession. As soon as this is settled, a question of much interest suggests itself, how and under what conditions were the directions of a will first allowed to regulate the devolution of authority over the household, and consequently the posthumous distribution of property. The difficulty of deciding the point arises from the rarity of Testamentary power in archaic communities. It is doubtful whether a true power of testation was known to any original society except the Roman. Rudimentary forms of it occur here and there, but most of them are not exempt from the suspicion of a Roman origin. The Athenian will was, no doubt, indigenous, but then, as will appear presently, it was only an inchoate Testament. As to the Wills which are sanctioned by the bodies of law which have descended to us as the codes of the barbarian conquerors of Imperial Rome, they are almost certainly Roman. The most penetrating German criticism has recently been directed to these _leges Barbarorum_, the great object of investigation being to detach those portions of each system which formed the customs of the tribe in its original home from the advent.i.tious ingredients which were borrowed from the laws of the Romans. In the course of this process, one result has invariably disclosed itself, that the ancient nucleus of the code contains no trace of a Will. Whatever testamentary law exists, has been taken from Roman jurisprudence. Similarly, the rudimentary Testament which (as I am informed) the Rabbinical Jewish law provides for, has been attributed to contact with the Romans. The only form of testament, not belonging to a Roman or h.e.l.lenic society, which can reasonably be supposed indigenous, is that recognised by the usages of the province of Bengal; and the testament of Bengal is only a rudimentary Will.

The evidence, however, such as it is, seems to point to the conclusion that Testaments are at first only allowed to take effect on failure of the persons ent.i.tled to have the inheritance by right of blood genuine or fict.i.tious. Thus, when Athenian citizens were empowered for the first time by the Laws of Solon to execute Testaments, they were forbidden to disinherit their direct male descendants. So, too, the Will of Bengal is only permitted to govern the succession so far as it is consistent with certain overriding claims of the family. Again, the original inst.i.tutions of the Jews having provided nowhere for the privileges of Testatorship, the later Rabbinical jurisprudence, which pretends to supply the _casus omissi_ of the Mosaic law, allows the Power of Testation to attach when all the kindred ent.i.tled under the Mosaic system to succeed have failed or are undiscoverable. The limitations by which the ancient German codes hedge in the testamentary jurisprudence which has been incorporated with them are also significant, and point in the same direction. It is the peculiarity of most of these German laws, in the only shape in which we know them, that, besides the _allod_ or domain of each household, they recognise several subordinate kinds or orders of property, each of which probably represents a separate transfusion of Roman principles into the primitive body of Teutonic usage. The primitive German or allodial property is strictly reserved to the kindred. Not only is it incapable of being disposed of by testament but it is scarcely capable of being alienated by conveyance _inter vivos_. The ancient German law, like the Hindoo jurisprudence, makes the male children co-proprietors with their father, and the endowment of the family cannot be parted with except by the consent of all its members.

But the other sorts of property, of more modern origin and lower dignity than the allodial possessions, are much more easily alienated than they, and follow much more lenient rules of devolution. Women and the descendants of women succeed to them, obviously on the principle that they lie outside the sacred precinct of the Agnatic brotherhood. Now, it is on these last descriptions of property, and on these only, that the Testaments borrowed from Rome were at first allowed to operate.

These few indications may serve to lend additional plausibility to that which in itself appears to be the most probable explanation of an ascertained fact in the early history of Roman Wills. We have it stated on abundant authority that Testaments, during the primitive period of the Roman State, were executed in the Comitia Calata, that is, in the Comitia Curiata, or Parliament of the Patrician Burghers of Rome, when a.s.sembled for Private Business. This mode of execution has been the source of the a.s.sertion, handed down by one generation of civilians to another, that every Will at one era of Roman history was a solemn legislative enactment. But there is no necessity whatever for resorting to an explanation which has the defect of attributing far too much precision to the proceedings of the ancient a.s.sembly. The proper key to the story concerning the execution of Wills in the Comitia Calata must no doubt be sought in the oldest Roman Law of _intestate_ succession. The canons of primitive Roman jurisprudence regulating the inheritance of relations from each other were, so long as they remained unmodified by the Edictal Law of the Praetor, to the following effect:--First, the _sui_ or direct descendants who had never been emanc.i.p.ated succeeded. On the failure of the _sui_, the Nearest Agnate came into their place, that is, the nearest person or cla.s.s of the kindred who was or might have been under the same Patria Potestas with the deceased. The third and last degree came next, in which the inheritance devolved on the _gentiles_, that is on the collective members of the dead man's _gens_ or _House_. The House, I have explained already, was a fict.i.tious extension of the family, consisting of all Roman Patrician citizens who bore the same name, and who, on the ground of bearing the same name, were supposed to be descended from a common ancestor. Now the Patrician a.s.sembly called the Comitia Curiata was a Legislature in which Gentes or Houses were exclusively represented. It was a representative a.s.sembly of the Roman people, const.i.tuted on the a.s.sumption that the const.i.tuent unit of the state was the Gens. This being so, the inference seems inevitable, that the cognizance of Wills by the Comitia was connected with the rights of the Gentiles, and was intended to secure them in their privilege of ultimate inheritance. The whole apparent anomaly is removed, if we suppose that a Testament could only be made when the testator had no _gentiles_ discoverable, or when they waived their claims, and that every Testament was submitted to the General a.s.sembly of the Roman Gentes, in order that those aggrieved by its dispositions might put their veto upon it if they pleased, or by allowing it to pa.s.s might be presumed to have renounced their reversion. It is possible that on the eve of the publication of the Twelve Tables this vetoing power may have been greatly curtailed or only occasionally and capriciously exercised. It is much easier, however, to indicate the meaning and origin of the jurisdiction confided to the Comitia Calata, than to trace its gradual development or progressive decay.

The Testament to which the pedigree of all modern Wills may be traced is not, however, the Testament executed in the Calata Comitia, but another Testament designed to compete with it and destined to supersede it. The historical importance of this early Roman Will, and the light it casts on much of ancient thought, will excuse me for describing it at some length.

When the Testamentary power first discloses itself to us in legal history, there are signs that, like almost all the great Roman inst.i.tutions, it was the subject of contention between the Patricians and the Plebeians. The effect of the political maxim, _Plebs Gentem non habet_, "a Plebeian cannot be a member of a House," was entirely to exclude the Plebeians from the Comitia Curiata. Some critics have accordingly supposed that a Plebeian could not have his Will read or recited to the Patrician a.s.sembly, and was thus deprived of Testamentary privileges altogether. Others have been satisfied to point out the hardships of having to submit a proposed Will to the unfriendly jurisdiction of an a.s.sembly in which the Testator was not represented. Whatever be the true view, a form of Testament came into use, which has all the characteristics of a contrivance intended to evade some distasteful obligation. The Will in question was a conveyance _inter vivos_, a complete and irrevocable alienation of the Testator's family and substance to the person whom he meant to be his heir. The strict rules of Roman law must always have permitted such an alienation, but, when the transaction was intended to have a posthumous effect, there may have been disputes whether it was valid for Testamentary purposes without the formal a.s.sent of the Patrician Parliament. If a difference of opinion existed on the point between the two cla.s.ses of the Roman population, it was extinguished, with many other sources of heartburning, by the great Decemviral compromise. The text of the Twelve Tables is still extant which says, "_Pater familias uti de pecunia tutelave rei suae lega.s.sit, ita jus esto_"--a law which can hardly have had any other object than the legalisation of the Plebeian Will.

It is well known to scholars that, centuries after the Patrician a.s.sembly had ceased to be the legislature of the Roman State, it still continued to hold formal sittings for the convenience of private business. Consequently, at a period long subsequent to the publication of the Decemviral Law, there is reason to believe that the Comitia Calata still a.s.sembled for the validation of Testaments. Its probable functions may be best indicated by saying that it was a Court of Registration, with the understanding however that the Wills exhibited were not _enrolled_, but simply recited to the members, who were supposed to take note of their tenor and to commit them to memory. It is very likely that this form of Testament was never reduced to writing at all, but at all events if the Will had been originally written, the office of the Comitia was certainly confined to hearing it read aloud, the doc.u.ment being retained afterwards in the custody of the Testator, or deposited under the safeguard of some religious corporation. This publicity may have been one of the incidents of the Testament executed in the Comitia Calata which brought it into popular disfavour. In the early years of the Empire the Comitia still held its meetings, but they seem to have lapsed into the merest form, and few Wills, or none, were probably presented at the periodical sitting.

It is the ancient Plebeian Will--the alternative of the Testament just described--which in its remote effects has deeply modified the civilisation of the modern world. It acquired at Rome all the popularity which the Testament submitted to the Calata Comitia appears to have lost. The key to all its characteristics lies in its descent from the _mancipium_, or ancient Roman conveyance, a proceeding to which we may unhesitatingly a.s.sign the parentage of two great inst.i.tutions without which modern society can scarcely be supposed capable of holding together, the Contract and the Will. The _mancipium_, or as the word would exhibit itself in later Latinity, the Manc.i.p.ation, carries us back by its incidents to the infancy of civil society. As it sprang from times long anterior, if not to the invention, at all events to the popularisation, of the art of writing, gestures, symbolical acts, and solemn phrases take the place of doc.u.mentary forms, and a lengthy and intricate ceremonial is intended to call the attention of the parties to the importance of the transaction, and to impress it on the memory of the witnesses. The imperfection too of oral, as compared with written, testimony necessitates the multiplication of the witnesses and a.s.sistants beyond what in later times would be reasonable or intelligible limits.

The Roman Manc.i.p.ation required the presence first of all of the parties, the vendor and vendee, or we should perhaps rather say, if we are to use modern legal language, the grantor and grantee. There were also no less than _five_ witnesses; and an anomalous personage, the Libripens, who brought with him a pair of scales to weigh the uncoined copper money of ancient Rome. The Testament we are considering--the Testament _per aes et libram_, "with the copper and the scales," as it long continued to be technically called--was an ordinary Manc.i.p.ation with no change in the form and hardly any in words. The Testator was the grantor; the five witnesses and the libripens were present; and the place of grantee was taken by a person known technically as the _familiae emptor_, the Purchaser of the Family. The ordinary ceremony of a Manc.i.p.ation was then proceeded with. Certain formal gestures were made and sentences p.r.o.nounced. The _Emptor familiae_ simulated the payment of a price by striking the scales with a piece of money, and finally the Testator ratified what had been done in a set form of words called the "Nuncupatio" or publication of the transaction, a phrase which, I need scarcely remind the lawyer, has had a long history in Testamentary jurisprudence. It is necessary to attend particularly to the character of the person called _familiae emptor_.

There is no doubt that at first he was the Heir himself. The Testator conveyed to him outright his whole "familia," that is, all the rights he enjoyed over and through the family; his property, his slaves, and all his ancestral privileges, together, on the other hand, with all his duties and obligations.

With these data before us, we are able to note several remarkable points in which the Manc.i.p.atory Testament, as it may be called, differed in its primitive form from a modern will. As it amounted to a conveyance _out-and-out_ of the Testator's estate, it was not _revocable_. There could be no new exercise of a power which had been exhausted.

Again, it was not secret. The Familiae Emptor, being himself the Heir, knew exactly what his rights were, and was aware that he was irreversibly ent.i.tled to the inheritance; a knowledge which the violences inseparable from the best-ordered ancient society rendered extremely dangerous. But perhaps the most surprising consequence of this relation of Testaments to Conveyances was the immediate vesting of the inheritance in the Heir. This has seemed so incredible to not a few civilians, that they have spoken of the Testator's estate as vesting conditionally on the Testator's death or as granted to him from a time uncertain, _i.e._ the death of the grantor. But down to the latest period of Roman jurisprudence there was a certain cla.s.s of transactions which never admitted of being directly modified by a condition, or of being limited to or from a point of time. In technical language they did not admit _conditio_ or _dies_.

Manc.i.p.ation was one of them, and therefore, strange as it may seem, we are forced to conclude that the primitive Roman Will took effect at once, even though the Testator survived his act of Testation. It is indeed likely that Roman citizens originally made their Wills only in the article of death, and that a provision for the continuance of the Family effected by a man in the flower of life would take the form rather of an Adoption than of a Will. Still we must believe that, if the Testator did recover, he could only continue to govern his household by the sufferance of his Heir.

Two or three remarks should be made before I explain how these inconveniences were remedied, and how Testaments came to be invested with the characteristics now universally a.s.sociated with them. The Testament was not necessarily written: at first, it seems to have been invariably oral, and, even in later times, the instrument declaratory of the bequests was only incidentally connected with the Will and formed no essential part of it. It bore in fact exactly the same relation to the Testament, which the deed leading the uses bore to the Fines and Recoveries of old English law, or which the charter of feoffment bore to the feoffment itself. Previously, indeed, to the Twelve Tables, no writing would have been of the slightest use, for the Testator had no power of giving legacies, and the only persons who could be advantaged by a will were the Heir or Co-heirs. But the extreme generality of the clause in the Twelve Tables soon produced the doctrine that the Heir must take the inheritance burdened by any directions which the Testator might give him, or in other words, take it subject to legacies. Written testamentary instruments a.s.sumed thereupon a new value, as a security against the fraudulent refusal of the heir to satisfy the legatees; but to the last it was at the Testator's pleasure to rely exclusively on the testimony of the witnesses, and to declare by word of mouth the legacies which the _familiae emptor_ was commissioned to pay.

The terms of the expression _Emptor familiae_ demand notice. "Emptor"

indicates that the Will was literally a sale, and the word "familiae,"

when compared with the phraseology in the Testamentary clause in the Twelve Tables, leads us to some instructive conclusions. "Familia," in cla.s.sical Latinity, means always a man's slaves. Here, however, and generally in the language of ancient Roman law, it includes all persons under his Potestas, and the Testator's material property or substance is understood to pa.s.s as an adjunct or appendage of his household. Turning to the law of the Twelve Tables, it will be seen that it speaks of _tutela rei suae_, "the guardianship of his substance," a form of expression which is the exact reverse of the phrase just examined. There does not therefore appear to be any mode of escaping from the conclusion, that, even at an era so comparatively recent as that of the Decemviral compromise, terms denoting "household" and "property" were blended in the current phraseology. If a man's household had been spoken of as his property we might have explained the expression as pointing to the extent of the Patria Potestas, but, as the interchange is reciprocal, we must allow that the form of speech carries us back to that primeval period in which property is owned by the family, and the family is governed by the citizen, so that the members of the community do not own their property _and_ their family, but rather own their property _through_ their family.

At an epoch not easy to settle with precision, the Roman Praetors fell into the habit of acting upon Testaments solemnised in closer conformity with the spirit than the letter of the law. Casual dispensations became insensibly the established practice, till at length a wholly new form of Will was matured and regularly engrafted on the Edictal Jurisprudence. The new or _Praetorian_ Testament derived the whole of its impregnability from the _Jus Honorarium_ or Equity of Rome. The Praetor of some particular year must have inserted a clause in his inaugural Proclamation declaratory of his intention to sustain all Testaments which should have been executed with such and such solemnities; and, the reform having been found advantageous, the article relating to it must have been again introduced by the Praetor's successor, and repeated by the next in office, till at length it formed a recognised portion of that body of jurisprudence which from these successive incorporations was styled the Perpetual or Continuous Edict. On examining the conditions of a valid Praetorian Will they will be plainly seen to have been determined by the requirements of the Manc.i.p.atory Testament, the innovating Praetor having obviously prescribed to himself the retention of the old formalities just so far as they were warrants of genuineness or securities against fraud. At the execution of the Manc.i.p.atory Testament seven persons had been present besides the Testator. Seven witnesses were accordingly essential to the Praetorian Will: two of them corresponding to the _libripens_ and _familiae emptor_, who were now stripped of their symbolical character, and were merely present for the purpose of supplying their testimony. No emblematic ceremony was gone through; the Will was merely recited; but then it is probable (though not absolutely certain) that a written instrument was necessary to perpetuate the evidence of the Testator's dispositions. At all events, whenever a writing was read or exhibited as a person's last Will, we know certainly that the Praetorian Court would not sustain it by special intervention, unless each of the seven witnesses had severally affixed his seal to the outside. This is the first appearance of _sealing_ in the history of jurisprudence, considered as a mode of authentication. It is to be observed that the seals of Roman Wills, and other doc.u.ments of importance, did not simply serve as the index of the presence or a.s.sent of the signatory, but were literally fastenings which had to be broken before the writing could be inspected.

The Edictal Law would therefore enforce the dispositions of a Testator, when, instead of being symbolised through the forms of manc.i.p.ation, they were simply evidenced by the seals of seven witnesses. But it may be laid down as a general proposition, that the princ.i.p.al qualities of Roman property were incommunicable except through processes which were supposed to be coeval with the origin of the Civil Law. The Praetor therefore could not confer an _Inheritance_ on anybody. He could not place the Heir or Co-heirs in that very relation in which the Testator had himself stood to his own rights and obligations. All he could do was to confer on the person designated as Heir the practical enjoyment of the property bequeathed, and to give the force of legal acquittances to his payments of the Testator's debts. When he exerted his powers to these ends, the Praetor was technically said to communicate the _Bonorum Possessio_. The Heir specially inducted under these circ.u.mstances, or _Bonorum Possessor_, had every proprietary privilege of the Heir by the Civil Law. He took the profits and he could alienate, but then, for all his remedies for redress against wrong, he must go, as we should phrase it, not to the Common Law, but to the Equity side of the Praetorian Court. No great chance of error would be incurred by describing him as having an _equitable_ estate in the inheritance; but then, to secure ourselves against being deluded by the a.n.a.logy, we must always recollect that in one year the _Bonorum Possessio_ was operated upon a principle of Roman Law known as Usucapion, and the Possessor became Quiritarian owner of all the property comprised in the inheritance.

We know too little of the older law of Civil Process to be able to strike the balance of advantage and disadvantage between the different cla.s.ses of remedies supplied by the Praetorian Tribunal. It is certain, however, that, in spite of its many defects, the Manc.i.p.atory Testament by which the _universitas juris_ devolved at once and unimpaired was never entirely superseded by the new Will; and at a period less bigoted to antiquarian forms, and perhaps not quite alive to their significance, all the ingenuity of the Jurisconsults seems to have been expended on the improvement of the more venerable instrument. At the era of Gaius, which is that of the Antonine Caesars, the great blemishes of the Manc.i.p.atory Will had been removed. Originally, as we have seen, the essential character of the formalities had required that the Heir himself should be the Purchaser of the Family, and the consequence was that he not only instantly acquired a vested interest in the Testator's Property, but was formally made aware of his rights.

But the age of Gaius permitted some unconcerned person to officiate as Purchaser of the Family. The heir, therefore, was not necessarily informed of the succession to which he was destined; and Wills thenceforward acquired the property of _secrecy_. The subst.i.tution of a stranger for the actual Heir in the functions of "Familiae Emptor"

had other ulterior consequences. As soon as it was legalised, a Roman Testament came to consist of two parts or stages--a conveyance, which was a pure form, and a Nuncupatio, or Publication. In this latter pa.s.sage of the proceeding, the Testator either orally declared to the a.s.sistants the wishes which were to be executed after his death, or produced a written doc.u.ment in which his wishes were embodied. It was not probably till attention had been quite drawn off from the imaginary Conveyance, and concentrated on the Nuncupation as the essential part of the transaction, that Wills were allowed to become _revocable_.

I have thus carried the pedigree of Wills some way down in legal history. The root of it is the old Testament "with the copper and the scales," founded on a Manc.i.p.ation or Conveyance. This ancient Will has, however, manifold defects, which are remedied, though only indirectly, by the Praetorian law. Meantime the ingenuity of the Jurisconsults effects, in the Common-Law Will or Manc.i.p.atory Testament, the very improvements which the Praetor may have concurrently carried out in Equity. These last ameliorations depend, however, on mere legal dexterity, and we see accordingly that the Testamentary Law of the day of Gaius or Ulpian is only transitional.

What changes next ensued we know not; but at length, just before the reconstruction of the jurisprudence by Justinian, we find the subjects of the Eastern Roman Empire employing a form of Will of which the pedigree is traceable to the Praetorian Testament on one side, and to the Testament "with the copper and the scales" on the other. Like the Testament of the Praetor, it required no Manc.i.p.ation, and was invalid unless sealed by seven witnesses. Like the Manc.i.p.atory Will, it pa.s.sed the Inheritance and not merely a _Bonorum Possessio_. Several, however, of its most important features were annexed by positive enactments, and it is out of regard to this threefold derivation from the Praetorian Edict, from the Civil Law, and from the Imperial Const.i.tutions, that Justinian speaks of the Law of Wills in his own day as _Jus Tripert.i.tum_. The new Testament thus described is the one generally known as the Roman Will. But it was the Will of the Eastern Empire only; and the researches of Savigny have shown that in Western Europe the old Manc.i.p.atory Testament, with all its apparatus of conveyance, copper, and scales, continued to be the form in use far down in the Middle Ages.

CHAPTER VII

ANCIENT AND MODERN IDEAS RESPECTING WILLS AND SUCCESSIONS

Although there is much in the modern European Law of Wills which is intimately connected with the oldest rules of Testamentary disposition practised among men, there are nevertheless some important differences between ancient and modern ideas on the subject of Wills and Successions. Some of the points of difference I shall endeavour to ill.u.s.trate in this chapter.

At a period, removed several centuries from the era of the Twelve Tables, we find a variety of rules engrafted on the Roman Civil Law with the view of limiting the disinherison of children; we have the jurisdiction of the Praetor very actively exerted in the same interest; and we are also presented with a new remedy, very anomalous in character and of uncertain origin, called the Querela Inofficiosi Testamenti, "the Plaint of an Unduteous Will," directed to the reinstatement of the issue in inheritances from which they had been unjustifiably excluded by a father's Testament. Comparing this condition of the law with the text of the Twelve Tables which concedes in terms the utmost liberty of Testation, several writers have been tempted to interweave a good deal of dramatic incident into their history of the Law Testamentary. They tell us of the boundless license of disinherison in which the heads of families instantly began to indulge, of the scandal and injury to public morals which the new practices engendered, and of the applause of all good men which hailed the courage of the Praetor in arresting the progress of paternal depravity. This story, which is not without some foundation for the princ.i.p.al fact it relates, is often so told as to disclose very serious misconceptions of the principles of legal history. The Law of the Twelve Tables is to be explained by the character of the age in which it was enacted. It does not license a tendency which a later era thought itself bound to counteract, but it proceeds on the a.s.sumption that no such tendency exists, or, perhaps we should say, in ignorance of the possibility of its existence. There is no likelihood that Roman citizens began immediately to avail themselves freely of the power to disinherit. It is against all reason and sound appreciation of history to suppose that the yoke of family bondage, still patiently submitted to, as we know, where its pressure galled most cruelly, would be cast off in the very particular in which its incidence in our own day is not otherwise than welcome. The Law of the Twelve Tables permitted the execution of Testaments in the only case in which it was thought possible that they could be executed, viz. on failure of children and proximate kindred. It did not forbid the disinherison of direct descendants, inasmuch as it did not legislate against a contingency which no Roman lawgiver of that era could have contemplated. No doubt, as the offices of family affection progressively lost the aspect of primary personal duties, the disinherison of children was occasionally attempted. But the interference of the Praetor, so far from being called for by the universality of the abuse, was doubtless first prompted by the fact that such instances of unnatural caprice were few and exceptional, and at conflict with the current morality.

The indications furnished by this part of Roman Testamentary Law are of a very different kind. It is remarkable that a Will never seems to have been regarded by the Romans as a means of _disinheriting_ a Family, or of effecting the unequal distribution of a patrimony. The rules of law preventing its being turned to such a purpose, increase in number and stringency as the jurisprudence unfolds itself; and these rules correspond doubtless with the abiding sentiment of Roman society, as distinguished from occasional variations of feeling in individuals. It would rather seem as if the Testamentary Power were chiefly valued for the a.s.sistance it gave in _making provision_ for a Family, and in dividing the inheritance more evenly and fairly than the Law of Intestate Succession would have divided it. If this be the true reading of the general sentiment on the point, it explains to some extent the singular horror of Intestacy which always characterised the Roman. No evil seems to have been considered a heavier visitation than the forfeiture of Testamentary privileges; no curse appears to have been bitterer than that which imprecated on an enemy that he might die without a Will. The feeling has no counterpart, or none that is easily recognisable, in the forms of opinion which exist at the present day. All men at all times will doubtless prefer chalking out the destination of their substance to having that office performed for them by the law; but the Roman pa.s.sion for Testacy is distinguished from the mere desire to indulge caprice by its intensity; and it has of course nothing whatever in common with that pride of family, exclusively the creation of feudalism, which acc.u.mulates one description of property in the hands of a single representative. It is probable, _a priori_, that it was something in the rules of Intestate Succession which caused this vehement preference for the distribution of property under a Testament over its distribution by law. The difficulty, however, is, that on glancing at the Roman Law of Intestate Succession, in the form which it wore for many centuries before Justinian shaped it into that scheme of inheritance which has been almost universally adopted by modern lawgivers, it by no means strikes one as remarkably unreasonable or inequitable. On the contrary, the distribution it prescribes is so fair and rational, and differs so little from that with which modern society has been generally contented, that no reason suggests itself why it should have been regarded with extraordinary distaste, especially under a jurisprudence which pared down to a narrow compa.s.s the testamentary privileges of persons who had children to provide for. We should rather have expected that, as in France at this moment, the heads of families would generally save themselves the trouble of executing a Will, and allow the Law to do as it pleased with their a.s.sets. I think, however, if we look a little closely at the pre-Justinianean scale of Intestate Succession, we shall discover the key to the mystery. The texture of the law consists of two distinct parts. One department of rules comes from the Jus Civile, the Common-Law of Rome; the other from the Edict of the Praetor. The Civil Law, as I have already stated for another purpose, calls to the inheritance only three orders of successors in their turn; the Unemanc.i.p.ated children, the nearest cla.s.s of Agnatic kindred, and the Gentiles. Between these three orders, the Praetor interpolates various cla.s.ses of relatives, of whom the Civil Law took no notice whatever.

Ultimately, the combination of the Edict and of the Civil Law forms a table of succession not materially different from that which has descended to the generality of modern codes.

The point for recollection is that there must anciently have been a time at which the rules of the Civil Law determined the scheme of Intestate Succession exclusively, and at which the arrangements of the Edict were non-existent, or not consistently carried out. We cannot doubt that, in its infancy, the Praetorian jurisprudence had to contend with formidable obstructions, and it is more than probable that, long after popular sentiment and legal opinion had acquiesced in it, the modifications which it periodically introduced were governed by no certain principles, and fluctuated with the varying bias of successive magistrates. The rules of Intestate Succession, which the Romans must at this period have practised, account, I think--and more than account--for that vehement distaste for an Intestacy to which Roman society during so many ages remained constant. The order of succession was this: on the death of a citizen, having no will or no valid will, his Unemanc.i.p.ated children became his Heirs. His _emanc.i.p.ated_ sons had no share in the inheritance. If he left no direct descendants living at his death, the nearest grade of the Agnatic kindred succeeded, but no part of the inheritance was given to any relative united (however closely) with the dead man through female descents.

All the other branches of the family were excluded, and the inheritance escheated to the _Gentiles_, or entire body of Roman citizens bearing the same name with the deceased. So that on failing to execute an operative Testament, a Roman of the era under examination left his emanc.i.p.ated children absolutely without provision, while, on the a.s.sumption that he died childless, there was imminent risk that his possessions would escape from the family altogether, and devolve on a number of persons with whom he was merely connected by the sacerdotal fiction that a.s.sumed all members of the same _gens_ to be descended from a common ancestor. The prospect of such an issue is in itself a nearly sufficient explanation of the popular sentiment; but, in point of fact, we shall only half understand it, if we forget that the state of things I have been describing is likely to have existed at the very moment when Roman society was in the first stage of its transition from its primitive organisation in detached families. The empire of the father had indeed received one of the earliest blows directed at it through the recognition of Emanc.i.p.ation as a legitimate usage, but the law, still considering the Patria Potestas to be the root of family connection, persevered in looking on the emanc.i.p.ated children as strangers to the rights of Kinship and aliens from the blood. We cannot, however, for a moment suppose that the limitations of the family imposed by legal pedantry had their counterpart in the natural affection of parents.

Family attachments must still have retained that nearly inconceivable sanct.i.ty and intensity which belonged to them under the Patriarchal system; and, so little are they likely to have been extinguished by the act of emanc.i.p.ation, that the probabilities are altogether the other way. It may be unhesitatingly taken for granted that enfranchis.e.m.e.nt from the father's power was a demonstration, rather than a severance, of affection--a mark of grace and favour accorded to the best-beloved and most esteemed of the children. If sons thus honoured above the rest were absolutely deprived of their heritage by an Intestacy, the reluctance to incur it requires no farther explanation. We might have a.s.sumed _a priori_ that the pa.s.sion for Testacy was generated by some moral injustice entailed by the rules of Intestate succession; and here we find them at variance with the very instinct by which early society was cemented together. It is possible to put all that has been urged in a very succinct form. Every dominant sentiment of the primitive Romans was entwined with the relations of the family. But what was the Family? The Law defined it one way--natural affection another. In the conflict between the two, the feeling we would a.n.a.lyse grew up, taking the form of an enthusiasm for the inst.i.tution by which the dictates of affection were permitted to determine the fortunes of its objects.

I regard, therefore, the Roman horror of Intestacy as a monument of a very early conflict between ancient law and slowly changing ancient sentiment on the subject of the Family. Some pa.s.sages in the Roman Statute-Law, and one statute in particular which limited the capacity for inheritance possessed by women, must have contributed to keep alive the feeling; and it is the general belief that the system of creating Fidei-Commissa, or bequests in trust, was devised to evade the disabilities imposed by those statutes. But the feeling itself, in its remarkable intensity, seems to point back to some deeper antagonism between law and opinion; nor is it at all wonderful that the improvements of jurisprudence by the Praetor should not have extinguished it. Everybody conversant with the philosophy of opinion is aware that a sentiment by no means dies out, of necessity, with the pa.s.sing away of the circ.u.mstances which produced it. It may long survive them; nay, it may afterwards attain to a pitch and climax of intensity which it never attained during their actual continuance.

The view of a Will which regards it as conferring the power of diverting property from the Family, or of distributing it in such uneven proportions as the fancy or good sense of the Testator may dictate, is not older than that later portion of the Middle Ages in which Feudalism had completely consolidated itself. When modern jurisprudence first shows itself in the rough, Wills are rarely allowed to dispose with absolute freedom of a dead man's a.s.sets.

Wherever at this period the descent of property was regulated by Will--and over the greater part of Europe moveable or personal property was the subject of