The system of succession in medieval England

下面为大家整理一篇优秀的essay代写范文- The system of succession in medieval England，供大家参考学习，这篇论文讨论了中世纪英国的财产继承制度。在12世纪末13世纪初的时候，英国就形成了以长子继承制为主要特征的普通法继承规则。该规则以严苛著称，在整个中世纪占据主导地位，但是并未给英国社会带来过多的负面影响。其原因在于，在主流的普通法继承规则之外，英国还存在诸多非主流因素。它们皆以公平正义为核心理念，关注弱势家庭成员，维护个体权力，适应下层民众习惯。这些非主流因素的存在，有效地平衡了家庭成员的继承份额，协调了个体封建主和封建主阶层的整体利益，匡正了不合时宜的普通法继承规则。

At the end of the 12th century and the beginning of the 13th century, the common law succession rules with primogeniture as the main feature were formed in Britain. The rules were notoriously strict and dominated throughout the middle ages, but did not have much negative impact on British society. The reason is that in addition to the mainstream common law inheritance rules, there are many non-mainstream factors in Britain, such as the family property distribution scheme designed by individual feudal owners, the inheritance habit insisted by the lower class and marginal groups, and the distribution principle advocated by church courts and chancery courts. They all take fairness and justice as the core concept, pay attention to vulnerable family members, maintain individual rights, and adapt to the habits of the lower class. The existence of these non-mainstream factors effectively balanced the inheritance shares of family members, coordinated the overall interests of individual feudal lords and feudal lords, and corrected the anachronistic common law inheritance rules.

In the medieval society dominated by natural economy, property inheritance was often the basic way for people to obtain property and status, and also the main means for vested interests to maintain their political and economic privileges. This was especially true in medieval England. In medieval England, the common law inheritance rule, characterized by primogeniture, gave the eldest son the right to inherit the family's core property but excluded other family members. Faced with such an extreme inheritance system, Chinese and foreign researchers mostly focus on the successor, the eldest son, and are keen to analyze the causes and effects of this system, while few people pay attention to the family members other than the eldest son. In the author's opinion, under the property inheritance system in which the eldest son has the absolute advantage, the rights of vulnerable family members deserve more attention. What do disadvantaged family members live on if they can't inherit the family property? Is there any other way for them to get property? Why do these pathways exist? How do they relate to primogeniture? What is the impact on the property inheritance system and British society? Based on the detailed analysis of the property inheritance in medieval England, this paper makes a brief analysis of the above problems.

Before examining the British property inheritance system, we must first clarify several concepts closely related to it.

In medieval England, property generally consisted of both real and movable property. The former is divided into tangible and intangible. Tangible real estate is characterized by fixity, sustainability and immobility. It mainly refers to real estate, houses and mineral deposits. Intangible real estate is characterized by abstractness and imperceptibility, mainly referring to some profitable rights, such as the right of teaching recommendation, franchise, title, etc. Movable property refers to tangible property other than immovable property, including money, creditor's rights, clothes, household utensils, etc. The reason why I want to elaborate on the classification of property is that in medieval England, different kinds of property were governed by different inheritance rules and were administered by different courts. For example, the free application of the common law rule of succession to the ordinary courts; the land of the copybook was distributed according to the inheritance habits of the lower classes and was administered by the court of the manor. Movable property is governed by the inheritance principle advocated by the church and belongs to the church court.

Property inheritance is carried out among blood relatives. Blood relatives refer to people who are descended from a common ancestor and are related to each other by blood. There are paternal and maternal blood relatives, paternal blood relatives refer to the relatives of the decedent's father, and maternal blood relatives refer to the relatives of the decedent's mother. Some inheritance laws specify the order of inheritance. For example, the common law inheritance rules stipulate that paternal consanguineous inheritance takes precedence over maternal consanguineous inheritance. Blood relatives are also divided into direct and collateral blood relatives. "direct blood" refers to the relatives who have a vertical blood relationship with the inheritor, starting from the inheritor and tracing vertically upward or downward, such as father, grandfather, great-grandfather... Such as the elder direct blood relatives, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren... For the younger direct blood relatives; Collateral and direct. Relatively speaking, a relative who shares a common ancestor with the decedent but is not directly related by blood, just like the branches of a tree, although they share the same root, they are not related to each other. John stiles, for example, had two children, of whom there are descendants of the descendants of continuous generations of John stiles as their common ancestor, but of whom they were only collateral relatives. Specifically, the heirs' brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews are all related by blood. Also can say, collateral blood relative shows horizontal distribution, it is the indirect relatives besides immediate relatives.

Property inheritance can be divided into direct inheritance, collateral inheritance and upward inheritance. Direct descent means that the property of the decedent is inherited by his direct descendants. If the decedent has no direct descendants, his property is inherited by his next of kin, which is collateral inheritance. If the decedent has no collateral relatives, his property will be inherited by his elders, and this is the ascending inheritance.

To begin with, it should be made clear that the common law preemptively deprives all feudal owners of the right to dispose of their estates by will, and that all lands are subject to the following rules of succession.

Male preference is not an ancient fact in Britain. In Anglo-Saxon times, all tribes followed the rule of equality between men and women. This remained unchanged during Danish rule. The relevant provisions can be found in the law of Edward the confessor, and later approved by William the conqueror. It wasn't until Henry I that there was a clear "men first" rule.

Britain's primogeniture is not ancient, but gradually formed. Before the Norman conquest, children inherited property regardless of gender. When William the conqueror came to power, he began to require the military servitude and title of the fief to be inherited by the eldest son, the remaining fiefs remain unchanged. During the reign of Henry ii, part of socage also practiced primogeniture. Serjeanty was an estate acquired by the vassal through personal service, so it could not be divided; The ecclesiastical reservation cannot be inherited. At this point, primogeniture was established in all kinds of tenure.

The principle of representation means that the deceased heir should be represented by his heirs. If the eldest son dies before he succeeds, his heirs will exercise the right of succession on behalf of the eldest son. The eldest son has priority over the eldest son and daughter. During the reign of Henry ii, this principle was incorporated into the common law, but it was seldom implemented in the later period. This was due to the destruction of king John: Henry ii had five sons, the eldest died young, the second died in rebellion, and the third, Richard, succeeded to the throne but died childless, leaving the throne vacant. Arthur, the eldest son of Geoffrey, won the throne against John, the fifth. Severely damaged the results on behalf of the principle, the reign is known as the Casus John Regis. But the damage does not stop there. John murdered Arthur in 1203, but Arthur also had a sister, Eleanor, who could represent her father, Geoffrey, according to the principle of representation, and whose right to the throne took precedence over John and his descendants. So when John's son Henry iii became king, he guarded Eleanor until she died unmarried. After the death of Henry iii, the principle of representation was restored.

The descendants of feudal lords were divided into "legitimate birth" and "illegitimate birth". Children born without these conditions are illegitimate. In common law, nullius filius is a child born to nullius filius, which means "no one's son" and therefore does not have the right of inheritance. As the 12th-century jurist granville put it, "any child born out of wedlock or not legally married has no right of inheritance."

The common law coverture principle defines the property rights of married women. The doctrine treats married couples as one, with the husband representing the whole. This principle seriously affects the wife's property right: first, it deprives the wife of the possession and control of the real estate, the wife before marriage and during the marriage of all the real estate must be transferred to the husband to possess and control; Secondly, the movable property acquired by the wife before marriage is owned by the husband after marriage. Again, because the wife does not have property, do not have the right to conclude a will so, more do not have the right to sign a contract alone, bring a lawsuit or appear in court as the defendant.

When can't direct inheritance, real estate collateral relative by blood by inheritance, but collateral heir should be the first purchaser of offspring. "Purchaser" Latin for perquisitor, meaning to ancestors. "Acquired land", as opposed to "hereditary land", refers to the land acquired by means other than inheritance such as gift, grant, purchase and confiscation.

This principle complements the previous one. In the process of land inheritance, due to the long history and several generations, it is often impossible to trace back to the first person who acquired the land, so the heir can only be required to be the blood relatives of the last person who possessed the land, that is, not only from the same ancestor, but also from the same couple. For example, Geoffrey and his wife Lucy have two sons, John and Francis, and John and Francis are each other's blood relatives. Suppose Geoffrey dies and Lucy marries again and has a son jack by her remarried husband, lewis. Jack is half-blood with John and Francis. Similarly, if Lucy dies and Geoffrey marries again, the children of his later wife are half-blood relatives of John and Francis.

In collateral inheritance, male offspring take precedence over female offspring. This principle is actually designed to echo the first principle. Since the first acquisition was difficult to trace over a long period of time, it was not only remedied by the second principle, but was also considered more likely to trace the ancestry of the first acquisition to the male than to the female. This rule clearly favors men. Moreover, the principles of male preference in direct descent also apply to collateral inheritance.

If neither the descending inheritance nor the collateral inheritance is possible, the property of the decedent will be transferred to the ascending inheritance, that is, the successor will be sought in the elder relatives of the decedent. There are two rules for uplink inheritance:

Uplink inheritance can be divided into apparent upward succession and collateral uplink inherit two kinds, the former refers to the decedent's property by his father, grandfather and great grandfather lineal elders such as inheritance, this is impossible under common law, because according to the rules of the common law, anyone before his father hasn't died is impossible to become the heir to the real, even the eldest son just inheritors "pending". When the eldest son is able to inherit the estate, the father must have died, so it is impossible for the father to be the stepson, let alone the grandchild. Therefore, uplink inheritance can only occur in collateral systems.

Collateral ascending inheritance can be divided into two categories: paternal ascending inheritance and maternal ascending inheritance. And the same principles of male preference in direct descending inheritance apply to ascending inheritance.

To sum up, the common law inheritance rules have the following four characteristics:

The first is the principle of three priorities, that is, the male priority, the first son priority, paternity priority. The principle of "three priorities" is the core idea that runs through all the time, whether it is inheritance on the downside, inheritance on the collateral, or inheritance on the upside.

The second is ignoring the interests of the weak. In addition to female heirs and widows can share a share, other family members are basically excluded from the property inheritance sequence;

Again, it emphasized the overall interests of the feudal class. The common law succession rules were made by the rulers, who, relying on their powerful royal power, occupied the dominant position in society. The laws they made were bound to safeguard the interests of the entire feudal class represented by the rulers.

Finally, ignore the real needs of individual feudal owners. Common law succession rules forcibly deprived individual feudal owners of the right to arrange estate inheritance by wills according to their own will, resulting in their inability to adjust the inheritance share of family members.

The common law rules inherited the causes of the formation of these characteristics, we must return to the common law rules inherited form in the background to find: after the Norman conquest, the domestic situation, the conqueror of regime needs the support of the powerful military force, therefore, in order to ensure certainty and effectiveness of military duty, they regulated the system of property by the eldest son. At the same time, because the economic, judicial, political privileges and titles enjoyed by the feudal lords were all related to the land, the feudal lords chose primogeniture to ensure these rights, so as to ensure that the land bearing these rights was not divided and passed on from generation to generation intact. Visible to the eldest son inheritance inheritance system as the main characteristics of the common law rules are designed to maintain the feudal rule, the purpose is to maintain the father parent, the eldest son, husband, and role as one of the feudal class of overall interests, ensure smoothly feudal an obligation, maintain the feudal lords' houses are divided, so as to ensure the integrity of the feudal title and name.

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