Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 8.djvu/407

ORIGINAL DOCUMKNT!^. ,") 1 I example, in the 8-ith canon, which directs the clcrify from time to time. especially ichen men make their te^tamcntif, to exhort their neij^fhhour.s to give to the ahns-chest in the church ; and in the ruhric of the oHice for the visitation of the sick, which directs the minister to uihnonibli the b'u-k man rcspectin*^ his wilh One reason, perh;ij»s, why tlio paris-h jiriost less fre- quently aj»j)car3 among the witnesses, when any are named, may he that he generally took some henefit under it to say masses for the testator's soul. From the foregoing observations it is manifest, that we have no cause to question the originality of an ancient will because it docs not come out of an ecclesiastical court, or to be surprised that a will has not the testator's seal to it, or any mention in it of its having been sealed, or of there having l»cen any witnesses. In general, when a will is found with several seals, it is a probate copy, and there appear on it certificates of the will having been proved in several courts, the testator having left property in ditferent juris- dictions. Some examples of such documents are to be found in Madox's Form. Angl. But how arc we to account for a will having a seal or several seals attached to it, which yet does not purport to have been cither sealed or proved ? In explanation of this, after having sought in vain for some- thing decisive on the subject, I would otfer the following suggestion. Though witnesses to a will were not necessary, it was almost the invariable practice to have not less than two or three, and generally more. At a time when few could write, much less recognise the handwriting of others, if a will were made before witnesses, and not sealed with the testator's seal, especially if he were then in health, it must have been expedient to have some mode of identifying the writing as that which they had heard read over to him ; and what method was more likely to have been resorted to than that some seal, which could be easily recognised, should be attached to it ? In the two instances above referred to in Madox's Form. Angl., where there were respectively three and four seals, I conceive them to have been the seals of witnesses themselves ; as no means of identification could he more satisfactory to them than appending their own seals. Those wills are in the past tense and third person, as if memoranda of what took place ; but are too long to have been nuncupative wills — i. c., wills not jiut into writing while the testators were alive, or at least at the time they made them. In other cases of less importance, probably, the witnesses would be content with some well-known seal being affixed ; and if the parish priest, in compliance with the constitution of 123G, was in the habit of being present, no single seal was likely to have been more generally ai)proved than his ; and such a practice may have easily led to the use of a particular seal by the priest on such occasions, which would on that account, in some cases, be handed down from one to another through a succession of meum- bents, and become well known. I am, therefore, disi»osed to think the seal in question was the seal of the parish priest of Totnes for these purposes, and had passed from one to another during the interval that occurred between the dates of the two wills. This appears to mo more probable than that it should have been the seal adopted by some notary, even sup- posing it had in like manner been transmitted through a succession of such functionaries ; because he would have been more likely, from his lial>its of business, lo affix his notarial signature or seal. The silence of the books on such a practice of identifying the writing, and the rarity of the examples of seals so employed, may be accounted for by the fact of the testator's seal