688 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
confession of the dying man also often wrote his last will. The 
canon law still requires for the validity of the Will that it be 
attested by two witnesses and the parish priest. In the absence 
of the priest there must be four witnesses. 1 We shall see in 
the course of this study several examples of wills in which the 
parish priest officiates. 
The Will as an instrument for conveying property was un¬ 
known to the early Teutonic peoples. It was first brought to 
them from Rome by the Roman church. 2 It is not hard to see 
then, how the church would naturally regard will-making as a 
function peculiarly its own. In England the power of the 
church was more or less curbed by the strong hand of the Nor¬ 
man kings. In the charter of Henry I, dated 1100, the civil 
law is seen regulating the Will. That charter provided that a 
will might be made only in favor of a wife, children, parents, or 
legitimi homines. But the Great Charter (1215), though 
based on that of Henry I, has nothing to say of the Will. By 
that time it had passed under control of the church. 3 
It is not hard to see why the church was so anxious to con¬ 
trol the Will. No human organization, though professedly of a 
spiritual character has ever been so concerned for the things of 
the other world as for any great length of time to despise the 
many opportunities for working good by means of temporal 
things. Here was an excellent opportunity to get control of 
property. A dying man is less careful about the disposal of his 
goods than is one wffio has a lease on life, and it was very advan¬ 
tageous for a representative of the church to be nekr when the 
property was disposed of. Especially likely is the church to 
get a part of it if the man has faith in its teachings and believes 
that it holds the keys of eternal life. So we find Dr. Eurnival 
in his introduction to his volume of Early English Wills de¬ 
ploring the way in w 7 hich gifts were lavished upon the church 
by testators who often left their wives and children to suffer. 
One result of the ecclesiastical control of the will was the es¬ 
tablishing of the confession of faith in the doctrines of the 
1 A Catholic Dictionary , p. 861. 
2 Universal Cyclopedia , XII, 444. 
®W. Stubbs, Select Charters , Oxford, 1900, p. 101. 
