My Minnesota clients often ask why some of the probate and inheritance procedures seem complicated and sometimes outdated.
The truth of the matter is that many of these procedures follow English Common Law precedents dating back to the 13th century.
You’ve probably heard of the Magna Carta or “Great Charter” that the English barons got King John to sign in the year 1215. When we were in school, we were taught that the motivation of the English nobles was a great demand for trial by jury, due process of law. , representative government and other civil rights now contained in our Constitution.
not so
Civil rights demands were largely an afterthought of what the nobles were really after: namely, inheritance rights.
To understand what the Magna Carta what it was really about, we need to turn back the calendar to the year 1215.
First, life expectancy for most people was truly “nasty, brutal, and short,” as Thomas Hobbes would later put it. Life expectancy was around 39 years and many men would never survive to see their children grow up.
Likewise, women had a short life expectancy, especially since labor was often fatal. Furthermore, women had few legal rights except through their husbands or fathers. As a result, there were many widows and orphans in the 1200s in England.
King John was constantly short of money. To obtain funds, he often took over the estates and inheritances of the families of deceased barons.
Understandably, the barons wanted to preserve their family estates and did not want the king to interfere with their families. Some of the barons had been denied their fathers’ inheritances because of King John. Other barons feared that their wives and children would be destitute if King John’s seizure of property was not stopped.
As a result, they rebelled against King John and forced him to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede Field near Oxford on June 15, 1215.
Tea Magna Carta contains 63 sections. After the introduction, the next seven sections deal with issues of inheritance and succession. That certainly showed what the barons considered most important. In all, 16 sections of the Magna Carta dealing with family property and inheritance rights. The civil rights sections don’t appear until later in the document, so those rights were obviously less pressing for the barons.
So the next time you’re wondering about probate, probate, or inheritance procedures, you’ll understand why I start with, “Well, it all started with the Magna Carta.”