Inquisition post mortem

Purpose

The escheators were ordered by a writ from the king's chancery to investigate the deaths of tenants-in-chief in order to assess what monetary value was due to the king from his so-called feudal incidents, comprising for example feudal relief, wardships, and marriages. Such revenues which resulted from the deaths of his tenants-in-chief formed a significant proportion of the mediaeval royal revenues. The feudal due which was payable to the king on the inheritance of the lands by the tenant's heir is termed a relief, from Latin levo, levare (to lift-up), plus re (again), signifying the process of re-elevating the heir to the honourable position of the deceased, as a lord of the manor and tenant-in-chief. The scale of reliefs payable to the king by his tenants-in-chief who held under the feudal land tenure of barony had become a fixed sum under clause two of Magna Carta (1215), but the king nevertheless needed to know who the heir was so payment of the relief could be demanded. If the tenant-in-chief was found to have no heir, for example if he was unmarried or childless, the lands held would "escheat" (i.e. revert to the demesne of the king) to be re-granted as a valuable reward to a favoured courtier or official, or sold for cash proceeds. This aspect of the process was the origin of their former appellation by early Victorian antiquarians of "escheats". If the tenant-in-chief left a minor son as heir, that is to say one aged under 21, his wardship escheated likewise to the king, who was able to sell or award his marriage to a third party. Generally the marriages of such wards were purchased by wealthy men as husbands for their own daughters, and a marriage contract was drawn up at the direction of the bride's father which entailed the ward's future estate onto the progeny of the marriage. Thus the wealthy purchaser's grandchildren became the inheritors of the ward's estate. If the deceased tenant-in-chief left a minor daughter, that is to say one aged under 14, or one younger who was not contracted in marriage, as sole heiress (or more as joint-heiresses), her wardship and marriage likewise escheated to the king. Such wardships constituted a significant part of the royal revenues in mediaeval times.

Avoidance measures

The practice arose amongst tenants-in-chief of transferring the legal title in their lands to feoffees to uses, which effectively established trusts enabling the tenant-in-chief to continue to use the land and its revenues, but to avoid being officially recognised in law as the legal holder. This exempted him from the scope of the Inquisition post mortem, as the legal holders were effectively an immortal corporation one or two of whose constituent feoffees could on occasion die, only to be replaced by others. Such avoidance devices were apparently tolerated by the crown for a considerable time, yet on the accession of King Henry VII (1485–1509) the king's ancient right to his feudal incidents was enforced with determination and ruthlessness.

Procedure

For an heir to inherit his paternal lands a formal and lengthy standard procedure had to be completed, only at the end of which he could "sue out his livery of seisin" (i.e. gain physical possession of his inheritance), so it was in his best interest to get the process started as soon as possible after the death. He himself, or his relatives if a minor, would generally inform the king's chancery that the death had occurred, and this would prompt the production of a writ by the chancery under the king's great seal addressed to the various escheators of the counties in which the deceased held lands, known as a writ diem clausit extremum. This writ, the earliest identified example of which dates from 1254, informed the escheator that the king had been informed (quia datum est nobis intelligi ("because it has been given to us to know")) that the tenant-in-chief named had "closed his last day", as the Latin phrase by which the writ has become known may be translated, and that he was ordered to hold an inquisition post mortem, and to send the resultant report back to the chancery, with his seal and with the writ diem clausit extremum sewn onto it. On receipt of the writ the escheator requested the sheriff of the county concerned to empanell a jury made up of local freeholders, that is to say persons of social standing, who could be relied upon to provide the standard information required in accurate form. Such information, termed 'the jurors' "verdict"' comprised:

The most immediate order in the writ however was that requiring the escheator to take control of all the deceased's demesne lands, i.e. those which had not been sub-enfeoffed to mesne tenants but had been managed in-hand directly by the deceased and his household officials. All revenues resulting from such lands whilst in the hands of the escheator had to be audited (i.e. accounted for before the Barons of the Exchequer) periodically at the treasury.

The end result of the inquisition would be one of the three following, depending on what the jury reported:

Form of permanent record

Inquisitions post mortem (or "escheats") were recorded on two duplicate sheets of parchment. The original return was held in the records of the chancery, to which department the escheator had made his original return, the other by the treasury, which had caused a copy to be made for fiscal purposes, in order to verify the escheator's accounts which were presented to the treasury periodically. Unlike some other series of records, they were not historically sewn together as rolls, but in modern times the parchment sheets have been bound in files with covers, and are today held at the National Archives in Kew. The documents formerly comprising the chancery records are classified under the initial letter "C", whilst those from the exchequer bear the class letter "E". After the establishment of the Court of Wards in 1540 a copy of the Inq.p.m. was also sent to that court, and these records also survive at the National Archives classified as "WARD 7". When an Inq.p.m. had been held not as a result of a writ from chancery but under the escheator's own authority, the verdict was sent to the exchequer only.

Value as historical source documents

Inquisitions post mortem form a valuable source for historians and genealogists, as they not only detail the familial relationships of many of the English nobility and gentry, but also provide information on the history of individual manors, including their size and forms of tenure by which they were held. They thus constitute "one of the most important sources for the social and economic history of mediaeval England". They also provide summaries and terms of settlements made during the lifetime of the deceased, for example settlement to feoffees, the original copy of which has rarely survived.

Example

The following example of the abstracted Latin inq.p.m. of William Pagam (d.1422), published in 1995 as no. 932 in vol. 20, 6–10 Henry V, of the Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, illustrates many common elements:

"Writ 24 July 1422. Hampshire. Inquisition. Alton, 26 Aug.

Here the manor of Drayton is held by the feudal military tenure of castle-guard; the manor of Pury had been transferred to feoffees to uses, and was re-granted by them in 1418 back to William and his wife for their uses under trust.

Calendars of Inq.p.m's.

Printed calendars (abstracted summaries) of almost all the rolls of Inq.p.m.'s have been published in some form, with the exception of the periods 1447–1485 and 1509–1660. An extensive series of calendars extending from the reign of Henry III to that of Richard III, and with an appendix of lists to the reign of James VI and I, was published in four volumes by the Record Commission between 1806 and 1828, edited by John Caley and John Bayley. However, these volumes were later judged by Sir Henry Maxwell Lyte to be of "unsatisfactory character", and to contain many omissions. In 1865 two volumes were published, covering the reigns of Henry III and Edward I, in a new series edited by Charles Roberts entitled Calendarium Genealogicum, which concentrated on providing the names of heirs omitted from the previous publications, designed to be of particular use to genealogists. In 1898 the production of three volumes covering the reign of Henry VII (1485–1509) was started, and was completed in 1955. In 1904 the first volume of a new series of Inq.p.m.'s was published, intended to be more complete and systematic, under Maxwell Lyte's editorship. It covered the reign of Henry III, from 1236, when the practice of producing inq.p.m.'s began. This "first series" continued for 26 volumes, the last volume having been published in 2009, although volumes were not published in chronological order. Winchester University and the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London are currently working on a project to publish on-line in searchable format a revised and expanded series of all existing texts covering the years 1236–1447 and 1485–1509. The project also aims in the long-term to produce calendars for the first time of the periods 1447–1485 and 1509–1542. A number of county record societies have published calendars of Inq.p.m.'s relating to their own counties, abstracted from the chancery and exchequer rolls.