INHERITANCE

Julie Hardwick

In the narrowest sense, inheritance concerns the transmission of property from one person to another, whether that property is money, real estate, personal possessions, titles, or kingdoms. This very specific process has, however, the broadest of implications. Every person in European society—men and women, rich and poor, young and old, urban and rural, Catholic and Protestant—was affected by the transmission of property through inheritance. Relations between people, whether parents and children, siblings, or men and women, have influenced and been profoundly influenced by the way inheritance worked. The giving of property provided a symbolic as well as material means for family members to express their affection for each other or to designate their preferences for some family members over others. Moreover, patterns of inheritance were determined by many factors, such as laws, economic practices, social customs, and demographic patterns, as well as personal preferences. Because exploring the way inheritance worked in a particular historical community reveals many different aspects of that community, European social historians have found inheritance to be an invaluable topic.

The approaches of historians to the study of inheritance have changed focus in significant ways since the 1970s. They have moved from examining what might be called the mechanics of inheritance, looking at issues like what the pertinent laws were and what wills of individual testators suggest about how those laws were observed (or not) in practice, to trying to place inheritance more broadly in the context of social relations. In this more recent phase, social historians have looked at inheritance as a key strategy that family members used to deal with the various challenges they faced—to ensure they had support in old age, to provide for all their children, or to guarantee that social status was maintained. This conceptual approach encourages historians to examine the many ramifications of inheritance. As David Warren Sabean has observed, "The way that property is held gives shape to feelings between family members, territorializes emotion, establishes goals and ambitions, and gives to each a sense of dependence and independence" (Medick and Sabean, 1984, p. 171).

Key variables in inheritance practices include laws, timing, the nature of the property, and the status of men and women. The legal regimes governing inheritance varied enormously from country to country or even region to region within countries. Yet as social historians have shown in many studies, families did not always seem to follow the dictates of laws when it came to transmitting their property. They pursued a variety of strategies that tried to ensure that their own goals were met even while legal requirements were being observed or circumvented.

The timing of the transmission of property was enormously influential, shaping individual fortunes and family relationships. Parents might transfer property, in the form of dowries, gifts, or postmortem bequests, to one or more of their children at almost any time between the children's marriages and the parents' deaths. The consequences of these decisions over timing were enormous. A son who had to wait until his parents died to receive his inheritance might, for example, continue living with them and delay marriage. In turn, that pattern of delayed marriage for men was often accompanied by high rates of illegitimacy or prostitution.

When laws required that all children inherit equally or constrained parental testamentary discretion in other ways (as in England, where in many cases the law of thirds prevailed, whereby a widow would get a third, the children would get a third, and the father could dispose of the other third as he chose), parents could still privilege one child over another either by differential timing or by the kinds of property assigned to each child. One child might, for example, receive a substantial portion of their inheritance years earlier than a sibling.

The character of the property that was transmitted—that is, whether it took the form of movables (cash, tools, linen and other household goods, or personal items) or immovables (usually land or houses)—was also a key element in inheritance. When property was transferred on the marriage of a child, it was more likely to be in movables than in real estate.

Gender was another critical element in inheritance: men's and women's right to property often differed, whether as widows and widowers or as sons and daughters. It was possible, for instance, that in a family where the parents' property appeared to be divided equally among all children, sons might receive a preponderance of the land and daughters a preponderance of the movables. In some early modern communities, daughters who received dowries at the time of their marriages were subsequently excluded from any further claim on their parents' estate. Early modern women who were widowed often found themselves in very precarious financial situations because they had to divide their household property with the other heirs.

EARLY MODERN EUROPE

Inheritance shaped the prospects of most early modern Europeans in very profound ways. Although laws about the transmission of property varied enormously, in early modern society a person's life was profoundly shaped by what property he or she might receive through inheritance. The impact was not only economic but also social, framing household structures and kinship relations.

Renaissance Italy. Renaissance Italy provided one of the earliest and most fertile grounds for historians' studies of inheritance. Although the territory of Italy was divided into myriad self-governing republics, Venice and Florence have dominated scholarly attention. In Venice, patrilineal ties (where kinship was figured through the male line) were especially strong. The most striking institutionalization of this dynamic came in the form of the fraterna, a legal device that gave sons equal and joint shares of their fathers' estates while excluding daughters, who had rights only to dowries. Traditionally, this inheritance system was viewed as the key to the persistent close ties between male kin, especially in the Venetian elite, and to the marginalization of women.

Yet as historians have studied inheritance in practice as well as law, a more complex view has appeared because Venetian women's dowry rights were strongly protected, and elite women were key links in the kinship networks that underlay political and economic success. Persistent dowry inflation through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries made daughters ever more expensive. While some families responded by coercing their girls to pursue the cheaper course of becoming nuns, other families met the clear obligation to dower daughters at whatever cost by drawing on an ever wider group of kin to raise the money.

In Florence, broadly similar inheritance practices prevailed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Patrilineal tendencies were reinforced as new elite families of merchants and bankers emulated traditional aristocratic practices by giving themselves a family name that was transmitted by male heirs. The marginalization of women was given more material form when families used dowries to fulfill their obligation to daughters while sons were given equal shares of all remaining property. The close ties between brothers that resulted were evident, for example, in the establishment of fraternal communities where all brothers and their families lived together in the same large household, even after the father had died. Even when these groups broke up and siblings established their own households, they often lived in very close proximity, building complex webs of kinship ties that underpinned much economic and political activity. Sisters meanwhile found themselves in limbo, regarded as only temporary members of either their birth families or the families of their husbands.

Partial inheritance. Just as inheritance contributed to the distinctive characteristics of Renaissance Italian city-states, different inheritance laws and practices were similarly pillars that profoundly shaped daily life in the rest of Europe from the late fifteenth to the late eighteenth century. In many parts of Europe, rural and urban, partible inheritance prevailed as a matter of both law and practice. In these kinds of inheritance systems, the property was divided up more or less equally among all heirs. Families observed versions of partible inheritance in much of England, in slightly different forms in western and northern France, and in much of Germany.

In some partible inheritance regions, the commitment to absolute equality was extraordinary. In western France, for example, customary law set very egalitarian standards for inheritance. Daughters as well as sons had equal claims on non-noble estates, and the principle of forced return to the succession required that all property received previously be declared so that the final portion each claimant received would reflect long-term equality. Heirs met to report what each had already received (whether as dowries, loans, or gifts of other kinds), and then the lots were made. Again elaborate safeguards ensured that equality among heirs was preserved. Heirs selected lots according to their sex, with all sons choosing first, and their age, with the oldest having the first pick. This pattern might seem to give the oldest son considerable advantage over the youngest daughter. Yet the person who would choose last was charged with making up the lots from which the heirs would chose, an ingenious device that gave him or her clear incentive to make the lots as fair as possible.

In other partible inheritance regions, the division of property followed what might be termed a different-but-equal pattern. In England, for instance, where many peasant families practiced partible inheritance, an alternative strategy was usually pursued. One heir alone would receive the land, while the others received movable wealth of various kinds.

The consequences of partible inheritance were complex. While it ensured equality among heirs, the constant fragmentation of property endangered the financial viability of family members. Social historians studying some areas, such as rural societies in early modern Germany, have argued that partible inheritance caused intense competitiveness and tension between siblings, whereas elsewhere, as in early modern French towns, it seems to have fostered cooperation. In England, partible inheritance that limited land transfers to one child left the other heirs detached and free to pursue their lives elsewhere, in towns, cities, or even the emerging colonies. In many parts of France, where land was assigned to all children, peasant ties to the countryside remained strong, contributing to greater reluctance to emigrate. Many commentators and historians have linked these differences to subsequent differences in national histories, such as rates of economic development or successes with colonization.

Primogeniture. In other regions, families followed versions of inheritance systems based on the principle of primogeniture, in which one child (usually the eldest son) inherited the bulk of the landed property. Primogeniture was especially widespread among elites throughout European society and in areas where Roman law prevailed, such as southern France and Spain. In Roman law regions, testators had broad discretion to distribute property as they saw fit, which allowed them to concentrate their estate in the hands of a single heir.

Yet even in areas where a basic commitment to primogeniture prevailed, in practice most families showed a clear desire to provide for all of their children. Daughters received dowries and younger sons were helped with education or apprenticeships to provide them with means to make a living otherwise than off the family land. In such areas, families may not have been committed to equality, but they seemed to have pursued equity in their efforts to ensure to the best of their abilities that each child received help. Thus for most nonelite families the legal differences between partible inheritance and primogeniture were not as important in practice as they might seem. Families used inheritance along with many other aspects of their lives to weave strategies that met the varying needs of parents, children, and siblings.

In the late nineteenth century, a French sociologist, Frédéric Le Play, hypothesized that the practice of primogeniture led to the formation of a particular kind of household structure that he called "the stem family." Le Play suggested that in families where only one son would inherit the land, the heir's marriage usually coincided with the retirement of his parents. Subsequently, the two married couples shared a multigenerational household while other noninheriting siblings either went off to establish their own households or remained unmarried in the household of their brother and parents. Since the 1960s, social historians have endeavored to investigate the validity of this thesis, and many doubts have been raised. Historians now think household structures were less stable than this model suggests. Multigenerational households were common experiences at some point for many people, but their formation represented particular moments in the life courses of families. Moreover, families adopted multigenerational households for many reasons besides inheritance systems, including caring for the elderly, redistributing labor needs, and providing child care.

Dowries and inheritance. Marriages were also important moments of property transmission, primarily through families' provision of dowries to their daughters as they married. Realistically, a girl could not marry without a dowry in this period. If a young woman's parents could not afford to provide her with one, she needed to work to save her own dowry. Many female servants, for example, used the payment they received at the end of their term of employment to fund dowries for themselves. (Early modern servants were usually paid only when they left their employers' households, not on a regular weekly or monthly basis.) Most nonelite families seem to have taken their dotal obligations to their daughters very seriously, however, and provided contributions to dowries if they could.

For newly wed couples, dowries were critical elements in establishing the long-term prospects for married life. Young men could use the cash injection dowries represented as an important means of promoting their careers, allowing them to fund their occupations by buying tools or positions. Even the poorest women's dowries also usually included the essential goods to set up a new household—items like a bed, some pots and pans, a stack of linens, and some clothes.

The effect of giving dowries on women's right to inherit varied considerably. In some areas, families considered that their obligations to their daughters had been met by the provision of dowries, and such "dowered off" daughters gave up any further claim on family property. In these cases, dowries were probably a means by which daughters' claims on family property were limited, and consequently girls received smaller shares than their brothers. Elsewhere, though, daughters who had been dowered were still entitled to participate in the division of property after their parents' deaths.

Legally, in most countries, husbands became the managers, if not the outright owners, of their new wives' dowries (and of any other property their wives subsequently inherited). Nevertheless, women's ability to have access to their own property varied from place to place. In England, a married woman's legal identity was consumed by her husband's as she became a feme covert. In the countries of continental Europe, women's dowries were often divided into lineage property and community property, even in nonelite families. Husbands managed both, but could only inherit community property: women's children became the heirs to lineage property, and if wives died childless, husbands had to return lineage property to their in-laws. Everywhere courts were careful to protect women's dowries from the threats posed by husbands who might squander the money.

Noble inheritance patterns. For elite families across Europe, the situation was different. Even in regions where partible inheritance prevailed for commoners, laws permitted noble families to practice primogeniture in some form. Such families often pursued versions of primogeniture most ruthlessly because they felt that their status, with all the privileges it carried, would be jeopardized by dividing their patrimony—their family property in all its forms—among many heirs. The most striking practitioners of primogeniture were of course the European monarchical dynasties, who bequeathed not only personal property but kingdoms, and the contrast between the fortunes of the child who would inherit and other siblings was very dramatic in terms of political power as well as material comfort. The eldest son was the preferred heir in all royal families, and all sons were preferred to all daughters. In France, the early modern observation of Salic law meant in fact that women could not inherit the throne.

Other aristocratic families adopted a number of strategies to circumvent the perils of multiple heirs. The proportion of never married sons and daughters in elite families was high, a tactic that reduced the number of heirs and limited the financial burdens that dowries presented. In many Catholic countries one or more children were encouraged to take religious orders, a step that invalidated their right to inherit. As a result of choices like these, in eighteenth-century Venice, for example, 64 percent of the sons of elite families never married, while in France at the same time 42 percent of the sisters of dukes and peers likewise remained single. The numbers were similarly high throughout European aristocracies.

From the sixteenth century onward elite families also increasingly developed new legal means to avoid the division of their estates. These practices (known as mayorazgos in Spain, fideicommissa in Italy, substitutions in France, and strict settlements or entails in Britain) all sought to preserve intact the landed estate that usually provided the core of both the wealth and the status of great families by forbidding the division of land and putting it beyond the claims of creditors.

All such efforts to preserve the wealth of aristocratic families intact privileged the status of the family as a lineage or dynasty over the interests of individual heirs. Even the son who inherited such an estate was effectively a tenant for life rather than an owner, as his ability to manage the property was severely restricted. He could not, for example, sell the estate, and his ability to mortgage it to raise money was also strictly limited. Younger sons often found themselves with few prospects and needed to seek their fortunes in the army or church. Some historians argue that daughters may have fared better, at least if they were permitted to marry. Although dowry inflation was rampant across Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the result that the high costs of dowries threatened to ruin many families, the alliances daughters made were essential for the building of kinship and political networks. A daughter who was married with a dowry sufficient to attract a suitor of appropriate status could expect to live a life that was more on a par in material terms, at least, with that of her inheriting oldest brother than her younger brothers could.

Widows. Women who were widowed were also a distinctive group in terms of inheritance. In most countries, widows were entitled to a specific share of the property they and their husbands had accumulated. That share was determined either by law or by specific arrangement at the time of the couple's marriage. It was often around a third, although it could be much less. Although this provision was meant to give widows financial means to support themselves, the splitting of household property between widows and all other heirs left many widows in dire financial straits, as tax rolls from communities across Europe show.

Wills offered one last means for testators to shape the disposal of their property. Historians have shown that besides the practices already described that took care of the majority of property, men and women also used small gifts of personal property, like jewelry, clothes, linen, or books, as a way of expressing particular ties. Women especially seem to have been likely to remember their sisters or nieces, emphasizing a continued sense of the importance of extended kinship beyond the conjugal families they had established with their husbands.

MODERN EUROPE SINCE 1789

The two hundred years or so since the late eighteenth century have seen many dramatic shifts in European society that have had enormous impacts, both directly and indirectly, on the practice and significance of inheritance. These changes have included not only obvious developments like the passage of new laws that explicitly impacted how inheritance worked but also the emergence of new economic and political patterns that have transformed the role of inheritance in most communities.

The era of the French Revolution marked a watershed in many ways, as political changes in many countries were accompanied by shifts toward industrialization, albeit at different rates and by different means in different countries. In France itself, many revolutionary leaders were quick to insist that all children should have equal inheritance rights. The commitment to equal shares for all heirs became a cornerstone of revolutionary legislation, and was enshrined with little alteration in the Napoleonic Civil Code of 1804. For those seeking to reform France, equality of inheritance had political as well as familial goals because they foresaw newly egalitarian families as the building blocks of a democratic nation. This Civil Code, with its emphasis on equal shares for all heirs, became enormously influential in other continental countries in the nineteenth century, providing a model for legal reform. Even regions where its introduction was not the result of Napoleon's conquests chose to adopt the Code, as in the case of the Netherlands, where it became law in 1838.

As Western industrial societies evolved, four key developments dramatically reduced the traditional importance of inheritance in determining individual wealth and life course for all but the richest of families. For most young people, education rather than inheritance became the key to their life fortunes. With the rise of wage earning, children became more independent of their parents. The emergence of a variety of social security systems as elements of welfare state programs also reduced individual dependency on inheritance. The most important of these perhaps has been the establishment of national pension schemes that provide income during old age. Finally, many governments introduced new fiscal regimes, of which estate taxes were the most significant for the role of inheritance.

Nevertheless, the property families transmit from generation to generation still has important material and symbolic roles. Although laws about inheritance still vary from country to country, with France, for example, insisting that all children inherit equally and Britain giving parents the right to divide their property as they wish, in practice equity among all inheriting children, both sons and daughters, has become the rule in all but the most elite families.

Since World War II, as life expectancy has increased, parents have increasingly chosen to pass property to their children at many different stages rather than at the traditional pivotal moments of marriage and death. Parents have underwritten the costs of education as that has become an increasingly important determinant of success for large parts of populations, and offered financial help at many other moments, such as the purchase of houses or the birth of children.

The situation of widows in particular has changed dramatically in many regions since World War II. Increasingly, in countries like England that give wide latitude over the disposal of property, when one spouse dies, the surviving partner, man or woman, inherits the entire estate, leaving the next generation to receive their ultimate share only after the death of both parents. Even in areas like the Netherlands, where inheritance laws are still heavily influenced by the provisions of the Napoleonic Code that were introduced in the nineteenth century, husbands have moved toward choosing to protect the rights of their surviving wives to have at least use of all the property. This pattern, which privileges the interests and competence of both spouses, marks a dramatic change from earlier practices, when widows' portions were assigned along with those of other heirs on the death of the father.

In the countries of Eastern Europe, meanwhile, the post–World War II transition to socialism revolutionized inheritance along with many other aspects of family life. The abolition of private ownership of the means of production ended the role of inheritance as a means by which wealth was transmitted from one generation to the next.

In sharp contrast, elite families have continued to incline toward preserving their estates intact. The legal strategy of entail survived most powerfully in England, where the nobility, like other testators, enjoyed few restrictions on the transmission of their property. For continental nobilities, however, the egalitarian intentions of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Code produced powerful impetuses toward division. Since the early nineteenth century, elites in France and Spain have had only very limited abilities to keep their estates intact. Even in countries like Prussia that at first shared with Britain the survival of the right to entail, noble estates were being divided by the later nineteenth century.

Even in the most aristocratic circles, where primogeniture seems to prevail most stoutly in the transmission of titles and estates, changes in progress suggest that the dramatic transformation of inheritance practices of the last two centuries are reaching the highest levels. In 1999, the British government was preparing a constitutional revolution that designated birth order alone, regardless of sex, as the key to inheritance of the British monarchy. Should a future monarch see a daughter as the firstborn, she will become queen ahead of any subsequently born brothers.

See alsoGender History; Patriarchy (in this volume); and other articles in this section.

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