The Heriot in Early Medieval England: A Reassessment

Abstract This article presents a reassessment of the entire corpus of heriots – a post obitum transfer of military equipment and/or money to one’s lord – as well as a detailed survey which exposes the high degree of inconsistency between the values of II Cnut and the evidence found across wills and other sources. Rather than seeking to explain away the inconsistencies revealed by this analysis (as previous scholarship has often sought to do), I argue that such variation was a regular feature of heriot payments and, furthermore, that negotiation played a key role in the process, wherein heriot payments were subject to unilateral or bilateral alteration according to the needs of the testator or the recipient. This variability accounts for the disparities found across the corpus. Moreover, it is theorised that the possibility for the negotiation of one’s heriot allowed for the use of the heriot as a tool of disproportionate extraction.