Byland Revisited, or, Spectres of Inheritance

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the connections between ghosts and medieval law. It revisits the final story from the famous Byland Abbey collection, concerning the sister of Adam de London and a disputed inheritance, and demonstrates the historicity of the people involved using legal evidence. This opens up a reading of the story in which legal ideas are central to the framing and narrative; I suggest that the ghost manifests a fear of the destruction of inheritance. I then move to argue that the law of inheritance in later medieval England was dependent on a ‘spectral reasoning’, in which the wishes of those who granted property to their children took on an outsized, supernatural agency. Finally, I suggest that this comparison helps to reveal not only the strangeness of inheritance as a legal concept, but also the ways in which it has continued to structure inequality into our own time.