That would be Henry the Eighth, who needed a new way to tax the people. So he invented probate.
The history of probate is complicated. In some nations of the world, apparently, the concept of probate did not even exist until after colonization by the English. I believe India is one example.
It is hard for people in this century to grasp the significance of the fact that if you lived in Texas in 1825, even if the telephone had been invented, you could not pick up a phone and call an Austin Probate Lawyer much less research on the internet.
Part of what made inheritance laws so difficult in mediaeval Europe as that there was no separation of church and state. In feudal times, only the overlords owned any land in the first place and they merely granted their subjects the right to occupy the property in exchange for services. Of course, the right was revokable at any time. The ecclesiastical courts controlled inheritance. Since all the clerics were men, women had no right to inherit anything. After the church took its cut, the rest normally went to the oldest son.
In much of the United States there were not even any legal entities charged with administering probate in the western states until the middle of the nineteenth century. Nor until that time were women able to effectively keep real estate holdings in any proper sense of the term, particularly not if they married.
If a dispute arose, there wasn't any expert to ask. I guess that possession was all ten points of the law then.
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