But we cannot devote more space in this chapter to the wills of the most gifted of men of this ancient period, however interesting it would be to follow the testamentary devises of the statesmen, poets and philosophers of the period before Christ, but to trace the origin and growth of English wills, with a few illustrations of the quaint and curious, will sufficiently lengthen the scope of the present subject-matter. Forms of testamentary disposition of personalty obtained in Great Britain at a very early period,[15] but until the Statute of Wills, in 1540,[16] there was no right of disposition by will, in England, on the part of the owner of real estate.[17] The Anglo-Saxon will is not a product of the Roman will at all, but is purely a creature of the manners and customs of the English people themselves.[18] In the early Anglo-Saxon law wills were unknown, but owed their origin to the privilege accorded the crowned heads and great ones to make testamentary disposition and death-bed gifts of their property.[19] In Cnut’s day it was not unusual for a man to make a post obit gift of his land or goods, and after the Norman conquest this custom continued and one could dispose of his land, after his death, by a charter, effective upon his own death, or that of his wife,[20] but the testamentary devise, as we know it, was not a common instrument in this day. After the middle of the thirteenth century the king’s court condemned the post obit gift of land, by charter, but allowed it only in certain boroughs where the custom obtained; primogeniture was held to destroy the existing law of succession; the church asserted the right to execute the last will and testament of every person and the horror of intestacy increased, as the church assumed the right to administer the goods of the deceased, for the good of his soul.[21] We read, in the old books, that a great man, Eude, died in Normandy, during the reign of Henry I., and made a certain division or devise of his property, leaving his manor to the abbey he had built at Colchester, with a hundred pounds and a gold ring, together with a cup and horse and mule; but before the King would confirm the devise of the manor, he compelled the surrender of the cup, horse and mule to the Crown.[22] And the post obit gift to Walden Abbey attempted by William de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, during the reign of Henry II. was also set aside by Geoffrey Fitz Peter, one of Glanville’s successors as Chief Justiciar,[23] under Henry II., and his successor. Of course the church-men frequently procured confirmations from the heirs of these post obit gifts of land to the church, by the threat of a dying father and the disapprobation of the church, if the gift was not confirmed, but in the law these gifts were not recognized, for, as Glanville puts it, in this period it was an axiom of the law that “God alone and not man can make an heir.”[24]