The modern statutes of descents and distributions, in the United States, are no doubt founded upon the customs, which had taken the fixed form of law, at this early period of English history. In the written English wills that have come down to us, from the middle ages, we find the dispositions of property governed, largely, by the customs and laws of the period when the will was written and the forms and dispositions of property devised by these instruments is as varied as the imaginations and whims of the testators. The will of Guy de Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, dated at Warwick Castle, Monday, next after the feast of St. James, the Apostle, 1315, provided for the interment of his body in the Abbey of Bordsley, without funeral pomp. To Alice, his wife, he left a portion of his plate, a crystal cup and half his bedding, with all the books in his chapel; to his daughters, he left the other half of his bedding, rings and jewels; to his son, Thomas, he left his best coat of mail, helmet and suit of harness, and to his son, John, he left his second best coat of mail, helmet and harness, and the remainder of his armour, bows, and other warlike implements were to remain in Warwick castle, for his heir.[41] Noticeable among the wills of the fourteenth century is the specific provision for the place and manner of the interment of the body of the deceased. The testators of this period of the world’s history, prompted by their superstition, wrote their wills as if they thought that the angel of the Lord, on the resurrection day, would scan their wills, to find the place of their interment. They talked “of graves, of worms, and epitaphs,” just as the Great Bard makes the weak King Richard speak, who had naught to bequeath, save his deposed body “to the ground.”[42] We find that old John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, in 1399, directs, in his will,[43] “If I die out of London, I desire that the night my body arrives there it be carried direct to the Friars Carmelites, in Fleet Street, and the next day be taken straight to St. Paul’s, and that it be not buried for forty days, during which I charge my executors that there be no embalming of my corpse.”