Emotion And Reason Confrontation

As the main means of acquiring wealth in pre-industrial period, inheritance not only determined individual's fortune, but has a close relationship with family, marriage, women's position, and political power. And it played an important role in social history. The aim of this thesis is attempting to explore the property inheritance patterns of late medieval and early modern England.This thesis is not a comprehensive survey of all kinds of inheritance rules and customs of this period, but a systematic introduction to landowners' wealth distributing notion, and an analysis of the contradictory aims of the landowners when they designed family settlements. At the same time this thesis also attempted to establish relationships between 'family settlements' and 'intra-family relationship', uncover the characteristics of the English intra-family relationship during our period through analyzing the influence by family settlements.This thesis falls two parts, with an introduction at the beginning, following five chapters. Firstly, the introduction discusses the importance of the theme; then it presents the historiography and clarifies the time, place and object of the theme; finally it explains the methods, and enumerated the resources used in this dissertation.Chapter One discusses briefly the background of family settlements, and argues that landowners are not satisfied with the inheritance pattern, which is characterized by feudal tenure and common law rules. Respectively, the following three charters elaborate on the three family settlements designed by landowners, i.e., entail, uses and strict settlement. These chapters demonstrate that during the course of designing family settlements landowners were able to explore the appropriate way to amend the existing inheritance patterns, break through the feudal bondage, and obtain the freedom of controlling their wealth. However, the landowners also faced a difficult dilemma. They were always oscillating between two contradictory aims, i.e., keeping the integrity of family property and considering the welfare of weak family members. Sometimes they emphasized particularly on the former, sometimes the latter, all depending upon their needs. They finally found a balance point between the two aims. This complicated and painful process not only exhibited the conflicts between reason and emotion in landowners' heart incisively and vividly, but made the English inheritance system better and better.Chapter 5 argues that family settlements exerted great influence on landowners' intra-family relationship, which took on a characteristic of continuity from 13^th to 18^th century. During this period, the landowner never forgot stressing the integrity of family property and transfer of title and surnames. And the intra-family relationship did not become intimate overwhelmingly during the 17^th and 18^th centuries. At the same time we should also realize that landowners cared and cherished weak family members at all time through our period, love also existed in the families from 13^th to 16^th century.In conclusion, this thesis attempts to unfold a process in which landowners reconstructed the English inheritance patterns. And the characters (i.e., fluctuation and continuity) showed themselves during the process indicated that this process was corresponding to the overall development mode of England which was characterized by compromise, fusion, gradualism and reformation...