AN EXTRAORDINARY WILL.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1017, 14 October 1882, Page 3

AN EXTRAORDINARY WILL.

One of the most eccentric wills of modern times has just been quietly set aside by Vice-Chancellor Bacon, in the Chancery Division of the High Court of Justice. The document in question was executed in May, 1868, by a' Mrs Anne Burdett, of Gilmorton, in Leicestershire, and her leading testamentary dispositions were made in a codicil which directed certain appointed trustees, immediately after her funeral, to cause the windows and doors of every room in her dwelling-house to be bricked up in a solid and substantial manner, thus immuring all the goods and chattels in the house, even to the clock on the mantelpiece, and to continue th 3 bricking up for a period of twenty years. The kitchen only was to remain unsealed, and in this apartment some respectable married couple were to be installed at a peppercorn rent o.f one halfpenny per week, their duty being to fake care of the premises, and in particular to see that no attempts were made to raise the brick blockade of the doors and windows. In order that her directions should be carried out to the Utter, certain benefits under the will were given to the trustees, which benefits they were to forfeit if the house ceased to ho kept in a strictly bricked up and barricaded state. By another codicil, this lively and general testatrix directed that the windows should be boarded up and nailed with good long nails, bent down on the inside, and then covered up with sheet iron and tin, Of

the jimpon'ty thus hermetically sealed up no ift'ectual devise was made. This extraordinary will was disputed in the Probate Court, but probate was eventually granted. Thou the parties who were dissatisfied took "the case into Chancery, and no fewer than eight counsel learned in law appeared before the Vice-Chancellor ; those who supported the validity of the devise quoting Pope’s well-known lines, in which the poet says that a testator may 1 endow a college or a cat,’ and seeking to draw therefrom the inference triat Mrs Burdett was entitled to dispose of her own precisely as she liked, even though her testamentary injunctions were of the most capriciously grotesque nature. Sir James Bacou, however, very cogently pointed out that, in the case before him the testator had endowed neither a eat nor a college ; and he directed the trustees to unseal and release all this hitherto useless property, which must be distributed as the undisposed residue, of the real and personal estate. The only theory which it seems feasible to adopt as to her object in directing that the doors and windows of her house were to be bricked up for so long a period might be that she had a bitter spite against rats and mice—to say nothing of other vermin—and wished to gratify her vengeance by starving to death the creatures which she hated.