A history of probate.
Probate is the oldest continuously operating branch of civil law in the English-speaking world. For six hundred years it was run by the Church, on the theory that a badly settled estate endangered the dead person's soul. Everything that follows is the slow business of getting it out of the churchyard and into a courthouse.
Rome, and the invention of the heir
The idea that a dead person's wishes can bind the living is not obvious and is not universal. Rome built it, and Europe inherited it along with everything else.
- c. 450 BC
The Twelve Tables
Rome's earliest codification recognises the testamentum and, in the formulation that echoes through two thousand years of law, provides that as a man has directed concerning his property, so let it be binding. Testamentary freedom starts here. - c. 100 BC – 500 AD
The heir as a continuing person
Roman law develops the heres — an heir who does not merely receive property but legally continues the identity of the deceased, taking on the debts along with the assets. That fiction is the ancestor of the modern personal representative, and it is why an estate can still be sued. - c. 600 – 1066
Anglo-Saxon England: the cwide
Pre-Conquest England has written death-bed dispositions — the cwide — often witnessed by a bishop and concerned as much with the soul as the silver. Land generally descends by custom rather than by choice. There is no court that specialises in any of this.
Six centuries in the hands of the bishops
William the Conqueror separated the church courts from the secular ones and handed them jurisdiction over the personal property of the dead. The reasoning was theological, not administrative: a will disposed of alms, mortuaries and burial instructions, and executing it properly was a matter of the deceased's justification before God.
- c. 1072Turning point
William the Conqueror separates the courts
Ecclesiastical courts are split from the hundred courts. Jurisdiction over the succession to personal property at death goes to the Church; land stays with the King's courts. That split — realty one way, personalty the other — will distort English and American inheritance law for the next eight hundred years. - c. 1215
Magna Carta touches the intestate
Among its many clauses, Magna Carta addresses what happens to a dead man's chattels and the Crown's appetite for them — an early recognition that intestacy is a problem the law must answer rather than an opportunity for whoever gets there first. - early 1200s
The Church begins granting probate
Bishops' courts start formally proving wills and granting administration. The word probate is simply the proving — the court satisfying itself that the document before it is the true last will. - 1340s
Established custom
By the middle of the fourteenth century, ecclesiastical jurisdiction over probate is acknowledged in English law as settled custom rather than a novelty. The Prerogative Court of Canterbury becomes the senior probate court in England and stays so for five hundred years. - 1535Turning point
The Statute of Uses
Henry VIII's attempt to shut down the use — a device by which land was held by one person for the benefit of another, largely to dodge feudal dues and the ban on devising land. The statute did not kill it. It drove it underground, where it re-emerged as the trust.
The right to leave your land to anyone
For most of English history you could not choose who got your land. It descended by rule. Two statutes changed that, and created both the freedom this archive is full of and the litigation that freedom generates.
- 1540Turning point
The Statute of Wills
Parliament permits a landholder to devise land by will — all of it if held in socage, two thirds if held by knight service. This is the single most consequential date on this page. Every case in the archive, from Shakespeare's second-best bed to a notebook page in a couch cushion, exists because of it. - 1677Turning point
The Statute of Frauds
Certain wills must be in writing and attested by witnesses. The modern execution ceremony — signature, witnesses, presence — descends directly from this statute, and it is why an unwitnessed page found in a sofa is a legal problem rather than a legal document.
The courts that ate the estates
Trusts were enforced in the Court of Chancery, which had no jury, no deadlines, no proportionality, and a fee structure that paid everyone by the step. It produced the most notorious civil procedure in the history of the common law, and then a novelist ended it.
- 1797
Peter Thellusson dies
The London merchant directs his fortune to accumulate through the lives of his living sons and grandsons before passing to a distant descendant. His family sues. The litigation runs, on and off, for roughly sixty-two years. - 1800
The Thellusson Act
Parliament is alarmed enough by one man's will to legislate against it, limiting how long income may be accumulated rather than paid out. The Accumulations Act 1800 is still known by his name. - 1852–53Turning point
Bleak House
Dickens serialises the novel built around Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a Chancery suit that ends when the costs consume the whole estate. In his preface he names two real suits as his sources. It is the only work of Victorian fiction that became a term of art. - 1857Turning point
The Court of Probate Act
Testamentary jurisdiction is stripped from the ecclesiastical courts and given to a new secular Court of Probate. After roughly six hundred years, proving a will stops being a church function. - 1873–75
The Judicature Acts
Law and equity are merged and the separate Court of Chancery is abolished. From Bleak House to the end of Chancery is about twenty-two years.
Fifty jurisdictions, no federal probate
The United States inherited English probate and then immediately fragmented it. There is no federal probate court and never has been. Every state built its own, which is why the same handwritten page is a valid will in Michigan and waste paper in Florida.
- 1790
Franklin's two-hundred-year codicil
Benjamin Franklin leaves £1,000 each to Boston and Philadelphia, to be lent out at interest and accumulate for two centuries. The funds pay out in 1990. American testamentary eccentricity begins at the top. - 1916Turning point
The federal estate tax
Enacted to fund preparedness before the First World War, and never repealed since — except for one year. Everything in modern estate planning that looks like contortion is downstream of this date. - 1969
The Uniform Probate Code
Drafted to bring order to fifty divergent systems. Adopted in whole by a minority of states and in part by many more. Florida is not a UPC state — it wrote its own code, which is why Florida practice differs from the textbook in ways that matter.
The code we actually practise under
Florida built a probate system for a state where a very large share of the population arrives late in life, brings assets from somewhere else, and owns a house that the state constitution treats as almost sacred.
- 1933
The Florida Probate Act
Florida's first comprehensive probate statute, replacing a patchwork inherited from territorial days. - Jan 1, 1976Turning point
The Florida Probate Code
Enacted by chapter 74-106, Laws of Florida, and effective on the first day of 1976. Chapters 731 through 735 — the code that still governs every estate we open. It deliberately departs from the Uniform Probate Code in several places, most consequentially on homestead and on the elective share. - 1985
Homestead becomes constitutional bedrock
Article X, Section 4 of the Florida Constitution protects the homestead from forced sale by most creditors with no cap on value, and restricts how it may be devised where there is a surviving spouse or a minor child. It is the most powerful creditor protection in the country and the most common trap in Florida estate planning, and both halves come from the same paragraph. - Jul 1, 2007Turning point
The Florida Trust Code
Chapter 736 replaces the old chapter 737 with a comprehensive trust code based on the Uniform Trust Code but substantially rewritten for Florida. It brings the pet trust in §736.0408, the trust protector in §736.0808 (recodified in 2021 as the Florida Uniform Directed Trust Act, §736.1406), decanting in §736.04117, and the compensation standard in §736.0708 that a Florida appellate court would spend the next decade defining.
Tax, technology, and the fights we have now
Probate stopped being about land a long time ago. It is now about tax thresholds that move every few years, assets that exist only as licences, and documents signed in front of a webcam.
- 2001
The exemption starts climbing — with a fuse attached
Federal legislation raises the estate-tax exemption year by year, repeals the tax entirely for 2010, and lets the whole structure expire afterwards. Everyone assumes Congress will fix it before 2010 arrives. - 2010Turning point
The year without an estate tax
For the first time since 1916, no federal estate tax. Several billionaires die in it, including a Yankees owner in Tampa. Step-up in basis is replaced by modified carryover basis, so the relief is not as clean as the headlines suggest. - 2013
Permanence, and portability
The exemption is made permanent and indexed, and portability becomes a fixture: a surviving spouse may use the deceased spouse's unused exclusion — but only if a federal estate tax return is filed on the first death to elect it. It is the most valuable form in American estate planning and among the most frequently missed. - Jan 1, 2020Turning point
Florida authorises electronic wills
Chapter 2019-71 creates §§732.521–732.525. A Florida will may be signed electronically, and witnesses may satisfy the presence requirement by audio-video technology supervised by an online notary — with real guardrails: the testator must not be a vulnerable adult, and the document must sit with a qualified custodian carrying a $250,000 bond and $250,000 of liability coverage. - Jun 2020
Florida guardianship reform
After a professional guardian scandal that spanned nineteen counties, Florida requires court authorisation before a guardian may sign a do-not-resuscitate order, and tightens reporting and petition rules. - Jul 1, 2022
The thousand-year trust
Florida extends the permissible duration under §689.225 to 1,000 years for trusts created on or after this date, up from 360. A settlor in Sarasota may now tie up property for roughly eleven times longer than the Michigan lumber baron who locked his fortune for ninety-two years and became a byword for it. - 2026Turning point
Where it stands
The federal exemption is $15 million per person, $30 million for a married couple with portability elected. Florida still has no estate tax, no inheritance tax, and no individual income tax. Which means that for the overwhelming majority of Florida families, probate is not a tax problem at all. It is a paperwork problem, a deadline problem, and — as nine hundred years of this page suggest — a family problem.
Nine hundred years of this history were arguments about who decides — the church or the crown, equity or law, the family or the document. That argument is settled. What is left is procedure, and procedure is knowable.
Almost every case in this archive turned on something a competent hour of drafting would have prevented: a missing witness, a stale residuary clause, a fee term nobody wrote down, a body with no instructions attached. The law is not the hard part. Signing something is.