The phenomenon of the Anglo-Saxon written will was associated with a wealthy elite. The extent to which the documentation of post obitum disposition became customary among the nobility in the tenth and eleventh centuries cannot now be known, although (as Chapter One has shown) it seems likely that the procedure was more widely embraced than the number of surviving wills suggests. More amenable to discussion is why such an instrument came to be valued and used in a society which by custom privileged oral testimony and procedures.

There can be little doubt that the documentation of bequests had its roots in the inveterate record-keeping of the Church. Lay bequest of bookland appears to have become established as an important element in the relationship between the nobility and the Church at least by the time that the main sequence of wills begins in the tenth century, and for beneficiary religious houses, familiar with the form and function of the Latin charter as well as a range of vernacular documents, it was a particular advantage to hold a written record of the terms of a deferred gift. However, the significance of these records for the laity is implied by the use of the vernacular, and in the expansion of the documents to include a range of bequests which were of no direct interest to the house responsible for drawing up individual wills.