The Documents in the Case

In 1396, Wernher de Indagine, who served as the rector of the “new hospital” of Mainz managed by the sisters of St. Agnes, made his will; it provides insight into the social functions of late medieval hospitals. Though Wernher's possessions were modest, he bequeathed them with a specificity characteristic of much wealthier testators. Wernher did not wish his involvement with hospitals to end at his death; he left a furlong of arable land to the hospital in the village of Butzbach, near his birthplace, “to be converted to serve the pious uses of the sick.” He specified that a measure of the grain yielded by the land should be awarded to the priest or lay minister of the hospital, in exchange for annual commemoration of Wernher and his parents in the Mass. Wernher left the same quantity of land, with the same direction that its produce should be used by the sick, to the hospital in his native Münzenberg. The final stipulation was that Wernher could repurchase either furlong of land, for a set price that would then be used as a pension for his support in whichever of the mentioned hospitals he chose. Presumably, this eventuality was foreseen in case Wernher felt that age and infirmity prevented him from discharging his office in the hospital of Mainz. It can be surmised that Wernher chose the hospitals of Butzbach and Münzenberg, rather than the one where he served, as his places of commemoration—and eventual retirement and death—in order to be close to his place of birth, where he may have had more remaining kin.