Devon Wills Project

Contents & Search

Miss Moger's Abstracts of Testamentary Causes, held at the Devon Record Office (DRO), Exeter, are notes about court cases that arose concerning either the making or wording of a will, or the accuracy of an inventory, or the way in which the will had or had not been executed by the executor, etc. Among the more brief of Miss Moger's notes are a great many citations, i.e. summons to appear in court in a case concerning a will or administration. We have included these, merely showing that certain people (witnesses) were 'cited'. However, despite not being wills, administrations or inventories as such, the abstracts often reveal enough details about the people, places and property concerned to be more than adequate substitutes. [The original case papers, from which Miss Moger made her abstracts, do in general survive, though in very frail condition. They often show more detail still.] All the court cases were heard in the Consistory Court of the Bishop of Exeter.

In compiling a list of these abstracts for the Devon Wills Project we have omitted two kinds of cases that Miss Moger occasionally noted. Firstly, in a few cases the surviving case papers offer no clues at all as to whose will was the cause of the dispute, i.e. no name of the testator. Then, some of the court cases were not about wills at all, but about attendance at communion or the right to appoint a vicar. All the personal names that appear in Miss Moger's Testamentary Causes are completely indexed at DRO, so the items we have omitted are still relatively easily findable.

When Miss Moger was compiling her abstracts it appears that she sometimes failed to find a precise year or any mention of a place. This is understandable, because only some of the case papers have survived. So, in our index there are some spaces where the place or year should be.

It seems safe to assume that a very large proportion of the 'testators' listed in Columns A and B did actually leave a will, and that this will was proved in a Devon court somewhere between six months and five years before the court case arose. Because so many original Devon wills were lost in the Blitz, and because copies or abstracts of only some of them have survived, MOGT is yet another source of huge potential for revealing at least some of what appeared in some of those lost wills. [An entry you find in MOGT should in most cases be almost 'duplicated' by an entry found in another source included in our index, namely FRYA, FRYB (both with just a sample online as yet), BECK (Names A-G, Names H-O, Names P-S, Names T-Z), PECU1 or PECU2, which sources will show the probate year of a will that was later the subject of litigation.]

Where the nature of the case is relatively clear, details about it have been included in Col L. Where the parties in that case include someone with a surname different from that of the testator, this other surname has been shown too. If no other surname is mentioned in Col L, the chances are that the dispute was between members of the testator's immediate family.

If you find in MOGT a testamentary cause which interests you, you will need to contact the Devon Record Office, Great Moor House, Sowton Industrial Estate, Exeter, EX2 7NL. The abstracts of testamentary causes are held in two series of bound volumes, about thirty in total, each containing about two hundred handwritten pages, one for each separate testamentary cause. These volumes are not numbered, but each volume is marked either 'Series 1' or 'Series 2' followed by the range of page numbers contained in it. So, a given testamentary cause can be located from the the series number and its page number, as given in this index. With this information, DRO staff should be able to supply you with a photocopy of the relevant abstract. Since the original case papers (though not Miss Moger's abstracts of them) are so fragile - some suffered in a fire - it is unlikely that DRO will supply photocopies of them. It should however be possible to visit the DRO and photograph the original documents.