DAVID E. NARRETT.  "Dutch Customs of Inheritance, Women, and
     the Law in Colonial New York City," in Authority and
     Resistance in Early New York, William Penack and Wright,
     Conrad Edick, eds.  New York:  New-York Historical
     Society, 1988.



     David Narrett's stab at deciphering the shifting patterns of
testate inheritance in colonial New York is approached as a fairly
pure exercise in social history.  The reliance on quantification of
documentary evidence in history introduces its peculiar set of
restrictions and advantages.
     After an introductory section concerned with the
historiographical import of the disputations concerning his
subject,  Narrett launches into an ambitious study of "all wills
made in colonial New York City (29)."  His starting point is the
observation that Dutch colonials originally followed the Roman-
Dutch concept that wives were "subordinate to their husbands, it
allowed them to exercise considerable authority within the family
(30)."  The Dutch were actually fairly egalitarian, calling for
joint ownership of both debts and property.  Dutch law dictated
that when either of the spouses died without a will the remainder
of the property would be divided between the survivor and the
children.  When will were drawn up by early Dutch colonials, most
were mutually generated and signed or marked by both parties (31). 
     Narrett claims that by 1700 a wholesale conversion had been
made to British-style "testamentary practice (34)."  The
differences between the British and Dutch inheritance practices
were great.  Husbands began to assume more control over their
wives' property.  Following new Parliamentary practice, the
childless widow would inherit one-half the estate (with the
husband's relatives getting half as well!), while one with children
would get only one-third.  The empowerment of the husband meant
that "a man could therefore write a will that departed radically
from the law of intestate succession according to his personal
wishes (36)."   More interestingly, the 'personal wishes' of the
husband followed social lines.  For whatever reason (it is
unexplained by Narrett), the growth of the bourgeois mercantile
class is concurrent and related to a change in inheritance
practice:  the new class left more to their children than to the
surviving spouse.  It is in this area that a bit of analysis on
Narrett's part would have been appreciated.  The possible causal
relationship between the new social priorities of the business
class and their inheritance practices is left unstudied.
      The sources for Narrett's study are crucial in understanding
his methods and analysis.  His analytical comments draw on
secondary sources, but his raw information is drawn from actual
wills left by the group he is studying.  This makes for great
graphs and technically informative presentations, but the
quantitative approach apepars a bit dry and hedging when the
historian does not address the underlying factors involved.  As
Narrett qualifies this problem:". . . men seldom expressed their
motives in writing wills, [because of this] it is easier for the
[social] historian to document than to explain shifts in patterns
of inheritance (44)."  It is this unrelieved documentation that can
be unengaging.
     Even given this limitation in social histories, Narrett still
believes that "the provisions of wills offer detailed evidence
concerning the structure of power and authority within the
household, the status of women, the bonds of kinship, and attitudes
toward property (30)."  At best this detailed evidence is a
necessarily clouded textual reflections, distorted by legal
constraints and the impossibility of assigning motive from a
distance.  It is at this point that an explanation of the
underlying current of mentalite would provide a useful, if
arbitrary, structure on which to hang the quantitative analysis.  
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