ABSTRACT
I have done this at the advice and with the approval of many wise men, moved especially by the exhortation, the prayers, and the counsel of the lord Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury and primate of all England, who showed me by reasonable and most truthful arguments that a noble and generous man [vir nobilis et liberalis] who has a fief of six knights should most justly give not only the third part of a knight's land to God and the holy Church for the salvation of himself and his kin, but the whole of a knight's land or more than that. He added also that if this man's heir should try to take away the alms which are interposed as a bridge between his father and Paradise, by which his father may be able to pass over, the heir, so far as he may, is disinheriting his father from the kingdom of heaven, and therefore should not obtain the inheritance which remains, since he who has killed his father has proved himself no son.
