ABSTRACT
This article explores the connections between ghosts and medieval law. It revisits the final story from the famous Byland Abbey collection, concerning the sister of Adam de London and a disputed inheritance, and demonstrates the historicity of the people involved using legal evidence. This opens up a reading of the story in which legal ideas are central to the framing and narrative; I suggest that the ghost manifests a fear of the destruction of inheritance. I then move to argue that the law of inheritance in later medieval England was dependent on a ‘spectral reasoning’, in which the wishes of those who granted property to their children took on an outsized, supernatural agency. Finally, I suggest that this comparison helps to reveal not only the strangeness of inheritance as a legal concept, but also the ways in which it has continued to structure inequality into our own time.
