THE SCENE: When a debate about a general principle of inheritance law becomes too complicated to decide, the Saxon king goes full medieval and decides that the issue will be resolved via a jousting tournament.
THE TEXT: There was also some disagreement over the variety of the laws, and there were some who said that grandsons should not be reckoned among sons, and that an inheritance could be legitimately divided among sons only, if it should happen that one’s parents had died while his grandparents were still living. Wherefore a decree when forth from the king that an assembly of the entire people should be made at a little town called Steele, and this was done in order that the case might be decided among arbitrators who were competent to examine into it.
But the king listened to wiser counsel, and was unwilling that the noblemen and elders of the people should be thus inconvenienced, and so he decreed that the matter should be decided by a tourney. The party that held that grandsons should be reckoned among sons as heirs came out victorious, and accordingly it became part of their perpetual law that an inheritance should be divided among grandsons and sons equally.
– The Deeds of the Saxons, Widukind of Corvey, 10th Century AD
