Particiones de herencias: Entre normas, acuerdos, afectos y dependencias

Abstract

The death of a person opens, in terms of the fate of their assets, a complex process in which at least three steps can be observed. In the first place, the will expressed by the deceased through a testamentary disposition. Secondly, the inventory of the goods. And the third step is the effective division of the inheritance. Historical research has abundantly used wills and asset inventories, but has not paid all the necessary attention to the effective division of the inheritance. Perhaps the clear normative stipulation that establishes how said partition must be carried out in the territories of the Crown of Castile has acted as a brake to investigate to what extent said normative was complied with; or how the will of the testators and the heirs could distort the final distribution. All this in the field of family relations in which authorities, dependencies and affections are combined. In this paper, using property partitions carried out in Jerez de la Frontera (Cádiz) in the second half of the 18th century, a chronological period suitable for observing changes and alternatives, an approximation to the mentioned perspective of hereditary distributions is intended.