Welsh Journals

had left certain effects there in the hands of friends recalls the story of the old Latin deed. We now come to the will of James Lloyd of Monington, which, if genuine, would be conclusive proof of the connection. Here we have the usual difference of opinion between experts. It is impossible to form an opinion on the evidence published in a report, but one cannot help feeling that some of the grounds on which the experts appear to have based their belief as to the unreliability of the will are rather weak. The suggestion was that the real will had been abstracted, and a facsimile made, with the addition of a clause containing the bequest to James Selby of Wavendon. Generally speaking the experts gave as their reason for believing that the will was not genuine the character of the writing and the omission of marks of abbreviation. This, presumably, applied to the whole of the document-though this is not clear from the report-yet one of these experts suggested that the alleged copyist had succeeded in imitating the writing in the will with tolerable accuracy with the exception of the clause in question, when he relapsed into his usual style. This expert also made a great point of the fact that the half sheets on which the inventory and the will were written never formed one sheet, the foundation for this view being the absence of a water- mark. This inventory was, of course, the valuation of the deceased's effects for probate purposes, and my researches in the Carmarthen Probate Court convince me that such documents are frequently written on different paper to the will. The value of the opinion of the experts on this point, however, is indicated by the fact that other wills of the same date, from the same Registry, and produced at the trial, contained most of the alleged defects which the experts for the defendants considered as evidence of