The Martin Family

Together with his wife, Mary Scott Martin, and infant son James, “yeoman” William Martin arrived in Canada West from Eastrig, Currie Parrish, Midlothian County, Scotland (near Edinburgh) in 1848. Born in 1816, William was one of twelve children of Ann Brown and “carrier” James Martin. Five of his siblings would soon join him in Mimico, namely Alexander, Andrew, Robert, Anne, and Janet, although only the families of William and Alexander remained in that area.^{Footnote 28} Fifty- and thirty-six-acre market-gardening or muck-farming plots were rented at what is now Mimico Avenue and Royal York Road, and at Lakeshore Boulevard and Royal York.^{Footnote 29} William also made a £550 loan to Thomas Goldthorpe in 1855 on land at what is now Lakeshore and Kipling Avenue, and that mortgagor’s 1861 default on the debt enabled William to foreclose on it to move his family into the property’s Regency-styled stone house with its extensive ells and outbuildings.^{Footnote 30} Eight years later, William bought from John Burkett’s estate for $1,300 a 150-acre farm that the Martins called “Shingle Bay Cottage” on the west shore of Lake Simcoe just south of Orillia, Ontario.^{Footnote 31} That property seems to have been acquired by William as an investment, although James’s young family did spend a couple of summers there. It was sold to the province in 1885 for $6,545 (five times its purchase price of fifteen years earlier) and developed as the “Ontario Asylum for Idiots,” later named the “Ontario Hospital School” and still later the “Huronia Regional Center.” In 2007, it was repurposed as the headquarters of the Ontario Provincial Police.^{Footnote 32} The source of William’s financial resources is unknown, although his father’s 1868 Scots estate may have figured in the purchase of the Shingle Bay land. James Martin, Sr., did not immigrate to Canada, but church records and family notes show that he visited for events like his children’s weddings.^{Footnote 33}

James Martin, Jr., was born in Midlothian County, Scotland in 1848, and family lore has him learning to walk on the trans-Atlantic voyage from Leith, Scotland, to Quebec City, Canada East. He grew up in the fledgling Toronto “suburb” of Mimico, Canada West, with paternal uncles Alexander, Andrew, and Robert in close proximity.^{Footnote 34} Mimico was then a mixed agricultural and residential community, and it would soon become a summer destination for Torontonians with vacation homes on Lake Ontario. Christchurch Anglican appears to have been an important part of the family’s life, with four of their marriages occurring there in the 1850s and, later, several interments in the churchyard cemetery.^{Footnote 35} Neighbors included the Wards, Murrays, Melroses, and Allans, all of which names were given to Martin grandchildren or great-grandchildren as Christian names. James apparently attended Etobicoke public schools, where he won several book prizes.^{Footnote 36} He became an accomplished amateur artist, and he is said sometimes to have attracted the curiosity of passers-by while reading by candle-light at home into the early hours of the morning. Family correspondence shows that James hired hands to cultivate his land, look after his livestock, and do his statute-labor on the roads. Notman-Fraser photographs depict him wearing swallow-tailed suits while inspecting his orchards, and his notes to acquaintances reveal that he frequently travelled by train to Toronto to mix with city society (the Great Western Railway and the Northern Extension Railway had tracks across the Martin properties in Mimico and Orillia, respectively, that would have facilitated his travel).^{Footnote 37} James lived with his father for all forty years of their overlapping lives, and he had ten children notwithstanding the fact that he was an only child and despite his lifelong lack of employment and income.^{Footnote 38} His obituary reported that he had “ability and culture [that would have] qualified him to hold a public station,” but had little to say about his actual achievements.^{Footnote 39}

James married Elizabeth Rundle at York Mills, Ontario, in 1872, and she promptly moved in with her in-laws in Mimico. Mary Elizabeth was born to that couple in 1873, followed by Florence Edna in 1875. Those girls would be enrolled as high-school students in the Ontario Ladies’ College at Whitby (now Trafalgar Castle School) and then in a nursing program at the Owen Sound General and Marine Hospital.^{Footnote 40} They would also be the first to “take” under the trust created by their grandfather’s will. Born in 1877 and 1878, Walter Scott and William John both died in infancy. Their mother, Elizabeth Rundle Martin, also died in 1878, and William’s widowed sister-in-law, Elizabeth, was prevailed on to assume child care and household management for the family.

James married Agnes Adeline Harvie in 1881, and six more children followed in quick succession. The “class” of remainder-people who would inherit under the terms of their grandfather’s will was thus rounded out at eight. William, Jr., was born in 1882, Barbara Scott in 1884, John Harvie Allan in 1887, James Ward in 1889, Robert Macmillan (Mac) in 1891, and Agnes Gray in 1895.^{Footnote 41} Perhaps due to the intervening deaths of their grandfather and father, and to the fractured sale of their legacy in Chestnut Haven, those younger children stayed for the most part at home rather than following their older siblings through private schools and post-secondary education.

The Bequests and Their Administration

In 1888, in the midst of that fast-paced child-bearing-and-rearing and following his father’s death by one year, James made a two-sentence will with the assistance of the family’s regular Mulock, Tilt, and Miller law firm. He gave “all my personal property of every sort to my wife Agnes absolutely … [and appointed] my wife executor of this my will and guardian of my infant children.”^{Footnote 42} Probate of that will in 1896 listed assets of $4,939, including a new 100-acre South Orillia Township farm valued at $4,000 that was held in joint tenancy in James’s and his children’s names.^{Footnote 43} Separation from the estate of that real property (which was not and, because of the right of survivorship, could not have been covered by James’s will), left about $900 worth of personal property to Agnes. That sparse legacy from her prematurely-deceased husband presumably also led to judicially-approved “draws” that she regularly made, on the basis of need, for her minor children from their grandfather’s Court-administered trust following her husband’s death.^{Footnote 44}

James was also empowered by his father’s will “to, by will or other instrument under seal properly executed by [James], appoint an Executor or Trustee to sell and dispose of all my said lands after the death of the said James Martin and to divide the proceeds thereof between the children of my said son James as hereinbefore provided for.”^{Footnote 45} James plainly did not do that by will or, so far as can now be determined, by any other formal instrument. That skipped step became superfluous a couple of years later when, as mentioned, the Chancery Division of Ontario’s High Court approved a sale of most of the realty in William’s estate to land developers and assumed James’s responsibility for running the trust into which the proceeds were paid. Provincial officials also represented the Martin children in their minority on applications for judicial approval of the Chestnut Haven sales.^{Footnote 46}

The waters of William’s estate began to get rougher in the winter of 1890, however, when estate administrator and life tenant James contracted by way of a “bargain and sale agreement” to sell all fifty acres of Chestnut Haven in fee simple (his children’s inheritance and the security for his aunt’s annuity) to the Mimico Real Estate and Security Company (formerly the New Toronto Manufacturers’ Company) for $28,000.^{Footnote 47} That purchaser was a conglomerate of Philadelphia and Toronto industrialists, and the purchase price was substantially higher than the 1887 probate-declared value of the property of $6,000.^{Footnote 48} Indeed, the increase was almost a multiple of five (in three years).^{Footnote 49} The purchaser’s goal, which was realized in the early-twentieth century following a series of financial set-backs, was to create the town of New Toronto as a self-contained industrial community on the larger model of Rochester, New York.^{Footnote 50} By the First World War, plants in New Toronto had been constructed by manufacturers like Goodyear Tire, Du Pont Fabrikold, and Canadian Wallpaper. For present purposes, however, the key point is that James purported to sell much more than the life interest that he owned in the Martins’ Mimico property. Life tenants, then as now, could use the asset in issue and take earnings or renewable resources from it. But they could not sell, waste, or otherwise prejudice the interests of their remainder-people.^{Footnote 51} William Martin apparently wanted to keep his well-situated, landed wealth intact for a future generation of his family and seemingly did not trust James to use or steward that wealth wisely. Or perhaps William was leery about giving his whole patrimony to his son, fearful that James would leave everything to a surviving second wife who would then, in respect of her estate, “play favorites” with her natural children as against her step-children. William knew that he had pancreatic cancer at least a year before he died, and he also knew that none of his four existing grandchildren had resided for any significant time other than with him in the family home that became the subject of his bequest of a life estate to their father with its remainder to them. How widely life estates were used in those kinds of circumstances is not a question that has been the subject of local scholarly inquiry, and the commitment of several days to sampling period wills in the Public Archives of Ontario did not much advance that inquiry.^{Footnote 52} Students of nineteenth-century British North American law firms have, moreover, yet to find a significant wills or estates practice among those businesses that would show patterns and means of succession.^{Footnote 53} Similarly, the small Victorian corpus of local wills manuals has little to say about the use of life estates.^{Footnote 54} Nor is the nineteenth-century prevalence of life estates a topic that has been widely investigated in the broader Anglo-American world.^{Footnote 55} Moreover the legal-historical literature of Scotland and the Scots diaspora does not have much to say about traditional Celtic preferences for intergenerational wealth-transfers by way of ultimo-geniture (youngest descendent takes all), of which this bequest is arguably a modified version.^{Footnote 56} It has, therefore, been difficult to determine whether William Martin as testator was behaving defensively, eccentrically, or dynastically or was following common cultural practices. It can, however, be said that no institution or person through whose hands William’s will passed treated it as novel.

The first salvo in James’s efforts to sell his children’s inheritance to Mimico Real Estate came in the form of a two-page “offer to sell you my farm,” in James’s handwriting and literary style, addressed to the partners of that company.^{Footnote 57} It was a standing offer to make what was then known as a bargain and sale agreement, which was typically an unsecured installment contract to sell land.^{Footnote 58} There is no indication of lawyers’ participation in James’s mapping of that deal or in the offer’s drafting, but the purchasers were represented by novice Toronto commercial solicitor William Norman Tilley. Tilley went on to achieve national prominence in that field and as a long-tenured Treasurer (President) of the Law Society of Upper Canada.^{Footnote 59} James’s proposal called for a down payment of $5,000 ($1,000 plus $4,000, a couple of months apart), a payment of $5,000 on 1 November 1890, and five consecutive yearly payments of $3,600 (with five percent interest) on each 1 November during that period. There is mention in that offer of potential take-back mortgage financing, but no details were provided and no mortgage was attached to that version of the transaction.^{Footnote 60}

That deal went ahead in the winter of 1891, following judicial intervention.^{Footnote 61} Ontario’s Chancery Division took control of the property as parens patriae of William’s grandchildren, and substituted financing by way of a $23,000 mortgage for the bargain and sale arrangement to which the parties had originally agreed and under which a $5,000 down payment had already been made to James. The Court thereby became Mimico Real Estate’s effective creditor/mortgagee and would hold payments under the transaction in trust for the Martin grandchildren. It also severed from the deal the acre of land on which the family home was located, and allocated occupancy of it to Elizabeth Martin for her life in lieu of the $100 a year that had been left to her in William’s will. Title to a life estate in that severed land remained with James, and title to the remainder stayed with his children.^{Footnote 62} Judicially-appointed sureties for James’s administration of his father’s estate, Hendry, Kelly, Rundle, and Whitlan, were then excused by the Court from the duties they had assumed four years earlier. James appears to have represented himself in that proceeding and, insofar as he had anything left to represent, in the subsequent conveyance.

James stated in his 1887 application for appointment as executor of his father’s estate that “during the last five years [he had] transacted most of [his father’s] business and [his father] always consulted [him] about any business transactions.”^{Footnote 63} Although he acknowledged in passing the legal interest of his children in his offer to sell Chestnut Haven to Mimico Real Estate, the prevailing language of that and related texts is “my land,” “my offer,” and “my extension of time.”^{Footnote 64} James also omitted to appoint by will or other instrument, as he was requested to do in his father’s will, a trustee to manage and then divide and distribute among his children the remainder interest that was left to them.^{Footnote 65} He seems to have regarded William’s assets as tantamount to his own, notwithstanding the limitations of his status as son and later the limits of his life estate. Indeed James may have reasoned that, so long as he preserved for his children the $6,000 that he declared Chestnut Haven to have been worth on his father’s death, he could appropriate to himself as a life tenant any subsequent appreciation in much the same way that he could keep the profits that accrued from growing crops on that property or renting it to tenants.^{Footnote 66} It was likely a rude shock to him when, while approving a modified version of the sale of Chestnut Haven to Mimico Real Estate, the Court removed James from the administration of his father’s estate and from the management of his children’s trust.

Having lost control of his children’s trust assets to the Court, as well as the use of the family’s Mimico property to his Aunt Elizabeth and to Mimico Real Estate, James retreated with his immediate family to his new in-laws’ “Springbank Farm,” again in Simcoe County’s South Orillia Township. Although his parents-in-law and two of his maiden aunts-by-marriage continued to reside in the house on that property, James purported to buy the farm from father-in-law and commercial stage-coach operator William Harvie for a $1,250 down-payment and a $3,750 vendor take-back mortgage.^{Footnote 67} The fact that his children were put on title to that land as joint tenants suggests that James used part of their deposit money from the Mimico sale for that purchase. The key point is, however, that a family of ten, along with four in-laws and a hired farm-hand, were then co-habiting in a cramped, storey-and-a-half frame farmhouse that must have extruded a very different ambiance from the comparatively privileged surroundings of Chestnut Haven. Proceeds from the sale of the lands surrounding William’s Mimico home were, at least for the moment, accumulating beyond the family’s reach in the coffers of the Accountant of the Supreme Court of Ontario. But Mimico Real Estate’s difficulty making those payments, commencing in the third year of that six-year deal, together with its impending insolvency, would soon disrupt once again the expectations of William’s beneficiaries.^{Footnote 68}

Payment Under the Mimico Sale Stalls

Alexander Keith of Mimico Real Estate wrote to James Martin in the winter of 1893 to propose an adjustment to the 1891 transaction under which Keith’s syndicate had probably made two installment payments of $3,600, together with delivery of the $1,000 plus $4,000 down payment.^{Footnote 69} He asked for a payment period of longer than six years, smaller installments, and he requested that James instruct his lawyer to stop threatening a court action for “specific performance” of the original deal.^{Footnote 70}

The debt held by the Court on Chestnut Haven as parens patriae of the Martin grandchildren empowered it to “distrain for arrears of interest provided that, in default of the interest hereby secured, the principal hereby secured shall become payable,” to “enter on and lease or sell the said lands on default of payment for one month and on giving one month’s notice,” and to “have quiet possession of the said lands free from all incumbrances on default [by the mortgagor].”^{Footnote 71} It was not a textbook mortgage, but it gave the Court a few remedial options. In any event, James was neither an owner, nor a trustee, nor a mortgagee when default under that transaction began. And, although the High Court was the relevant mortgagee with contractual power to distrain or enter onto the property, it appears to have done little about that default until the spring of 1929.^{Footnote 72} In contra-distinction to the Martins’ neighbors, several of whom had taken full-bodied mortgages back from Mimico Real Estate and who did repossess or attempt to repossess their former lands when that company went into default, the Accountant of the Supreme Court may have reasoned that, without local industrial development, Chestnut Haven was actually worth something like the $6,000 at which James had valued it when his father’s will was probated in 1887. On that basis, the failed transaction had already yielded approximately $6,500 more than the property’s non-industrial value. There was, thus, little incentive to seek repossession or any other extraordinary relief from Mimico Real Estate. And, unlike the neighbors, neither the Court, nor the Martin grandchildren (who were still in their minority), nor James seems to have been interested in re-occupying the land for agricultural, vacation, or residential purposes. Those are large assumptions that are important to this account, but there does not seem to be any way to make them more than assumptions. The kinds of sources that would be required to reconstruct that Court’s administrative work do not appear to exist. Indeed, the non-adjudicative dimensions of judicial work have not yet been thoroughly-addressed in histories of Canadian trial courts.^{Footnote 73}

The Beneficiaries’ Inheritance

James died at Springbank, in the midst of that Mimico development scramble, on 15 February 1896. He was forty-eight years old, and none of the available sources reveals the cause of his death. James’s eight children then ranged in age from one to twenty-three years and, by virtue of his death (which brought about “closure” of the class of beneficiaries created by their grandfather’s will) and their ages, the two eldest children became eligible to receive their portions of William’s trust fund. The size of those pay-outs cannot be determined precisely, but they were almost certainly larger than the remaining six pay-outs that began seven years later.^{Footnote 74} That is so because James’s widow withdrew another undeterminable amount of money from that trust during the next twenty years, with the Court’s authorization and following inspections of her household, to provide necessities of life for her minor children. Those withdrawals would necessarily have depleted a fund that was growing through neither new deposits nor aggressive investment.^{Footnote 75}

The speed with which James’s probate application was made by his executrix (his widow and sole beneficiary) two weeks after his death, notwithstanding her relatively remote location and the fact of that death’s occurrence in mid-February, together with the almost instant and gratuitous transfer to her by the two oldest grandchildren of their interest in the homestead that James’s widow and her children occupied, also suggest concern about the financial well-being of the family.^{Footnote 76} The later opposition of the four younger children, who were still at home, to the proposed 1905 “sweetheart” sale of the retained Chestnut Haven house to their great-aunt Elizabeth Martin’s daughter and son-in-law suggests further sensitivity to making monetary ends meet.^{Footnote 77} Despite William’s paternalistic sentiments of the 1880s toward his grandchildren, factors like the vicissitudes of his son, a weakly-backed land developer, an unpredictable Toronto real-estate market, a national economic depression, and an apparently sluggish court had merged to effect significant frustration of those sentiments. Their relatively unsuccessful expression or insulation in the little legal system created by his will is a key subject to which this essay will return.^{Footnote 78}

What were the longer-term results of William’s 1887 bequest? His son James, who received $6,200 worth of personal property and a life interest in fifty acres of land in Mimico, died nine years after that bequest took effect and left a $900 estate comprised of “household goods, farming implements, horses, horned cattle, farm produce, and cash.”^{Footnote 79} William’s sister-in-law Elizabeth was paid a $100 annuity for the first four years of the regime created by his will and then occupied his Mimico home (in lieu of that annuity) for the succeeding fourteen years. Although the estate’s obligation to her ended with her death in 1905, its other beneficiaries then sold their remainder interest in William’s former home to Elizabeth’s daughter and son-in-law at a $1,000 price that was significantly below its market value.^{Footnote 80} That son-in-law was a rough-carpenter, rather than a carrier, yeoman, or a gentleman-farmer like the other family members who had lived at Chestnut Haven, which may account for his apparently straightened financial circumstances that led to further sales of parts of that one-acre property (together with the mortgages with which he encumbered it).^{Footnote 81} What remained of it was sold for $9,000 in 1921 by Elizabeth’s descendants to William Baycroft, who transformed it into Baycroft’s and then Ridley’s Funeral Home that has continued on the site at 3080 Lakeshore Boulevard West in New Toronto for the intervening ninety-four years.^{Footnote 82} After that sale, Elizabeth’s descendants relocated to Detroit, Michigan.

James’s widow, Agnes Harvie Martin, was not a direct beneficiary of William’s estate but, owing to transfers from his grandchildren to her in 1896 and 1918, she came to own the family’s Springbank Farm in respect of whose purchase her husband had spent (presumably covertly) several thousand dollars of his children’s trust money from that estate. Her four unmarried children lived out their lives on that farm, as she bequeathed it to them in equal parts on her death in 1943.^{Footnote 83} Mac Martin, the survivor of that group, then returned Springbank by will on his death in 1976 to the descendants of the married heirs of his grandfather’s 1887 trust (Edna’s children Helen and Murray, William’s children William and Muriel, and Barbara’s children Allan, Andrew, and Norma).^{Footnote 84} Following litigation among those descendants, William Anderson Martin acquired the property from Mac’s other beneficiaries and transferred about forty acres of conservation easements across it to the Province of Ontario in the 1980s. Those easements were named in honor of several generations of “William Martins,” including the family’s late-nineteenth-century patriarch.^{Footnote 85} What remained of that property was sold on the open market in 2004.

It bears repetition that calculations of pay-outs to William’s grandchildren from the Chestnut Haven funds are difficult to make. A guess would be that no beneficiary received more than about $1,525 in early-twentieth-century dollars (and probably less), as compared with the roughly $4,250 that each of them might reasonably have expected in late-nineteenth-century dollars on the basis of a tally immediately preceding their sale to Mimico Real Estate. A difference in proceeds that approaches 300 percent seems noteworthy. Viewing that issue from the standpoint of what those beneficiaries did with their inheritance does not make matters much clearer. In each case, there seems to have been one “substantial” acquisition of things like a Heintzman piano, a Ford Model T truck, and swamp-land zoned for agricultural use (intended to pre-empt military conscription during World War I). The largest single purchase by any of those beneficiaries was probably the 1909 acquisition from cousin Eric Lafferty Harvie of 160 acres of undeveloped land in the Kitscoty region of Alberta, which was resold in 1917.^{Footnote 86} There is no indication that money was invested in the stock market, or in bonds, or in currency by any of the beneficiaries but, by the same token, neither did most of them have careers or regular employment. The best conclusion is therefore that their diminished inheritances supported subsistence lifestyles for lives that ranged in length following the receipt of their inheritance from twelve to seventy years.

Three of the eight beneficiaries were ultimately married with children. But even the number of great-grandchildren in William’s “dynasty” was modest, at seven, so the trust money was probably not allocated in significant measure to things like inter-generational child-rearing, education, or the provision of business start-up funds. The grandchildren who married did so in “acceptable” and sometimes socially-mobile ways. Mary married an American medical doctor, William married the daughter of a local politician, and Barbara married a member of Hamilton, Ontario’s, extended Dundurn-MacNab family. Despite the young age of that generation at the time of the life-changes described in this essay, they presumably understood that they were being pulled back and forth between Mimico and Orillia, that they lived in progressively less opulent and more cramped settings, that people who were important parts of their lives like grandfathers, fathers, and great-aunts disappeared one after another, that official personnel visited their widowed mother to ensure their care, and that arguments involving judges sometimes drew them in. Moreover, that generation appears to have tried to compensate among themselves and their immediate descendants for those short-comings almost a century later.^{Footnote 87}

The Vulnerabilities of a Little Legal System

What of the “historical significance” of this Martin episode? A starting-point is, arguably, the recognition that ideas about the past’s importance are often contingent on subjective matters. Social historians might observe that the Martin vignette is a comparatively-engaging and rarely-accessible one of “middle-class” behavior, set in a period before that label had much Canadian currency. Conversely, institutionally-oriented historians might regard this paper as a partial and perhaps disturbing answer to questions about the effectiveness of the fading Chancery Division of Ontario’s High Court at the turn of the twentieth century. That might be enough to say on the issue of historical significance, since there is so little local secondary literature on those themes.^{Footnote 88} In other words, the social significance of this study may lie largely in its subject’s ordinariness.^{Footnote 89} But the larger goals of this research were the modest contextualization of a will and the administration of an estate, and reflection on the strategic choices made within the constraints of that unstable government in miniature. Those aims and the themes through which they have been pursued almost necessarily propelled this text onto more expansive theoretical terrain.

This archeology of a late-Victorian Ontario will, like several tangentially-related case-in-context studies, suggests that too much emphasis may conventionally have been placed on the language and concepts of state law, even when the subject of study was self-made law or implicit normativity.^{Footnote 90} A similar conclusion has also emerged from contextualized studies of the norms that structured nineteenth-century Canadian corporate action.^{Footnote 91} Individualistically-oriented William Martin embraced the legislatively-entrenched concept of freedom of willing and apparently hired leading Toronto legal counsel to ensure that his technical deployment of that laissez-faire idea would be as thorough as his ideological engagement with it.^{Footnote 92} But, like many other legal regimes, whether treaty-based, customarily international, domestically legislative, administrative, common law, or privately-mandated, the little testamentary charter that William “enacted” for implementation across three generations of his family was very imperfectly realized. William’s plan did prevent James from squandering the whole estate, and it more or less prevented his second daughter-in-law from inheriting that estate through her husband and excluding her step-children from it. But the estate’s diminished quantum did not build or secure any dynasties. The entropy of human relations thus limited the impact in the world of ideologically-grounded and carefully-crafted legal formalism. A hapless, dilettantish, or avaricious son, a widespread commercial recession, a sluggish court, and eccentric beneficiaries significantly compromised elite, private law-making.

Most straight-forwardly, that imperfect realization raises “law in books” (William’s will) and “law in action” (the will’s attempt to have an impact on social relations) questions. Closely-related issues like the monopoly, authority, and objectivity of formal law (again, William’s will) also emerge from this exercise in legal archeology. Expressed otherwise, sub-themes that arose from the will’s skewed operation can be catalogued under broad headings like “legal transplantation and rejection,” “juristic imperialism and popular rebellion,” and “insertion of norms into resistant social space.”^{Footnote 93} Privately constructed legal systems thus seem to have many of the textual, doctrinal, and operational vulnerabilities that recent generations of legal realists and critical legal scholars have exposed in respect of full-blown public law or regulatory private law.^{Footnote 94} The indeterminacy, contradiction, and unpredictability of self-made legal systems may turn out to be as pronounced as those features have often been shown to be for larger, state-based legal systems. If so, those disabilities will have to be said to exist despite the widely-hyped capacity of contracting parties, testators, and trust settlors to control comprehensively the creation and management of their little legal systems. Jumping too quickly into a simplified version of the legal realist and critical legal studies parades may not be prudent in this case, but that leap is at least superficially compelling. It probably also bears emphasis that William Martin’s posthumous legal system was not a relatively peaceable kingdom of implicit normativity like those which have been documented for passing urban strangers and European gypsies.^{Footnote 95}