9 Watts 263 | Pa. | 1840
The opinion of the court was delivered by
If this legacy is specific, as I take it to be, not being payable at all events, but out of a particular fund, and not by the executor, so also are the other bequests of gross sums out of the same fund; but as specific legacies abate as to each other, the question stands as if it were between general legatees.
The expressions with which the opinion of the court was introduced in Duncan v. Alt, and which have been pressed into the argument here, were intended to mark the leading principles on which foreign courts of equity have proceeded betwixt those who stood in the same degree of consanguinity; for in that case the question lay between children, and no widow was involved in it, either as a purchaser or a beneficiary. In this, the widow is the principal party; and she stands on higher ground than she would stand, by the same terms of bequest, in England. Viewing the annuity merely as a gratuity, a chancellor might perhaps think the testator had sufficiently discharged his duty to provide for her by giving her the bank stock and a third of the personal estate; but what would he think, were the bequest of the whole coupled with a condition .that it be accepted as an equivalent for her dower, not only in the land on which it is charged, but in all his lands beside. In Burridge v. Bradyl, 1 P. Wms. 127, Lord Cowper preferred a widow’s legacy given expressly on that condition; and in Blower v. Morret, 2 Ves. 420, Lord Hardwicke did the same, as also did Lord Gifford, when master of the rolls, in Heath v. Dendy, 1 Russell 543. And in Davenhill v. Fletcher, Amb. 420, it-was very properly ruled that the preference may be enforced, though the legacy exceed the value of the dower, because, as a purchaser of it, the testator is the best judge of that. In these cases the court proceeded on the ground that the relinquishment of the widow’s right at law entitles her to the entire benefit of her legacy, in exclusion of every one else. Such is distinctly the English rule in cases of expressly conditional bequests. In Pennsylvania, every bequest to the wife is conditional by force of the statute, which declares that every legacy to her shall
Judgment reversed, and a venire de novo awarded.