Crossword-Solution: PROBATES 8 letters, 7 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 12

The question was whether heirs and executors of persons domiciled here and leaving property in Government securities, should apply to Her Majesty's Supreme Court in Calcutta, for probates to wills and letters of administration, or whether an act should be passed to render the decision of the highest Court at Lucknow, countersigned, by the Resident, as valid as the certificate of a judge in our own provinces, as far as such property in Government securities might be concerned.

The commons, finding the occasion favorable, passed several bills restraining the impositions of the clergy; one for the regulating of mortuaries; another against the exactions for the probates of wills; [**] a third against non-residence and pluralities, and against church-men’s being farmers of land.

Such were the citation of laymen out of their dioceses, the excessive fees taken in spiritual courts, the delay and trouble in obtaining probates.

Little, probably, did the Commissary-Clerk imagine, when he entered on his snug quiet office, where he recorded probates of wills and the proceedings in questions of marriage law, that he was to witness and record one of the most momentous conflicts that the world ever beheld--that contest which has been the prototype of all later European convulsions.

His abbatial functions, however, are confined to convening ecclesiastical courts, and granting probates of wills, and licenses for marriages, subject only to the metropolitan jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Armagh.