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Origin contested
“Cut off with a shilling”
What it means
Disinherited.
Where it comes from
A testator who wished to disinherit an heir was believed to need to leave them a token sum, to prove the omission was deliberate rather than forgetful. A shilling was the customary amount.
How sure are we?
The practice is real and appears in eighteenth-century wills. The legal necessity, however, is a myth: English law never required it, and the shilling was symbolic spite rather than procedure.