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A surety or guarantee, in finance, is a promise by one party (the guarantor) to assume responsibility for the debt obligation of a borrower if that borrower defaults. The person or company that provides this promise, is also known as a surety or guarantor.
gardener wrote:I think the administrator had to sign a bond promising to perform an inventory of the deceased's estate. This site http://familyrecords.dur.ac.uk/nei/NEI_records.htm says that it was usually double the value of the estate (though how they would know that before making the inventory beats me). Perhaps George Henry Jinks was unable to sign the bond (no money) so the other's signed it instead.
Bonds were required for a variety of reasons by the court. Most common were those entered by executors and administrators, termed will bonds and administration bonds, and which bound the bondsman and his sureties to perform their duties faithfully, or suffer the penalty of a sum usually twice the value of the deceased's estate (series DPRI/3). Such bonds might be cancelled once a probate account had been accepted, and the conditions of the bond performed. In the later period will bonds became required only where no executor was named in the will or where for some reason the persons authorised by the court to execute the will were not those named as executors in the will.
gardener wrote:I think the administrator had to sign a bond promising to perform an inventory of the deceased's estate. This site http://familyrecords.dur.ac.uk/nei/NEI_records.htm says that it was usually double the value of the estate (though how they would know that before making the inventory beats me). Perhaps George Henry Jinks was unable to sign the bond (no money) so the other's signed it instead.
It is important to note, however, that executors and administrators were not personally liable for any bonds, contracts or debts entered into by the deceased during his lifetime: while such debts were always settled first, before payment of legacies or distribution to the next of kin could occur, they could only be settled in so far as the totality of the deceased's estate allowed.
The format of such bonds is invariably the same, being in two parts: the first part, until 1733 usually in Latin, stating the names of the bondsman and sureties, the penal sum and the date, and the second part a statement of the conditions. The sureties together agreed to underwrite the bondsman's liability, and thus each must have been sufficiently wealthy to cover half the penal sum. Sometimes affidavits of the sureties to this effect accompany the bond. At Durham, as generally elsewhere, the penal sums were calculated at double the value of the deceased's estate. Strictly speaking as the bond might be entered long before an inventory had been completed, the estimated value of the estate might have been only notional. However in practice executors and administrators usually moved quite quickly and already had a draft inventory of the deceased's estate ready by the time they were formally appointed as the personal representatives. The bond is then dated, so completing the notification.
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