It seems to have been the fate of Anglo-Saxon vernacular wills to be valued by scholars as a resource, yet neglected as a genre worthy of study in its own right. The History of English Law, published in 1898, describes Anglo-Saxon will-making as ‘ill-defined’, warranting only a few pages which seem largely designed to determine that it was neither the Roman testament nor the legal instrument of the later medieval period. Since that date, only two detailed studies of the full corpus have appeared.

The first, published in 1963, is the important and wide-ranging survey by Sheehan. He considers the Anglo-Saxon will from the point of view of the legal historian, placing it in the context of the Roman testament, the Germanic tradition of inheritance and the developments of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. He examines the relationship between the Anglo-Saxon will and the two forms of post obitum disposition defined primarily by German legal historians: the post obit gift (a gift to take effect after the donor's death) and the verba novissima (deathbed gift). However, the strength of his survey is that it recognises the individuality of the insular will, focusing on its transitional nature between the Roman testament and the canonical will of the post-Conquest period.

The second detailed study of the corpus, carried out by Lowe, was designed to evaluate the reliability of the transmission of texts by examining scribal techniques. This study has been crucial in establishing the overall corpus and examining its integrity. The majority of the wills survive only in later copies, mainly in cartularies of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, with very few surviving as contemporary or near-contemporary manuscripts. Even fewer survive in both forms, but where they do, Lowe has compared the versions in order to identify the problems experienced by the later copyists as they sought to create a working text, and the strategies they adopted to overcome them.