In re the Estate of Patterson

Wingate, S.

For exceeding half a millenium the ecclesiastical courts, and their successors, the chancellors and courts of equity, have perennially asseverated the powers of courts of equity jurisdiction to ameliorate the acerbities of common-law substantive rules and procedure, to pierce and eliminate formalism and fiction, and accomplish even-handed justice.

During an almost equal period, probate courts, whether nisi prius or appellate, have enunciated as supreme the principle that *874the basic criterion of testamentary construction was the expressed intention of the testator.

Despite the…