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The second kind of public will was the military testament (in procinctu),[106] but our authorities leave us in doubt as to whether this testament could be made in any gathering of the soldiers prepared to meet the enemy and in any place, or whether it was a formal act possible only in the great gathering of the exercitus in the Campus Martius—that gathering which was finally organised as a legislative assembly, existed by the side of the assembly of the Curies, and came to be known as the comitia centuriata.

In the first case it may have been an old patrician form of testament, an informal will permitted in an emergency, perhaps to enable a childless soldier to transmit his inheritance. We do not know whether it had absolute validity, or only a validity dependent on circumstances, such as the absence of direct heirs, or the satisfaction of religious conditions approved by subsequent pontifical scrutiny; on this hypothesis the comrades of the testator could hardly have acted other than as witnesses to the will.