or the Estates Tail Act 1285 is a chapter of the English Statutes of Westminster (1285). It originated the law of entail – forbidding a landholder to sell his land except to his heirs.

Background

A form of entail has been known before the Norman feudal law had been domesticated in England. The common form was a grant "to the

feoffee Under the feudal system in England, a feoffee () is a trustee who holds a fief (or "fee"), that is to say an estate in land, for the use of a beneficial owner. The term is more fully stated as a feoffee to uses of the beneficial owner. The use ...

and the heirs of his body", by which limitation it was sought to prevent alienation from the lineage of the first purchaser. These grants were also known as , because if the donee had no heirs of his body the estate reverted to the donor. This right of reversion was evaded by the interpretation that such a gift was a conditional fee, which enabled the donee, if he had an heir of the body born alive, to alienate the land, and consequently disinherit the issue and defeat the right of the donor. To remedy this the statute was passed.

The statute

In 1285 the statute enacted that in grants to a man and his heirs, the will of the donor as expressed in the grant should be followed. The donee should have no power to dispose of the land in any other way. After the donee's death, the land would be inherited by his heirs – or if he had no heirs, then by the donor or the donor's heirs. Since the passing of the statute, an estate given to a man and the heirs of his body has been known as an ''estate tail'', or an estate in

fee tail In English common law, fee tail or entail is a form of trust, established by deed or settlement, that restricts the sale or inheritance of an estate in real property and prevents that property from being sold, devised by will, or otherwise ali ...

(). The word ''tail'' is derived from the French , to cut, the inheritance being by the statute cut down and confined to the heirs of the body.

Criticism

It is claimed that the operation of the statute produced innumerable evils: "children, it is said, grew disobedient when they knew they could not be set aside; farmers were deprived of their leases; creditors were defrauded of their debts; innumerable latent entails were produced to deprive purchasers of the land they had fairly bought; treasons also were encouraged, as estates tail were not liable to forfeiture longer than for the tenant's life". On the other hand, by limiting inheritance to the eldest son, the other issue were forced to seek employment elsewhere, thus, it has been argued, preventing the growth of a landed caste. The professions of the church, the army and the law were constantly recruited from the younger sons of landed families, preventing the gap between nobility and the rest.

Aftermath

The power of alienation was reintroduced by the judges in

Taltarum's Case ''Taltarum's Case'' is the name given to an English legal case heard in the Court of Common Pleas (England), Court of Common Pleas, with decisions being handed down in 1465 and 1472. The case was long thought to have established the operation of ...

(Year Book, 12 Edward IV., 1472) by means of a fictitious suit or recovery which had originally been devised by the

regular clergy Regular clergy, or just regulars, are clerics in the Catholic Church who follow a rule () of life, and are therefore also members of religious institutes. Secular clergy are clerics who are not bound by a rule of life. Terminology and history ...

for evading the statutes of Mortmain. This was abolished by the Fines and Recoveries Act 1833 ( 3 & 4 Will. 4. c. 74), which provided an alternative means of barring entails.

Notes

References

External links

* {{Authority control English laws Acts of the Parliament of England 1285 Acts of the Parliament of England still in force Latin legal terminology Legal history of England Medieval English law