Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations and abbreviated citations
- Introduction
- 1 Fee tails before De Donis
- 2 The growth of the “perpetual” entail
- 3 Living with entails
- 4 Barring the enforcement entails other than by common recovery
- 5 The origin and development of the common recovery
- 6 The common recovery in operation
- Appendix to Chapter 6
- Bibliography
- Subject and selected persons index
- Index to persons and places in Appendix to Chapter 6
1 - Fee tails before De Donis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations and abbreviated citations
- Introduction
- 1 Fee tails before De Donis
- 2 The growth of the “perpetual” entail
- 3 Living with entails
- 4 Barring the enforcement entails other than by common recovery
- 5 The origin and development of the common recovery
- 6 The common recovery in operation
- Appendix to Chapter 6
- Bibliography
- Subject and selected persons index
- Index to persons and places in Appendix to Chapter 6
Summary
Fee tails before the statute of De Donis (1285) are the subject of two related stories. One story is about the protection the King's Court provided the interests in a fee tail. The subject of this story is mainly the development of the three formedon writs – formedon in the reverter, in the descender, and in the remainder. For this story one can build on the work of S. F. C. Milsom and of Paul Brand.
The second story is about the grants themselves. In the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries there were two basic forms of grant in fee tail. Suppose A granted land in fee tail to B, his grant could take the form “to B and the heirs of his body, but if B should die without an heir of his body the land shall revert to A” or his grant could take the form “to B and the heirs of his body, but if B should die without an heir of his body the land shall remain to C.” Grants in these forms were known as conditional gifts in the thirteenth century because of the explicit condition on the reversion or remainder. Legal historians have thought that conditional gifts were in the form “to B and the heirs of his body” and that the condition was imposed by judges or by Bracton.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Fee Tail and the Common Recovery in Medieval England1176–1502, pp. 6 - 82Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001