ENTAIL OF ESTATE

ENTAIL OF ESTATE limits the disposition of real property. The famous Statute of Westminster II (1285), often called De Donis, established the system of fee entail so that a wealthy family could retain its estates perpetually as a block inheritance. By this measure, a grantee of a feudal estate was entitled to the income from the land for life but could not sell the estate, mortgage it, or give it away. Upon the grantee's death, his eldest son inherited the estate subject to the entail. Should a grantee have no heirs, the estate went back to the grantor. The courts generally sustained this law until the fifteenth century when judges began to limit entails to one succeeding generation. Parliament abolished entails entirely in 1833.

Entailing of estates was relatively common in colonial America, especially in the agricultural sections of the southern and the middle states. Stout opposition developed, however, because of the belief that it was dangerous to perpetuate a political bloc of landed aristocrats. In several colonies, landowners resorted to devices such as common recovery and private legislative acts to gain free disposition of their land. By the time of the Revolution, colonial opinion was opposed to entail. Many of the original states followed the lead taken by Virginia in 1776 and abolished entails. Connecticut and Mississippi never recognized entail, although, in Connecticut, the common law permitted conditioned fees. Nor did the entail system emerge in Iowa, where it was held that entail was not suited to American practices, while Kansas and Delaware accepted the principle.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cantor, Norman F. Imagining the Law: Common Law and the Foundations of the American Legal System. New York: Harper-Collins, 1997.

Morris, Richard B. "Primogeniture and Entailed Estates in America," Columbia Law Review 27 (1927): 24–51.

W. FreemanGalpin/c. p.

See alsoLand Policy ; Primogeniture .