| Agency overview | |
|---|---|
| Formed | 1576 |
| Dissolved | 1835 [lower-alpha 1] |
| Jurisdiction | England and Wales |
| Agency executives |
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| Footnotes | |
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The Alienation Office was a British Government body charged with regulating the 'alienation' or transfer of certain feudal lands in England by use of a licence to alienate granted by the king, during the feudal era, and by the government thereafter.
The first regulatory structure for controlling the alienation of feudal lands was created during the reign of Henry III (1216–1272), who issued an ordinance prohibiting his tenants-in-chief from alienating their lands held from him without his specific licence.
During the feudal era the king was the only true "owner" of land under his allodial title, and the rest of the population merely "held" estates in land from him under various forms of feudal tenure, directly in the case of his tenants-in-chief, and indirectly in the case of sub-tenants of the latter. The king's tenants-in-chief formed the backbone of the royal army. [1] King William the Conqueror had granted all the land he conquered in England to his principal military commanders, and others to the church and to other of his supporters and servants. These were the first tenants-in-chief of the Anglo-Norman feudal system. The principal was that an estate (or fee) would supply the needs of one knight so that he would be able to appear fully armed, mounted and attended by esquires and retinue, for royal military service for a certain number of days per year. The king wanted to ensure that any new occupant of the fee would be an effective soldier, thus a licence to alienate was effectively a royal veto on a new tenant-in-chief.
Originally the penalty for not obtaining a royal licence was forfeiture of the lands concerned. The next major change occurred in 1327, when the penalty for non-compliance was changed from forfeiture to a fine, payable into the Hanaper of the Chancery. As with many English legal and regulatory systems a gradual evolution occurred to deliver a settled system. The penalty for alienating land without a royal licence became one year's revenue from that land, and the payment required to obtain a licence to alienate was one third of the value of the land to be alienated.
In 1576 the Alienation Office was first established on a proper basis. Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester was granted a 10-year farm of the revenues due under the alienation of property licensing regime. The farm also covered monies payable from 'pre-fines' payable during the applicant's hearing in the Court of Final Pleas. The Office developed from the structures created by Dudley during this period. Ten years later an extension of the farm was granted to Thomas Dudley and Robert Wrotte, acting as agents for Robert Dudley. Dudley died in 1588, but the regime he created continued in place, and in 1595 was further extended to cover fines imposed for writs of entry in the process of common recovery.
The office was established in premises on today's site of King's Bench Walk, Temple, London, which now house legal chambers.
During the period of the Commonwealth (1649–1660) there was a brief gap in the office's existence. It was abolished in September 1653, but was resurrected a year later once the full-extent of loss in revenue to the state had been fully appreciated. More drastic change occurred in 1661, shortly after feudal tenures were abolished by the Tenures Abolition Act 1660. The concept of tenancy-in-chief was removed from English law, and regulations restricting the free conveyance of land were removed. The Alienation Office however continued in existence for nearly another 200 years. Following the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the ascension of the throne by William III and Mary II, a new form of control over the Alienation Office was created when in May 1689 the Commissioners of the Treasury started to exercise control over the Office by use of letters patent created under the Privy Seal.
In 1758 a small extension of the jurisdiction of the Office took place when post fines were dealt with directly by the Office, which both assessed and collected them. However sheriffs still continued to remit to the Exchequer a sum of equal value to the post fines due from their county, formerly collected by them. The 18th. century closed with an extensive inquiry by a House of Commons select committee into the workings and financing of the Office.
The pace of reform in the United Kingdom gathered pace in the 1830s, and the structure of the Alienation Office did not survive that decade. In 1834 land conveyancing was reformed and the system of fines and recoveries was abolished, which left the Alienation Office with no substantial function. It was consequently abolished in 1835.
| Receiver-General of Alienation Office | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Appointer | Monarch of England (1603–1707) Monarch of Great Britain (1707-1801) Monarch of the United Kingdom (1801–1832) |
| Term length | At the Monarch's pleasure |
| Formation | 1603 |
| First holder | Sir Arthur Atys |
| Final holder | Charles Dodd |
| Abolished | 1832 |
The following persons held the office of Receiver General of the Alienation Office between 1602 and 1832: [2]
Escheat is a common law doctrine that transfers the real property of a person who has died without heirs to the crown or state. It serves to ensure that property is not left in "limbo" without recognized ownership. It originally applied to a number of situations where a legal interest in land was destroyed by operation of law, so that the ownership of the land reverted to the immediately superior feudal lord.
Scutage was a medieval English tax levied on holders of a knight's fee under the feudal land tenure of knight-service. Under feudalism the king, through his vassals, provided land to knights for their support. The knights owed the king military service in return. The knights were allowed to "buy out" of the military service by paying scutage.
The Statutes of Mortmain were two enactments, in 1279 and 1290, passed in the reign of Edward I of England, aimed at preserving the kingdom's revenues by preventing land from passing into the possession of the Church. Possession of property by a corporation such as the Church was known as mortmain, literally "dead hand". In medieval England, feudal estates generated taxes for the King, principally on the grant or inheritance of the estate. If an estate became owned by a religious corporation which could never die, could never attain majority, and could never be attainted for treason, these taxes never became payable. It was akin to the estates being owned by the dead, hence the term.
Lord of the manor is a title that, in Anglo-Saxon England and Norman England, referred to the landholder of a rural estate. The titles date to the English feudal system. The lord enjoyed manorial rights as well as seignory, the right to grant or draw benefit from the estate. The title continues in modern England and Wales as a legally recognised form of property that can be held independently of its historical rights. It may belong entirely to one person or be a moiety shared with other people. The title is known as Breyr in Welsh.
In medieval and early modern Europe, a tenant-in-chief was a person who held his lands under various forms of feudal land tenure directly from the king or territorial prince to whom he did homage, as opposed to holding them from another nobleman or senior member of the clergy. The tenure was one which denoted great honour, but also carried heavy responsibilities. The tenants-in-chief were originally responsible for providing knights and soldiers for the king's feudal army.
A demesne or domain was all the land retained and managed by a lord of the manor under the feudal system for his own use, occupation, or support. This distinguished it from land sub-enfeoffed by him to others as sub-tenants. In contrast, the entire territory controlled by a monarch both directly and indirectly via their tenant lords would typically be referred to as their realm. The concept originated in the Kingdom of France and found its way to foreign lands influenced by it or its fiefdoms.
Quia Emptores is a statute passed by the Parliament of England in 1290 during the reign of Edward I that prevented tenants from alienating their lands to others by subinfeudation, instead requiring all tenants who wished to alienate their land to do so by substitution. The statute, along with its companion statute Quo Warranto also passed in 1290, was intended to remedy land ownership disputes and consequent financial difficulties that had resulted from the decline of the traditional feudal system in England during the High Middle Ages. The name Quia Emptores derives from the first two words of the statute in its original mediaeval Latin, which can be translated as "because the buyers". Its long title is A Statute of our Lord The King, concerning the Selling and Buying of Land. It is also cited as the Statute of Westminster III, one of many English and British statutes with that title.
Under the feudal system in England, a feoffee is a trustee who holds a fief, 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 of such trustees developed towards the end of the era of feudalism in the Middle Ages and declined with the formal ending of that social and economic system in 1660. The development of feoffees to uses may have hastened the end of the feudal system, since their operation circumvented vital feudal fiscal mechanisms.
Knight-service was a form of feudal land tenure under which a knight held a fief or estate of land termed a knight's fee from an overlord conditional on him as a tenant performing military service for his overlord.
An overlord in the English feudal system was a lord of a manor who had subinfeudated a particular manor, estate or fee, to a tenant. The tenant thenceforth owed to the overlord one of a variety of services, usually military service or serjeanty, depending on which form of tenure the estate was held under. The highest overlord of all, or lord paramount, was the monarch, who due to his ancestor William the Conqueror's personal conquest of the Kingdom of England, owned by inheritance from him all the land in England under allodial title and had no superior overlord, "holding from God and his sword", although certain monarchs, notably King John (1199–1216) purported to grant the Kingdom of England to Pope Innocent III, who would thus have become overlord to English monarchs.
A feudal baron is a vassal holding a heritable fief called a barony, comprising a specific portion of land, granted by an overlord in return for allegiance and service. Following the end of European feudalism, feudal baronies have largely been superseded by baronies held as a rank of nobility, without any attachment to a fief. However, in Scotland, the feudal dignity of baron remains in existence, and may be bought and sold independently of the land to which it was formerly attached.
The Tenures Abolition Act 1660, sometimes known as the Statute of Tenures, was an Act of the Parliament of England which changed the nature of several types of feudal land tenure in England. The long title of the Act was An Act takeing away the Court of Wards and Liveries, and Tenures in Capite, and by Knights-service, and Purveyance, and for settling a Revenue upon his Majesty in Lieu thereof.
Feu was long the most common form of land tenure in Scotland, as conveyancing in Scots law was dominated by feudalism until the Scottish Parliament passed the Abolition of Feudal Tenure etc. (Scotland) Act 2000. The word is the Scots variant of fee. The English had in 1660 abolished these tenures, with An Act Taking Away the Court of Wards ..., since 1948 known as the Tenures Abolition Act 1660.
The Court of Wards and Liveries was a court established during the reign of Henry VIII in England. Its purpose was to administer a system of feudal dues; but as well as the revenue collection, the court was also responsible for wardship and livery issues.
Livery of seisin is an archaic legal conveyancing ceremony, formerly practised in feudal England and in other countries following English common law, used to convey holdings in property. The term livery is closely related to if not synonymous with delivery used in some jurisdictions in contract law or the related law of deeds. The oldest forms of common law provided that a valid conveyance of a feudal tenure in land required physical transfer by the transferor to the transferee in the presence of witnesses of a piece of the ground itself, in the literal sense of a hand-to-hand passing of an amount of soil, a twig, key to a building on that land, or other token.
The history of English land law can be traced back to Roman times. Throughout the Early Middle Ages, where England came under rule of post-Roman chieftains and Anglo-Saxon monarchs, land was the dominant source of personal wealth. English land law transformed further from the Anglo-Saxon days, particularly during the post-Norman Invasion feudal encastellation and the Industrial Revolution. As the political power of the landed aristocracy diminished and modern legislation increasingly made land a social form of wealth, subject to extensive social regulation such as for housing, national parks and agriculture.
Feudal relief was a one-off "fine" or form of taxation payable to an overlord by the heir of a feudal tenant to license him to take possession of his fief, i.e. an estate-in-land, by inheritance. It is comparable to a death duty or inheritance tax.
In the kingdom of England, a feudal barony or barony by tenure was the highest degree of feudal land tenure, namely per baroniam, under which the land-holder owed the service of being one of the king's barons. The duties owed by and the privileges granted to feudal barons are not exactly defined, but they involved the duty of providing soldiers to the royal feudal army on demand by the king, and the privilege of attendance at the king's feudal court, the Magnum Concilium, the precursor of parliament.
Feudalism as practiced in the Kingdoms of England during the medieval period was a state of human society that organized political and military leadership and force around a stratified formal structure based on land tenure. As a military defence and socio-economic paradigm designed to direct the wealth of the land to the king while it levied military troops to his causes, feudal society was ordered around relationships derived from the holding of land. Such landholdings are termed fiefdoms, traders, fiefs, or fees.
An Inquisition post mortem is an English medieval or early modern record of the death, estate and heir of one of the king's tenants-in-chief, made for royal fiscal purposes. The process of making such inquisition was effected by the royal escheators in each county where the deceased held land. The earliest inq.p.m. was made in 1236, in the reign of King Henry III (1216–1272), and the practice ceased c. 1640, at the start of the English Civil War, and was finally abolished by the Tenures Abolition Act 1660, which ended the feudal system.