 | This article possibly contains original research .(September 2020) |
| Act of Parliament | |
 | |
| Long title | De donis conditionalibus. |
|---|---|
| Citation | 13 Edw. 1. c. 1 |
Status: Current legislation | |
| Text of statute as originally enacted | |
| Revised text of statute as amended | |
De donis conditionalibus or the Estates Tail Act 1285 is a chapter of the English Statutes of Westminster (1285). [1] It originated the law of entail – forbidding a landholder to sell his land except to his heirs.
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 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 feuda conditionata, 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 De donis conditionalibus was passed.
In 1285 the statute De donis conditionalibus 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 (feudum talliatum). The word tail is derived from the French tailler, to cut, the inheritance being by the statute cut down and confined to the heirs of the body.
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". [2] [3]
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. [4]
The power of alienation was reintroduced by the judges in Taltarum's Case (Year Book, 12 Edward IV., 1472) by means of a fictitious suit or recovery which had originally been devised by the regular clergy for evading the statutes of Mortmain. [2]
This was abolished by the Fines and Recoveries Act 1833, which provided an alternative means of barring entails. [5]
In English law, a fee simple or fee simple absolute is an estate in land, a form of freehold ownership. A "fee" is a vested, inheritable, present possessory interest in land. A "fee simple" is real property held without limit of time under common law, whereas the highest possible form of ownership is a "fee simple absolute", which is without limitations on the land's use.
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 alienated by the tenant-in-possession, and instead causes it to pass automatically, by operation of law, to an heir determined by the settlement deed. The terms fee tail and tailzie are from Medieval Latin feodum talliatum, which means "cut(-short) fee". Fee tail deeds are in contrast to "fee simple" deeds, possessors of which have an unrestricted title to the property, and are empowered to bequeath or dispose of it as they wish. Equivalent legal concepts exist or formerly existed in many other European countries and elsewhere; in Scots law tailzie was codified in the Entail Act 1685.
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.
Sir Thomas de Littleton or de LyttletonKBSL(c. 1407–23 August 1481) was an English judge, undersheriff, Lord of Tixall Manor, and legal writer from the Lyttelton family. He was also made a Knight of the Bath by King Edward IV.
The Statute of Westminster may refer to:
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.
Use, as a term in the property law of common law countries, amounts to a recognition of the duty of a person to whom property has been conveyed for certain purposes, to carry out those purposes. In this context "use" is equivalent to "benefit".
In the Middle Ages, especially under the European feudal system, feoffment or enfeoffment was the deed by which a person was given land in exchange for a pledge of service. This mechanism was later used to avoid restrictions on the passage of title in land by a system in which a landowner would give land to one person for the use of another. The common law of estates in land grew from this concept.
A gift, in the law of property, is the voluntary and immediate transfer of property from one person to another without consideration. There are several type of gifts in property law, most notably inter vivos gifts which are made in the donor's lifetime and causa mortis (deathbed) gifts which are made in expectation of the donor's imminent death. Both types of gifts share three elements which must be met in order for the gift to be legally effective: donative intent, the delivery of the gift to the donee, and the acceptance of the gift. In addition to those elements, causa mortis gifts require that the donor must die of the impending peril that he or she had contemplated when making the gift.
Majorat is a French term for an arrangement giving the right of succession to a specific parcel of property associated with a title of nobility to a single heir, based on male primogeniture. A majorat (fideicommis) would be inherited by the oldest son, or if there was no son, the nearest male relative. This law existed in some European countries and was designed to prevent the distribution of wealthy estates between many members of the family, thus weakening their position. Majorats were one of the factors facilitating the evolution of aristocracy. The term is not used to refer to inheritances in England, where the practice was the norm, in the form of entails (also known as fee tails. Majorats were explicitly regulated by French law. In France, it was a title to property, landed or funded, attached to a title instituted by Napoleon I and abolished in 1848.
In the common law of England, the doctrine of worthier title was a legal doctrine that preferred taking title to real estate by descent over taking title by devise or by purchase. It essentially provides that a remainder cannot be created in the grantor's heirs, at least not by those words.
A restraint on alienation, in the law of real property, is a clause used in the conveyance of real property that seeks to prohibit the recipient from selling or otherwise transferring their interest in the property. Under the common law such restraints are void as against the public policy of allowing landowners to freely dispose of their property. Perhaps the ultimate restraint on alienation was the fee tail, a form of ownership which required that property be passed down in the same family from generation to generation, which has also been widely abolished.
A common recovery was a legal proceeding in England that enabled lawyers to convert an entailed estate into absolute ownership, fee simple. This was accomplished through the use of a series of collusive legal procedures, some parts of which were fictional and others unenforceable. It was devised and perfected by lawyers in the second half of the fifteenth century. A 1472 case, known as Taltarum's Case, increased its popularity.
In property law, alienation is the voluntary act of an owner of some property to dispose of the property, while alienability, or being alienable, is the capacity for a piece of property or a property right to be sold or otherwise transferred from one party to another. Most property is alienable, but some may be subject to restraints on alienation.
A freehold, in common law jurisdictions such as England and Wales, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and twenty states in the United States, is the common mode of ownership of real property, or land, and all immovable structures attached to such land.
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.
The Statute of Enrolments or Enrolment of Bargains of Lands, etc. Act 1535 was a 1536 Act of the Parliament of England that regulated the sale and transfer of land. The Statute is commonly considered an addition to the Statute of Uses, which was passed within the same Parliament, probably due to an omission in the Statute of Uses. It is thought to have been intended to prevent secret conveyancing, although modern academics instead assert that it was so Henry VIII could keep an accurate record of who his freeholders were. The Statute, which only provided for estates "of inheritance and freehold", was easily evaded through the sale of an estate for a limited time period as leasehold, followed by subsequent "release", confirmed in 1621 by Lutwich v Mitton.
The Rule in Shelley's Case is a rule of law that may apply to certain future interests in real property and trusts created in common law jurisdictions. It was applied as early as 1366 in The Provost of Beverly's Case but in its present form is derived from Shelley's Case (1581), in which counsel stated the rule as follows:
when the ancestor by any gift or conveyance takes an estate of freehold, and in the same gift or conveyance an estate is limited either mediately or immediately to his heirs in fee simple or in fee tail; that always in such cases, "the heirs" are words of limitation of the estate, not words of purchase.
The Statute of Westminster of 1285, also known as the Statute of Westminster II or the Statute of Westminster the Second, like the Statute of Westminster 1275, is a code in itself, and contains the famous clause De donis conditionalibus, one of the fundamental institutes of the medieval land law of England.
Taltarum's Case is the name given to an English legal case heard in the Court of Common Pleas, with decisions being handed down in 1465 and 1472. The case was long thought to have established the operation of the common recovery, a collusive legal procedure that was, until finally abolished in 1833, an important element of English law of real property. By means of a complex legal fiction, a recovery converted a freehold or copyhold property held in fee tail, which could not be freely sold or disposed of, into an estate in fee simple, which could be disposed without restriction.
