Seisin (or seizin) denotes the legal possession of a feudal fiefdom or fee, that is to say an estate in land. [1] It was used in the form of "the son and heir of X has obtained seisin of his inheritance", and thus is effectively a term concerned with conveyancing in the feudal era. The person holding such estate is said to be "seized of it", a phrase which commonly appears in inquisitions post mortem (i.e. "The jurors find that X died seized of the manor of ..."). The monarch alone "held" all the land of England by his allodial right and all his subjects were merely his tenants under various contracts of feudal tenure.
Seisin comes from Middle English saysen, seysen, in the legal sense of to put in possession of, or to take possession of, hence, to grasp, to seize. The Old French variations seisir, saisir, are from Low Latin sacīre, generally referred to the same source as Gothic 𐍃𐌰𐍄𐌾𐌰𐌽satjan, Old English settan, to put in place, set.
Seisin is believed to have been applicable only to freehold tenures, that is to say a tenure exceeding a mere term for life and which was heritable, on condition of payment of the appropriate feudal relief to the overlord. A "freeman" was a man who held by freehold tenure, and thus freehold tenure was anciently said to be the only form of feudal land tenure worthy to be held by a free man. [2] Tenure, and the variety thereof, was the very essence of feudal society and the stratification thereof, and the possession of a tenure (i.e., holding, from Latin teneo "to hold") was legally established by the act of seisin.
Seisin used in the normal course of events is of two kinds, "in law" and "in deed". Each carries with it a differing strength of tenure. It came to be said later that in the conveyance of a fee by deed of feoffment there must be livery of seisin. [3]
"Livery" (or delivery) by "seisin in law" occurred when the parties to the transaction went within sight of the land to be conveyed and the transferor declared to the recipient that possession had been granted. This constituted however only an incomplete conveyance.
By physically entering onto the land the transferee converts or "delivers" his seisin in law into seisin in deed. Instead of a physical entry on to the land, sometimes a token of the land (e.g., a turf, or similar) would be handed over ceremoniously, (see "turf and twig"; cf. the handover of "earth and water" by political entities subjecting themselves to the Persian Empire, which thereafter considered their rulers its vassals). A tenant seised in deed as well as in law thus had obtained the best legal title to his tenure available.
Primer seisin is defined as "the right which the king had, when any of his tenants died seised of a knight's fee, to receive of the heir, provided he were of full age, one whole year's profits of the lands, if they were in immediate possession; and half a year's profits, if the lands were in reversion, expectant on an estate for life" [4] [5] [6] On the death of a tenant-in-chief, for example a feudal baron, his holding was heritable by his son or other right heir. The conveyancing procedure, or procedure of "re-enfeoffment", i.e., re-establishment of tenure in a fief, was as follows. The heir would pay homage to the king, which once received established him irreversibly as the true heir, for the ceremony of homage was in the form of a sacred vow. Only then could the heir pay his feudal relief to the treasury, which final step would enable him to obtain seisin, i.e., actual possession. Between the death of the previous tenant and the new seisin, there was an empty tenure of the fief, which was legally inconvenient, but tolerated as generally of short duration. It is important to understand that such a tenure did not escheat, even temporarily, to the crown pending the re-enfeoffment of the heir. Yet in the case of a barony, which was an extensive tenure of frequently several dozen manors, the king needed to make certain that the heir who presented himself to pay homage was the true heir, for should his homage be accepted, his status was irreversibly confirmed, and the new baron would be entitled to attend parliament. Time was needed for the sheriff of the shire concerned to make enquiries, sometimes by use of local juries. In order to provide the king with time to make such investigations, the king took temporary seisin of the barony and all its lands, which needed management during the interval, which was termed "primer seisin". It was not a form of escheat, which was an extinguishment of a tenure. Primer seisin can thus be seen as a variety of feudal burden, or feudal incident, that is to say a right exercisable by an overlord over his vassal's holding. [7]
The Wardships, etc. Act 1267 passed by King Henry III (52 Hen. 3. c. 16) stated as follows: [8]
- (2) And if an Heir at the time of his Ancestor's Death be of full Age, and he is Heir apparent, and known for Heir, and be found in the Inheritance, the chief Lord shall not put him out, nor take, nor remove any thing there, but shall take only simple Seisin therefore for the Recognition of his Seigniory, that he may be known for Lord.
- (3) And if the chief Lord do put such an Heir out of the Possession maliciously, whereby he is driven to purchase a Writ of Mort d'Auncestor, or of Cousenage, then he shall recover his Damages as in Assise of Novel Disseisin.
- II. Touching Heirs, which hold of our Lord the King in chief, this Order shall be observed, That our Lord the King shall have the first Seisin of their Lands, like as he was wont to have before time: Neither shall the Heir, nor any other, intrude into the same Inheritance, before he hath received it out of the King's Hands, as the same Inheritance was wont to be taken out of his Hands and his Ancestors in times past. And this must be understood of Lands and Fees, the which were accustomed to be in the King's Hands, by reason of Knight service, or Serjeanty, or Right of Patronage.
In European feudal states, "ownership" of land, that is to say allodial possession, was generally restricted to monarchs and was thus rarely an operative principle. Instead seisin was used as a term signifying feudal possession. The modern writer Marc Bloch considers seisin to signify "possession made venerable by the lapse of time" and that "paper documentary evidence was not required to establish seisin, rather human memory of the use of land or administration of justice there was invoked, especially these by the ancestors". [9]
The equivalent Scottish term is sasine, which term has developed a further signification in Scots law.
Following the Norman invasion of Ireland, feudalism was introduced in those areas under Norman control. The most important legal concept in the feudal period in relation to land was seisin. [10]
Seisin is now confined to possession of the freehold, though at one time it appears to have been used for simple possession without regard to the estate of the possessor. Its importance is considerably less than it was at one time, owing to the old form of conveyance by feoffment with livery of seisin having been superseded by a deed of grant, and the old rule of descent from the person last seised having been abolished in favour of descent from the purchaser. Lord Denning controversially supported the abolition of the concept of seisin, however the common law has since decided to maintain the concept of seisin.[ citation needed ] At one time the right of the wife to dower and of the husband to an estate by curtesy depended upon the doctrine of seisin. The Dower Act (1833–1834), however, rendered the fact of the seisin of the husband of no importance, and the Married Women's Property Act 1882 practically abolished the old law of curtesy.
Modern courts have interpreted seisin as approximating to modern "freehold" ownership of land (Deshong v. Deshong, 186 Pa. 227, 40 A.402.) or the right to immediate possession (Williams v. Swango, 365 Ill. 549, 7 N.E.2d 306, 309.).
Seisin is the important understanding that property owned in fee simple consists of two different parts; namely, 1) the naked legal title, and 2) the equitable (i.e., beneficial) title and that these two properties may not be forever separated. Hence in Landlord and Tenant law the owner of the fee is well seised because he owns both the naked legal title and the equitable title. When the landlord rents his property the Lessee is vested with equitable title and the peaceable enjoyment of the property during his or her tenure. When the Lessee moves out, the equitable title is joined with the naked legal title and the gap in seisin is closed and the owner regains fee simple title. Commonly when trusts are created the trustee owns (takes) legal title; the trustee administers the property for the benefit of the beneficiaries who are said to have equitable (beneficial) title. Upon trust termination, the trustee conveys (distributes) legal title to the beneficiary, and again gap in seisin ends. The Merrill Lynch Ready Asset Trust, the first of the money market accounts when established in the 1970s, named a newly born son of one of the Merrill Lynch executives by whom to measure the duration as 21 years beyond the demise of that child. At the end of the period the assets of the trust then are to be distributed to the beneficiaries and the trust extinguished. Common English practice was to create a trust whose term ended upon the demise of the last living heir of her Britannic Majesty Queen Victoria whose descendants are well known but even that practice is discouraged. But the Southland Royalty Trust was created to endure until the demise of the last living descendant of signors of the Declaration of Independence, who are unknown thereby creating an entity that likely violates the rule against perpetuities because it can never end hence the gap in seisin never can close.
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.
In property law, title is an intangible construct representing a bundle of rights in (to) a piece of property in which a party may own either a legal interest or equitable interest. The rights in the bundle may be separated and held by different parties. It may also refer to a formal document, such as a deed, that serves as evidence of ownership. Conveyance of the document may be required in order to transfer ownership in the property to another person. Title is distinct from possession, a right that often accompanies ownership but is not necessarily sufficient to prove it. In many cases, possession and title may each be transferred independently of the other. For real property, land registration and recording provide public notice of ownership information.
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, or tailzie in Scots law, 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 an Act of 1685 which in 1896 was given a short title as an Entail Act.
In common law and statutory law, a life estate is the ownership of immovable property for the duration of a person's life. In legal terms, it is an estate in real property that ends at death, when the property rights may revert to the original owner or to another person. The owner of a life estate is called a "life tenant". The person who will take over the rights upon death is said to have a "remainder" interest and is known as a "remainderman".
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, which literally meant "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.
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.
Sasine in Scots law is the delivery of feudal property, typically land.
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.
The Statute of Uses was an Act of the Parliament of England that restricted the application of uses in English property law. The Statute ended the practice of creating uses in real property by changing the purely equitable title of beneficiaries of a use into absolute ownership with the right of seisin (possession).
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".
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.
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.
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 paramount lord, 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.
Courtesy tenure is the legal term denoting the life interest which a widower may claim in the lands of his deceased wife, under certain conditions. The tenure relates only to those lands of which his wife was in her lifetime actually seised and not therefore to an estate of inheritance.
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.
Lease and release is literally the lease (tenancy) of non-tenanted property by its owner followed by a release (relinquishment) of the landlord's interest in the property. This sequence of transactions was commonly used to transfer full title to real estate under real property law. Lease and release was a mode of conveyance of freehold estates formerly common in England and in New York for tax avoidance and speed. Between its parties it achieves the same outcome as a deed of grant/transfer/conveyance.
In English law, the assize of mort d'ancestor was an action brought where a plaintiff claimed the defendant had entered upon a freehold belonging to the plaintiff following the death of one of his relatives. The questions submitted to the jury were, "was A seised in his demesne as of fee on the day whereon he died?" and "Is the plaintiff his next heir?" This assize enabled the heir to obtain possession, even though some other person might have a better right to the land than the deceased.
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 Saxon monarchs, land was the dominant source of personal wealth. English land law transformed further from the 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.
A glossary of land law contains mostly middle English concepts, which are often found in older judgments, and refer to obsolete rights or remedies.
