Legal Dictionary

fee tail

Legal Definition of fee tail

Noun

  1. A form of tenure under the feudal system that could only be transferred to a lineal descendant. If there were no lineal descendants upon the death of the tenant, the land reverted back to the lord.

See also

  1. entail

Definition of fee tail

Further reading

Fee tail or entail is an obsolescent estate at common law. It describes an estate of inheritance in real property which cannot be sold, devised by will, or otherwise alienated by the owner, but which passes by operation of law to the owner's heirs upon his death. The term fee tail is derived from the Middle Latin foedum talliatum, which means "cut-short fee."

The purpose of an entail was to keep the land of a family intact in the main line of succession. The heir to an entailed estate could not sell the land, nor usually bequeath it to, for example, an illegitimate child. The complications arising from entails were an important factor in the life of many of the upper classes, especially from about the late 17th to the early 19th centuries, leaving many individuals wealthy in land but still heavily in debt.

References:

  1. Wiktionary. Published under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.



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