1 - Fee tails before De Donis

Summary

Fee tails before the statute of De Donis (1285) are the subject of two related stories. One story is about the protection the King's Court provided the interests in a fee tail. The subject of this story is mainly the development of the three formedon writs – formedon in the reverter, in the descender, and in the remainder. For this story one can build on the work of S. F. C. Milsom and of Paul Brand.

The second story is about the grants themselves. In the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries there were two basic forms of grant in fee tail. Suppose A granted land in fee tail to B, his grant could take the form “to B and the heirs of his body, but if B should die without an heir of his body the land shall revert to A” or his grant could take the form “to B and the heirs of his body, but if B should die without an heir of his body the land shall remain to C.” Grants in these forms were known as conditional gifts in the thirteenth century because of the explicit condition on the reversion or remainder. Legal historians have thought that conditional gifts were in the form “to B and the heirs of his body” and that the condition was imposed by judges or by Bracton.