458 History of the English Landed Interest. 



cultural industr}^, and it finally led to such heartburnings and 

 discontent that its restrictive clauses have been gradually but 

 surely relaxed by the Acts of 1839, 1873, and 1886. 



The second great impediment to the improvement of agri- 

 culture was, as we have said at the beginning of this chapter, 

 owing to the limited powers of the tenant-for-life. 



The restrictive effects of the Statute de Donis (still a part 

 of the English law), had been partly neutralised by the 

 Statute of Fines ^ and evaded still further by the practice of 

 Common Recoveries, but the majority of English landowners 

 still grasped at any process which could retain their inherit- 

 ance in the same family. By the statute of Hen. VIII., 

 estates- tail had been placed on the same footing as other 

 estates of inheritance with regard to forfeiture for treason. 

 In the civil wars of the eighteenth century, the landed 

 gentry became doubly anxious to evade this Act, and Sir 

 Orlando Bridgeman, a Royalist lawyer, with the assistance of 

 Sir Geoffrey Palmer, by showing them how this might be 

 done, invented the modern entail.^ Land was settled for life 

 on two or three living individuals and on some unborn person 

 as tenant-in-tail. By this means those owners of realty 

 convicted of treason forfeited only their life -interest, and the 

 estates remained in the same family. Though the life owner 

 has never been able to bar the entail, the tenant-in-tail as 

 soon as he comes into possession has been able to do so ever 

 since 1472. Prior to the year 1833 he was in theory per- 

 mitted by law to cut off the entail on coming of age, though 

 practically he was powerless to do so without the consent 

 of the tenant-for-life.3 3^^ after the Act of 3 & 4 W. IV., 

 by being henceforth specifically compelled to obtain the 

 consent of the protector of the settlement, he was not even 

 permitted to enjoy this empty boast. Thus this statute, 

 though it replaced the awkward process of a Common 

 Recovery or a Fine with that of a simple deed, if anything 



1 32 Hen. VIII. c. 36. 

 ^ The, English Land Laws. Moss, 1886. 



^ If the tenant-in-tail happened to be the teuant-for-life, he could bar 

 the entail by deed but not by will. 



