358 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



consequences having resulted from them has never been dis- 

 puted. Accordingly, when the absurd technical device of a 

 common recovery was invented to break these entails in the 

 reign of Edward IV, Parliament took no steps to counteract it, 

 and in the reign of Henry VIII expressly authorised a tenant-in- 

 tail to bar his own issue by a proceeding known as a " fine." 



It has not been sufficiently realised that during the period 

 between the introduction of these methods for breaking entails 

 and the institution of family settlements in the seventeenth 

 century the ownership of family property in this country was 

 practically more absolute, and the disposition of it less re- 

 stricted, than it had been for two centuries before, or than it 

 has since become. Each successive tenant-in-tail, by levying a 

 fine or suffering a common recovery, was able to convert his 

 estate into a fee-simple, and as the use of life-estates in tying 

 up land had not yet been discovered, the head of a family 

 was usually in this position. The agrarian history of this re- 

 markable period yet remains to be written ; but it is impossible 

 not to connect the rapid growth and singular independence 

 of the English gentry and yeomanry under the later Tudors 

 and earlier Stuarts, with the limitation of entails and freedom 

 of alienation which thus characterised it. In course of time, 

 however, family pride, aided by lawyers, contrived new expe- 

 dients for checking alienation by sale or subdivision by will, 

 and placing the right of primogeniture on a secure basis. The 

 first of these expedients in logical, if not in chronological, 

 order was the mere substitution of such words as " first son " 

 or "eldest son" for "heir of his body," in deeds of settlement. 

 The legal effect of this was that instead of the father taking 

 an estate-tail under the settlement, which he might have forth- 

 with converted into a fee-simple, he took only a life-estate, and 

 had no control over the remainder (whether for life or in tail) 

 given by the same instrument to his eldest son. This idea 

 was developed by conferring, so far as possible, life-estates 

 instead of estates-tail on the whole first generation of persons 

 included in a family settlement ; so that, whereas a tenant-in- 

 tail once in possession could not be deprived of his power to 



