3i2 = 76 
English Land Law. 
ruin, and creditors were defrauded of their just expectation bj 
the discovery of an entail which had hitherto been kept a secret. 
The progress of civilisation demanded a release from such a 
bondage, and in course of time the desired remedy was found. 
Fines and It was at the end of the fifteenth century, in the reign of 
recoveries. Edward III. (1472) that the device known as a common recovery, 
by which the state of things above described was practically put 
an end to, was first employed. Of this process it is unnecessary 
to say more than that it was a legal fiction, which, by a kind of 
fraus pia, enabled the tenant in tail to whom issue had been 
born to convert his limited interest in the land into its absolute 
ownership, with the unfettered right of alienation and devise. 
Nearly the same result was accomplished a few years later by 
another legal fiction known as levying a fine^ which received 
parliamentary sanction by a statute passed in the reign of Henr^ 
VIII. (32 Hen. 8, c. 36), and all the estates which had been 
fettered by previous legislation for 200 years were from this 
time practically emancipated. For two more centuries, speaking 
in round numbers, land-owners enjoyed a freedom of alienatior 
hitherto unknown or confined to a privileged minority ; and the 
rapid growth and independence of the order of yeomen am 
landed gentry, in the days of the later Tudors and earlie 
Stuarts, has been attributed in great measure by some writers ti 
the liberty thus bestowed. By the seventeenth century a ne\ 
means of fettering the landowners' hands was introduced, nc 
by the Legislature, but by private individuals and for privat 
ends. This was by the establishment of the system of famil 
Settlements. settlements, which resulted in again throwing a large portion ( 
the soil into the possession of those whose rights were limite 
by the duration of their own lives, and constituted indeed 
privileged kind of tenancy rather than an ownership in tl 
proper sense of the word. The practice of settling estates ow 
its origin to the ingenuity of Sir Orlando Bridgman, and oth 
eminent lawyers of his time, and was adopted in the troublt 
periods of the Commonwealth and Restoration, with the ma 
object of evading that forfeiture for felony or high treason whii 
was then unhappily so common a calamity. It would require 
volume to give anything like an adequate idea of its intricacic 
but the main principle in which it originated was to confei^ 
life estate upon the immediate tenant, and, by the interpositi'll 
of a trustee, to secure the devolution of the lands upon his eldfl 
or other son in any event. The son, in turn, stood in no belH 
position, and upon the attainment of his majority general 
resettled the estate in the same manner. The first tenant H 
Entail. tail under such a settlement was able to " bar the entail," aH 
in that manner make his ownership of the land absolute, by lH 
