An entailment in law is an old form of real estate ownership that locked land into a family bloodline, requiring it to pass automatically to the owner’s direct descendants and barring the current holder from selling, mortgaging, or giving it away permanently. Known formally as a fee tail, this arrangement shaped English and early American property law for centuries. Nearly every U.S. state has since abolished it or converted any attempt to create one into full ownership.
What a Fee Tail Let the Owner Do (and Not Do)
The person who held entailed property was called the tenant in tail. They could live on the land, farm it, and collect rents from it. What they could not do was decide where it went next. On their death the land passed automatically to the next heir in the specified line, no matter what the tenant in tail wanted.
If a tenant in tail did sell the property during their lifetime, the buyer’s claim lasted only as long as the seller did. The moment the tenant in tail died, the land snapped back to the designated heir, and the buyer lost it.
The word “tail” comes from the medieval Latin talliatum, meaning “cut down” or restricted. A fee tail was a cut-down version of ownership. Compare it to a fee simple, the broadest form of ownership in American property law: a fee simple owner can sell to anyone, leave the property to a friend, donate it to charity, or let it sit idle. A fee tail owner could do none of those things permanently.
When the specified line of descendants ran out, the property reverted to the original grantor’s heirs or passed to a remainderman named in the original grant. The tenant in tail never had the final say over the long-term fate of the land.
The Different Forms an Entailment Could Take
Not every entailment worked the same way. The inheritance rules depended on the exact words in the original grant.
- Fee tail general. The property could pass to any legitimate descendant of the grantee, male or female. Sons still took priority under primogeniture, but daughters could inherit if no sons survived.
- Fee tail male. The most common form. Only legitimate male descendants could inherit. Language like “to A and the heirs male of his body” created this type. A family with only daughters would lose the estate.
- Fee tail female. The mirror image, limiting inheritance to female descendants. Rare in practice.
- Fee tail special. The property could pass only to descendants of a specific marriage. A grant “to A and the heirs of his body begotten on B” excluded children from any other union.
These distinctions had real consequences. A family with five daughters and no sons would lose an estate held in fee tail male, while the same family would keep a fee tail general estate.
Where Entailment Came From
Before 1285, English courts treated conditional land grants loosely. If a grantor gave land “to A and the heirs of his body,” courts decided that once A had a child, the condition was satisfied and A could sell freely. Grantors who wanted the land to stay in the family forever were frustrated by this.
The Statute De Donis Conditionalibus, enacted in 1285 as part of the Statute of Westminster II, changed the rules.1Legislation.gov.uk. The Statute of Westminster the Second (De Donis Conditionalibus) 1285 It enforced the grantor’s original intent by barring the grantee from selling entailed land, and the restriction then carried forward to every subsequent generation.
Land in feudal England was more than an economic asset. It was the basis of political power, social rank, and aristocratic identity. The fee tail gave wealthy families a way to make sure no single reckless heir could gamble away centuries of accumulated influence. It also kept creditors from seizing entailed estates for unpaid debts.
How Owners Got Around It
The rigidity of entailment produced immediate pressure for workarounds. By the mid-fifteenth century, English lawyers had developed the “common recovery,” an elaborate legal fiction that converted a fee tail into a fee simple through a staged lawsuit. A friendly third party would sue the tenant in tail, a straw-man “voucher” would be called in to defend the claim and deliberately fail to appear, and the court would award the land to the plaintiff free of the entail. The tenant in tail’s heirs were theoretically compensated by a right to recover equivalent land from the voucher, but the voucher was chosen precisely because he had no land to give.
A simpler device called a “fine” (short for finalis concordia, or final agreement) worked similarly. Two parties would stage a settlement of a fake dispute over the land, and the court would record it as a binding judgment that wiped out the entail.
England eventually dropped the theater. The Fines and Recoveries Act of 1833 let any tenant in tail dispose of entailed land outright by signing a deed. After 1833, breaking an entail in England was paperwork.
Why Entailment Is Essentially Dead in the United States
The fee tail came to the American colonies with English common law but did not sit well with revolutionary ideas about equality. Thomas Jefferson pushed Virginia to abolish entail in October 1776, with legislation declaring that “the perpetuation of property in certain families, by means of gifts made to them in fee taille, is contrary to good policy” and converting existing fee tail estates into fee simple. Other states followed during and after the Revolution. By the early nineteenth century, most American jurisdictions had either abolished the fee tail outright or passed statutes that converted any attempt to create one into a fee simple.
Today, the overwhelming majority of states treat fee tail language in a deed as creating a fee simple, giving the grantee full ownership with no generational strings attached. A handful of states still technically recognize fee tail estates in some form. Massachusetts, Maine, Delaware, and Rhode Island are the most commonly cited, though even there the tenant in tail can usually convert the estate to a fee simple by signing a deed during their lifetime.
Some states take a middle approach, reading fee tail language as creating a life estate for the grantee with a remainder to the grantee’s children. The practical effect resembles an entail for one generation, but the restriction stops there.
If You See Entailment Language in an Old Deed
Entailment language in an old deed almost certainly has no practical effect on current ownership. The property has probably been conveyed multiple times under statutes that extinguished the entail long ago. Still, unusual language in a chain of title is worth flagging with a real estate attorney, especially in a state that has not explicitly abolished fee tails by statute.
Modern Tools That Do Similar Work
The fee tail is dead as a legal tool, but families still want ways to preserve wealth across generations. The modern substitutes are trusts.
A dynasty trust holds assets for the benefit of multiple generations of descendants. In states that have abolished the Rule Against Perpetuities, these trusts can theoretically last forever. A trustee manages the assets and makes distributions on the terms the creator sets, which can be flexible or restrictive. Unlike a fee tail, a dynasty trust can hold any type of asset, not just real estate, and the creator can build in protections against divorce, creditor claims, or a beneficiary’s poor financial judgment.
A spendthrift trust includes a provision that prevents beneficiaries from assigning their interest to creditors or anyone else. The beneficiary receives distributions but cannot pledge, sell, or mortgage future trust income, and creditors generally cannot reach the trust assets to satisfy the beneficiary’s personal debts. This resembles what entailment did for aristocratic families: it keeps assets away from both creditors and irresponsible heirs. A spendthrift trust must be irrevocable to provide this protection. A revocable trust does not shield assets from creditors, even if it contains spendthrift language.
Both tools offer far more flexibility than a fee tail ever did. The creator can name professional trustees, set conditions for distributions, provide for education and healthcare, and adjust terms through trust protectors. Where the fee tail was a blunt instrument, modern trusts are precision ones aimed at the same basic goal.