Real Estate In The English Common Law Inheritance System :1066-1540

The inheritance rules of medieval England were profound complex, for their widely relating to several academic fields, such as law, family and marriage. The western scholars have mainly discussed the merits and demerits of primogeniture in the way of studying laws since the sixteenth century, and they did not turn to the fields of family and marriage in which they based on the legal material on inheritance until the 1950s. So far the historians have seldom taken a look at the real property inheritance from a way of treating real property law in which driving force for change is seen as lying in family concerns. And few people have answered the following questions that this article has recognized:To what degree did the common law rules designed for real property inheritance satisfy the needs of the large landowners? What were the economic conditions and thedestiny of the weak family members---heiresses, wives, widows and the youngerchildren? What on earth did the large landowners pursue in the course of their fighting against the common law, freedom of controlling their land or the methods to keep the integrity of patrimony?As writing this essay, I try to put myself in the shoes of large landowners, considering the common law rules for the real property transmission. And I try to solve the above problems through illuminating the following subjects:How did the landowners make the real property law develop toward the direction of satisfying their own needs? And why did they weaken the property right of heiresses and widows in the one hand, and make every effort to provide for the younger children on the other through the way of entail and use? And how did they get out of the dilemma by achieving two apparently inconsistent aims, retrieving the freedom of arranging their land by wills and preventing the partition of patrimony?This essay falls two sections, with an introduction at the beginning, following the five chapters. The introduction includes the historiography and several tentative explanations of the key words.The first chapter is a brief historical retrospect of the regulations of inheritance of the Anglo-Saxon period, in the aim of making it convenient for the reader to draw a comparison between the regulations before and after the Conquest.Chapter 2 summarizes and reflects upon the basic rules of real property inheritance, or laws and institutions relating to the inheritance. As it going, it's the foundation of the whole article in which some terminology, which isn't easy to understand without this chapter, will appear frequently.Chapter 3 singles out for more technical considerations on two much-discussedlegal instruments devised by the landowners---entail and use, and this essay closedon the year 1540 because it's just the year that passed the statute of will which gave the absolute freedom of controlling their land.Chapter 4, which apparently is the core of the whole essay, discusses the upsand downs of the inheritance right of every kind of weaken family members respectively, with the aim of inspecting what the landowners were thinking about when arranging their patrimony.A final brief conclusion sums up overall.