Fee tail or entail is a legal concept and set of associated rules restricting the manner in which real property (especially land) passes from one generation to the next; these rules tend to keep deceased estates together as a whole, and in the hands of a single owner (heir), rather than allowing them to be split up amongst multiple children (as would tend to happen in similar situations in Continental European law). Entail has been known in English law since feudal times, and it has evolved as the law has evolved. It is concerned with heirship, ensuring the male line and preserving intergenerationally its power and ownership of property. As Lawrence Stone has argued, a key element is psychological: a strong attachment by those involved to the principle of preferential male primogeniture.
Two main phases may be identified:
the "feudal" form, which was first attempted to be curbed by the Statute of Westminster 1285 and in which the entail could be barred (in England but not in Scotland) from the fifteenth century onwards by common recovery; the modern form, based on evolving trust law from the seventeenth century onwards. This used strict settlement and was brought to an end by the Settled Lands Acts 1882 to 1890.
Modern form In English common law, fee tail or entail is a form of trust, created by a deed or settlement by a 'grantor', that restricts the sale or inheritance of an estate in real property and prevents that property from being sold, wasted, devised (divided) by will, or otherwise alienated by a 'tenant-in-possession', and instead causes it to pass automatically and entirely, by operation of law, to an heir, or 'tenant in tail', as determined by the settlement deed.
The terms fee tail and tailzie are from Medieval Latin , which means "cut(-short) fee". In its original form, the 'tenant in possession' is also a 'tenant for life' and has exclusive control over all fruits of the property while they live, but no prospect of coming into ownership of the property in 'fee simple'; the 'tenant in tail' can look forward to enjoying the property in 'fee simple' when the tenant in possession dies, but in the meanwhile has no access to the fruits of the property, except as specified in the 'settlement'.
Fee tail deeds are in contrast to "fee simple" deeds, possessors of which have an unrestricted title to the property, and are empowered to bequeath or dispose of it as they wish (although it may be subject to the allodial title of a monarch or of a governing body with the power of eminent domain). Equivalent legal concepts exist or formerly existed in many other European countries and elsewhere; in Scots law tailzie was codified in the Entail Act 1685.
Most common law jurisdictions have abolished fee tails or greatly restricted their use. They survive in limited form in England and Wales, but have been abolished in Scotland, Ireland, and all but four states of the United States.
Purpose The fee tail was devised to enable a patriarch to perpetuate his blood-line, family-name, honour and armorialsFrequently in default of a son and heir to the tenant-in-possession, the entail required the next male heir, if via a female line, to adopt the surname and arms of the patriarch, see for example Mark Rolle in the persons of a series of capable and independent male descendants. By keeping his estate intact in the hands of one heir alone, in an ideally indefinite and pre-ordained chain of succession, his own wealth, power and family honour would not be dissipated amongst several male lines, as became the case for example in Napoleonic France by operation of the Napoleonic Code which gave each child the legal right to inherit an equal share of the patrimony, where a formerly great landowning family could be reduced in a few generations to a series of small-holders or peasant farmers. It approaches the true corporation, who is a legal person who does not die but continues to exist independently of the directors and owners.
Indeed, as a trust, whilst trustees may die, replacements are appointed. The trust itself continues, in perpetuity or not. As many jurisdictions do not allow perpetual entities in private interests, 'fees tail' are commonly restricted by a rule against perpetuities to extend only for a particular number of future generations.
An entail also had the effect of disallowing illegitimate children from inheriting.
Entails created complications for many propertied families, especially from about the late 17th to the early 19th century, leaving many individuals wealthy in land but heavily in debt, often due to annuities chargeable on the estate payable to the patriarch's widow and younger children, where the patriarch was swayed by sentiment not to establish a strict concentration of all his wealth in his lone heir while leaving his other beloved relatives destitute. Frequently in such cases the generosity of the settlor to people other than the heir left the entailed estate as an uneconomical enterprise, especially during times when the estate's fluctuating agricultural income had to provide for fixed sum annuities. Such tenants-in-possession were unable to sell (realise in cash) any part of their land—or even to offer the property as security for a loan—in order to pay such annuities. The workaround was to obtain permission for such sale from Parliament: by organising the passage of a private act of Parliament; this was an expensive, uncertain and time-consuming mechanism but it was frequently resorted to nevertheless. The beneficial owner (or tenant-in-possession) of the property in fact had only a life interest in it, albeit an absolute right to the income it generated, the legal owners being the trustees of the settlement, with the remainder passing intact to the next successor or heir in law; any purported bequest of the land or a portion of it by the tenant-in-possession was ineffective.
History Fee tail was established during feudal times by landed gentry to attempt to ensure that the high social standing of the family, as represented by a single patriarch, continued indefinitely. The concentration of the family's wealth into the hands of a single representative was essential to support this process. Unless the heir had himself inherited the personal and intellectual strengths of the original great patriarch, often a great warrior, which alone had brought him from obscurity to greatness, he would soon sink again into obscurity, and required wealth to maintain his social standing. This feature of English gentry and aristocracy differs from the aristocracy which existed in pre-Revolution France, where all sons of a nobleman inherited his title and were thus inescapably members of a separate noble caste in society. Little-known, France then had one of the lowest ratios of noble families to population, in Europe. The accepted rule was however largely compensated by written or notarized wills which allowed fathers to favour, within certain limits, a first-born son. In England, primogeniture provided that an estate would be inherited entirely by the first-born legitimate son of a nobleman and that, accordingly, subsequent sons were born as mere gentlemen and commoners. Without the support of wealth, these younger sons might quickly descend into obscurity, and often did. On this eldest son was concentrated the honour of the family, and to him alone was granted all its wealth to support his role in that regard, by the process of the fee tail.
The effects of English primogeniture and entail have been significant plot details or themes in a number of notable works of English literature.See generally, Zouheir Jamoussi, Primogeniture and entail in England: A survey of their history and representation in literature (1999). (See some examples cited below.)
Statute of Westminster 1285 The Statute of Westminster II, passed in 1285, created and fixed the form of this estate. The new law was also formally called the statute De Donis Conditionalibus (Concerning Conditional Gifts).
Opponents Fee tail was never popular with the monarchy, the merchant class and many holders of entailed estates themselves who wished to sell or divide their land.Priest C. The End of Entail: Information, Institutions, and Slavery in the American Revolutionary Period. Law and History Review. 2015;33(2):277-319. Cambridge Core website doi:10.1017/S0738248015000024 Accessed 8 May 2026.
Abolition Fee tail as a legal estate in England was abolished by the Law of Property Act 1925. However, they continued to exist as equitable interests (see below).
Continuing use No new fees tail can now be created following the Trusts of Land and Appointment of Trustees Act 1996.
A fee tail created before 1 January 1997 can still exist in England and Wales as an equitable interest, behind a strict settlement; the legal estate is vested in the current tenant for life or other person immediately entitled to the income, but on the basis that any capital money arising must be paid to the settlement trustees. A tenant in tail in possession can bar his fee tail by a simple disentailing deed, which does not now have to be enrolled. A tenant in tail in reversion (i.e., a future interest where the property is subject to prior life interest) needs the consent of the life tenant and any 'special protectors' to vest a reversionary fee simple in himself. Otherwise he can only create a base fee; a base fee only confers a right to the property on its owner, when its creator would have become entitled to it; if its creator dies before he would have received it, the owner of the base fee gets nothing.
In the U.S., conservation easements are a form of entail still in use.
Creation Traditionally, a fee tail was created by a trust established in a deed, often a marriage settlement, or in a will "to A and the heirs of his body". The crucial difference between the words of conveyance and the words that created a fee simple ("to A and his heirs") is that the heirs "in tail" must be the children begotten by the landowner. It was most commonly applied in limiting form of deed establishing a "fee tail male", by which only sons could inherit, although there might be an alternative limiting form of "fee tail female", by which only daughters could inherit; and "fee tail special", which had a further condition of inheritance, usually restricting succession to certain "heirs of the body" and excluding others. Land subject to these conditions was said to be "entailed" or "held in-tail", with the restrictions themselves known as entailments.
However, owing to the rule against perpetuities in the common law of England, the control established by a fee tail can be exercised over no more than two future generations — such that the terms of a will can create restrictions over the future disposal of real property by the testator's son and heir, but not over the further disposal of that property by that heir's own heirs. The reason in law is that such a third-generation disposal might feasibly fall further into the future than "a life in being plus twenty-one years"; and consequently terms in a will written to constrain that disposal would be void from the outset as extending into 'perpetuity'.