Definition
An heir apparent who has been formally placed in possession of an ancestor's estate during the ancestor's lifetime, through conveyance rather than inheritance. The term describes a specific legal status in which the future heir does not merely hold an expectancy but has been granted actual possession of the estate while the ancestor still lives. The arrangement was a recognized mechanism in early English property law for transferring effective control of land to the designated heir in advance of death, without fully divesting the ancestor of title.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in early English and medieval property law contexts. Researchers encountering it in historical documents, pleadings, or treatises should understand that it signals a conveyance-based transfer of possession — not a testamentary gift and not the ordinary operation of inheritance at common law. The distinction matters because the legal incidents attaching to an astitrarius hares (questions of seisin, liability for rents and services, and the ancestor's retained interests) would differ from those of an heir taking by descent.
The term is closely tied to the doctrine of seisin and the feudal structure of land tenure. Because seisin — actual possession with the character of ownership — determined so much of early English property law, the formal installation of an heir in possession during the ancestor's lifetime carried real legal consequences that bare expectancy did not. Researchers working in Year Books, early Chancery records, or treatises from Coke's period should be alert to the distinction between an heir apparent holding an expectancy and one who has been formally seized through conveyance.
Coke on Littleton (Co. Litt. 8), the authoritative source cited in Black's, is the essential primary reference. Coke's commentary on Littleton's Tenures remains the foundational text for understanding this and related concepts in the feudal land law framework.
The term will not appear in modern American legal materials. Its practical research relevance is confined to English legal history, comparative property law scholarship, and work with early common law sources. Researchers approaching the corpus from a modern property law perspective should treat this as a historical term of art with no living American counterpart.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) provides the only dictionary treatment among available sources, defining the term concisely as an heir apparent placed in possession by conveyance during the ancestor's lifetime, with a direct citation to Co. Litt. 8.
The brevity of the entry reflects the term's narrow technical function. It is a descriptive Latin designation rather than a doctrinal concept generating extensive commentary. Coke's citation is the load-bearing authority; Black's reproduces it without elaboration, and no meaningful divergence across historical dictionary sources exists to evaluate, as the term does not appear to have generated competing definitions.
What historical sources do not address — and what researchers should supplement elsewhere — is the practical mechanism by which such a conveyance was accomplished and its precise effect on the ancestor's retained feudal obligations. For that, Coke's full commentary and secondary scholarship on medieval seisin doctrine are necessary.