Definition
De donis conditionalibus (Latin: "concerning conditional gifts") is the title of the first chapter of the Statute of Westminster II (13 Edw. I, 1285), commonly known as the Statute de Donis. The statute transformed the existing fee simple conditional — a freehold estate granted with a condition tied to the birth of heirs — into what became the fee tail, a new and distinct form of inheritable estate.
Before the statute, a grantor could convey land to a donee "and the heirs of his body" with the expectation that, once a child was born, the donee could alienate the land freely and defeat the grantor's intent to keep the property within the donee's bloodline. The Statute de Donis eliminated this alienation power. After 1285, such grants created an estate that descended compulsorily to the bodily heirs of the grantee, generation after generation, and could not be barred by ordinary conveyance. The donee held what the law would come to call a fee tail; the grantor retained a reversion; and the original donor's family (or the lord's) retained an expectancy that the land would return if the bloodline failed.
The statute is foundational to the law of real property: it created the machinery for entailment, generated centuries of effort by courts and conveyancers to circumvent it, and ultimately provoked the development of the common recovery and the fine as devices to bar the entail — doctrines that themselves became central features of English land law for five centuries.
---
Common Confusion
De donis conditionalibus is often loosely equated with the fee tail itself, but the two are distinct: de donis is the statute that created the fee tail as a legally enforceable estate. The fee simple conditional — the pre-1285 device the statute superseded — is a separate concept that survived in a handful of American jurisdictions and should not be treated as synonymous with either the fee tail or its statutory origin. Researchers working in early American property records must be alert to which regime applies, since some colonies and states never adopted the Statute de Donis as part of received English law.
---
Why It Matters in Research
For researchers working in English legal history before the nineteenth century, de donis conditionalibus is not merely a background fact — it is the organizational pivot around which real property doctrine turns. A significant portion of conveyancing law from 1285 onward — fines, common recoveries, disentailing assurances, remainders, reversions — only makes sense when read against the framework the statute imposed.
Several navigational traps arise in historical sources:
First, period sources frequently refer to the statute simply as "the Statute de Donis" or "Westminster 2" without specifying the chapter. Researchers encountering these shorthand references should understand they point to the same instrument as de donis conditionalibus.
Second, American sources require particular care. Reception of English statutes varied colony by colony and state by state. Some jurisdictions expressly received the Statute de Donis; others did not; others received the fee tail by common law reasoning without the statute; and many abolished the fee tail by legislation in the late eighteenth or nineteenth century. The presence or absence of de donis in a given jurisdiction's received law directly determines whether entailment and its associated doctrines were ever operative there.
Third, the statute's effects were systematically undermined by judge-made devices — the common recovery, recognized by the courts of common law in the fifteenth century, and the fine — which allowed tenants in tail to convey fee simple titles in practice even when the statute nominally prohibited alienation. Any research touching entailed estates after the mid-fifteenth century must account for these bars.
Fourth, Blackstone, Kent, and Stephen all analyze de donis at length but from the vantage point of a system already modified by centuries of judicial erosion. Their accounts describe what the statute became, not always what it initially enacted. Researchers working on the statute's early operation should triangulate against Reeves's History of English Law for a less teleological account.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is concise but well-directed. It correctly identifies de donis conditionalibus as the title of the first chapter of Westminster 2 (13 Edw. I) and accurately states that the statute converted fees simple conditional into fees tail. Burrill provides a compact but useful citation cluster: Reeves's History of English Law for doctrinal context, Blackstone's Commentaries (2 Bl. Com. 112), Stephen's Commentaries (1 Steph. Com. 228), Kent's Commentaries (4 Kent's Com. 12–13), Burton on Real Property, and Lewis on Perpetuities.
The entry's limitation is characteristic of reference-style dictionary treatment: it names the statute and states its operative effect without explaining the pre-existing fee simple conditional that the statute displaced, the judicial mechanisms developed to circumvent the statute's prohibition on alienation, or the statute's eventual legislative abolition across most of the common law world. Researchers relying on Burrill alone will have the correct signpost but will need the treatise sources he cites — particularly Reeves and Blackstone — to understand the doctrine's full arc.
No significant disagreement among the historical sources appears on the core identity of the term; the variation is in depth of treatment, not substance.
---
Jurisdictional Note
The Statute de Donis was part of received English law in many American jurisdictions but was expressly rejected or effectively nullified in others. Several states abolished the fee tail by statute shortly after independence, converting entails into fee simple estates either automatically or by legislative command. Researchers should not assume the statute's operative effect in any American jurisdiction without confirming that jurisdiction's specific reception history.
---
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Fee Tail
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Estates in Land
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Statute of Westminster
---