Definition
An estate in fee tail (also called a fee tail, or entail) is a freehold estate in real property that descends exclusively to the lineal heirs of the original grantee, following a fixed line of inheritance, and cannot be freely alienated or devised. Unlike a fee simple, which passes to heirs generally or can be transferred at will, a fee tail locks ownership within the bloodline of the first taker. When that bloodline runs out — when the tenant in tail dies leaving no lineal descendants — the property reverts to the grantor or passes to a remainder holder, depending on how the original grant was structured.
The classic words of limitation creating a fee tail were "to A and the heirs of his body." The phrase "heirs of his body" was the operative language distinguishing a fee tail from a fee simple ("to A and his heirs") and from a life estate ("to A"). Absence of bodily heirs did not just end A's line; it ended the estate entirely, triggering reversion or remainder.
Common Confusion
Fee tail is frequently confused with fee simple and with life estate, the two estates it most resembles at the surface. A fee simple is perpetual and fully alienable — the holder can sell, mortgage, devise, or give away the property without restriction, and the estate never naturally terminates. A life estate ends at the death of the measuring life and cannot descend at all. A fee tail sits between them: it descends indefinitely through lineal heirs but cannot leave that bloodline, and it terminates naturally when the line fails. The confusion deepens in American jurisdictions because most states converted or abolished the fee tail centuries ago, meaning what was once a fee tail in a deed is now treated as a fee simple under statute — a historical deed that looks like a fee tail may not function as one under modern law.
Fee tail is also sometimes confused with a spendthrift trust or a dynastic trust, which serve similar policy goals (keeping property within a family, restricting alienation) by entirely different legal mechanisms.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Fee tail general: Descends to any lineal heirs of the grantee's body, regardless of which spouse they were born to.
Fee tail special: Descends only to heirs of the grantee's body born to a specified spouse ("to A and the heirs of his body begotten on B").
Fee tail male / Fee tail female: Restricts descent further to male-line or female-line heirs only. Historically significant in English property law, particularly in connection with aristocratic estates and peerage.
Why It Matters in Research
The fee tail is almost exclusively a historical research problem in the United States. With the exception of a small number of states (Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island historically permitted versions of it; Delaware retained elements longer than most), American legislatures abolished or converted the fee tail beginning in the colonial and early republic period. The critical research trap is this: a deed or conveyance from the eighteenth or nineteenth century using fee tail language — "to A and the heirs of his body" — may have been immediately converted by statute into a fee simple absolute at the moment of execution, depending on the jurisdiction and the applicable date. Researchers analyzing chain of title in early American records must check the operative statute for the relevant state and date, not assume that fee tail language created a fee tail estate.
In English legal history and in research touching English common law sources, the fee tail is central to understanding the development of estates doctrine. The Statute De Donis Conditionalibus (1285) is the foundational instrument that created the true fee tail by preventing early disentailment; Quia Emptores (1290) and later fine and recovery procedures interact directly with it. Any research into pre-modern English land tenure, inheritance practice, or the doctrinal history of estates will encounter fee tail as a structural concept.
In American testamentary and probate records, fee tail language in wills from the colonial period through the early nineteenth century is common. Whether that language achieved its intended effect, or was converted into a fee simple by the time the testator died, is a jurisdiction-specific question that historical dictionaries and treatises alone cannot resolve.
The Statute of Uses (1535) and the development of executory interests also interact with fee tail doctrine in ways that matter for anyone researching early modern English property conveyancing.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence offer only a cross-reference entry: "See Escertaine inheritance," citing Littleton section 218. This is characteristically spare. The reference to Littleton is instructive: Littleton's Tenures, the foundational English property law treatise of the fifteenth century, treats the fee tail in detail and remains the doctrinal source for the estate's core definition. Coke's commentary on Littleton (Co. Litt.) extended that analysis and is the standard historical authority. The Rapalje & Lawrence entry reflects how thoroughly fee tail had become a historical artifact even by the time American legal dictionaries were being compiled in the late nineteenth century — a term that required only a pointer to older authority, not fresh definition.
What the historical dictionaries generally omit is the American statutory transformation. English-origin dictionaries treat the fee tail as a live doctrinal category; American research requires layering in the state-by-state conversion statutes that fundamentally changed what fee tail language does on the ground.
Jurisdictional Note
Fee tail has been abolished or converted to fee simple by statute in the overwhelming majority of American jurisdictions. The few states that retained it in modified forms have largely completed that abolition by the twentieth century. In England and Wales, the Trusts of Land and Appointment of Trustees Act 1996 effectively ended the creation of new entailed interests. Researchers working in any common law jurisdiction outside the United States should verify the current status under local statute before treating fee tail as a functional category.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
property_2: Estates in Land — Fee Simple Absolute, The Law Mind Property Law Encyclopedia
property_3: Estates in Land — Defeasible Fees, The Law Mind Property Law Encyclopedia