Definition
A fee tail is a freehold estate in land that is limited in its inheritance to a specified line of descendants — typically the bodily heirs of the grantee. Unlike a fee simple, which passes freely to any heir or devisee, a fee tail constrains ownership so that the land descends automatically to the grantee's lineal heirs, generation after generation, and cannot be devised by will or alienated in a way that cuts off future heirs.
The classic common law form arose from the Statute De Donis Conditionalibus (1285), which enforced gifts of land to a person "and the heirs of his body" as true entailments rather than conditional fees. Once the condition of having bodily heirs was met, earlier doctrine had allowed the tenant to alienate the land freely; De Donis reversed this and locked the land into the prescribed line of descent.
The estate terminates — and the land reverts to the original grantor's estate (the reversion) or passes to a third party (the remainder) — only when the entailed line of descent fails entirely, meaning the tenant in tail dies without qualifying heirs.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Fee tail" is treated as a legal or historical term with no significant modern non-legal meaning. The word "tail" in ordinary English refers to the appendage of an animal or the rear end of something.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Tail" carried the legal sense directly, defined as "an estate in fee limited to a person and the heirs of his body, or to certain classes of particular heirs."
Editorial note: The word "tail" here derives from the Anglo-French taillé (cut, limited) — the estate is one that has been "cut down" from a full fee simple. A modern reader encountering "tail" in a deed or old legal record and reading it as the animal appendage will entirely miss the term's technical force. The phrase "in tail" signals restricted hereditary succession, not a physical description.
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Common Confusion
Fee tail is routinely confused with fee simple and with life estate. The distinctions matter:
— A fee simple absolute passes to any heir or devisee without restriction. A fee tail passes only to bodily (lineal) heirs and cannot be freely devised.
— A life estate terminates at the death of the measuring life and does not pass to heirs at all. A fee tail continues through successive generations until the bloodline fails.
— Fee tail male and fee tail female (see RECOGNIZED FORMS below) are subtypes that further restrict the qualifying line of descent, a distinction that does not exist in fee simple or life estate doctrine.
Researchers also sometimes conflate the fee tail with the conditional fee that existed before De Donis. The conditional fee allowed alienation once the condition (birth of issue) was satisfied; the fee tail as created by De Donis eliminated that escape.
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Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Fee tail general: Descent to any bodily heirs of the grantee, regardless of which spouse they were born to.
Fee tail special: Descent restricted to the heirs of the grantee's body by a specified spouse — e.g., "to A and the heirs of his body by his wife B."
Fee tail male: Descent through male heirs of the body only. Female issue do not inherit and cannot transmit the entail.
Fee tail female: Descent through female heirs of the body only. Rare in practice but recognized at common law.
These subtypes appear with some regularity in colonial American conveyances and in English title chains; identifying which subtype applies is essential to tracing a chain of title through historical records.
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Why It Matters in Research
Fee tail is one of the most consequential historical estates for corpus researchers working with pre-twentieth-century land records, probate materials, and conveyancing documents. Several traps merit attention:
Abolition timeline: Most American states abolished the fee tail by statute, many doing so before or shortly after independence, often by converting a conveyance of fee tail into a fee simple or a life estate with a remainder in fee simple to the issue. The date and mechanism of abolition varies by state. A deed that would create a fee tail in England may have an entirely different legal effect in a given American jurisdiction depending on when it was executed relative to the abolishing statute.
Disentailment devices: At common law, a tenant in tail could "bar the entail" through a common recovery (a fictitious legal action) or, later, by a statutory fine, converting the fee tail into a fee simple. English records from the medieval through the early modern period contain proceedings that are formally styled as recoveries but are in substance conveyancing devices. Researchers encountering these should treat them as alienation transactions, not litigation.
Reversion and remainder confusion: Because a fee tail carries a built-in reversion or remainder, the grantor's estate and any remainder interest remain legally alive even across many generations. Title searches in jurisdictions that were slow to abolish fee tails may surface dormant remainder claims.
Language recognition: Corpus sources often use variant phrasings — "to A and the heirs of his body," "to A in tail," "entailed estate," "entailment," "docked entail," "barring the entail." Keyword searches should capture all variants.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry (truncated in the source material) defines the fee tail as an estate in lands or tenements created by a conveyance or devise to a person and his [bodily heirs] — the classic formulation that tracks De Donis.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence (1883) opens the definition with the standard formula — an estate created by conveyance or devise to a person and his [heirs of the body] — which aligns with both the Blackstonian common law treatment and American equity practice of the period. The truncation in the available source text cuts off before the dictionary addresses disentailment or American statutory modifications, which is a meaningful gap: by 1883, most American jurisdictions had already altered or abolished the fee tail, and a practitioner-oriented dictionary of American and English law would have been expected to address that divergence.
What the historical dictionaries uniformly capture well: the formal definition, the De Donis origin, the basic subtype taxonomy (general, special, male, female), and the concept of barring the entail. What they tend to underserve: the precise American state-by-state conversion mechanisms, the interaction between fee tail doctrine and early colonial land grants, and the procedural history of common recoveries as a conveyancing tool rather than genuine litigation.
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Jurisdictional Note
The fee tail has been abolished, modified, or converted by statute in virtually all American jurisdictions, with most states treating a deed in fee tail form as creating either a fee simple in the first taker or a life estate with remainder in fee simple to the issue. A small number of states (including historically Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island) retained fee tail doctrine in modified form into the twentieth century. English law retained the entail in modified form until the Law of Property Act 1925 effectively abolished it for practical purposes. Researchers working with English title chains must apply pre-1926 doctrine.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The corpus encyclopedia entry "Policy Period, Retroactive Dates, and Extended Reporting Periods (Tail Coverage)" in The Law Mind Insurance Law Encyclopedia addresses "tail" in the entirely distinct context of claims-made insurance policies and is not relevant to fee tail property doctrine. No direct encyclopedia match exists in the current corpus for fee tail.
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