Definition
A technical phrase used in deeds and wills to limit the inheritance of real property to male descendants born within a lawful marriage. When inserted in a conveyance or testamentary gift, the phrase restricts succession to sons, grandsons, and further male descendants in the direct line who are both legitimate (born of lawful wedlock) and male. It is the operative language of a fee tail male, carving out from the general fee simple a line of inheritance that excludes daughters, illegitimate sons, and collateral male relatives unless they qualify as heirs male of the original grantee's body.
The phrase operates as words of limitation, not words of purchase — that is, the heirs males named do not take as independent beneficiaries but as the channel through which the estate descends. Once the male line fails entirely, the estate either reverts to the grantor (or grantor's heirs) or passes to whoever holds the remainder interest, depending on how the original conveyance was structured.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase is inseparable from the history of the fee tail and the statutes that modified or abolished it. In English common law, the phrase worked within the entail system established by the Statute De Donis Conditionalibus (1285), which gave courts the tools to enforce conditional fees against alienation. By the time American colonies inherited English land law, the phrase carried centuries of judicial gloss about what counted as "lawfully engendered" and what happened when the male line diverged — for example, whether an adopted son qualified, or whether a son born before the parents' marriage but legitimated by subsequent marriage could inherit.
In American research, the practical trap is jurisdictional fragmentation. Most American states abolished or severely curtailed the fee tail during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often converting entails into fee simples by statute. A deed in a Virginia archive using this phrase in 1720 operated very differently from the same phrase appearing in a Pennsylvania instrument of the same date, because Pennsylvania moved early against entails. Researchers reading pre-Revolutionary deeds must check whether the relevant colony or state had enacted a statute converting entails, and if so, when.
A secondary trap: the phrase sometimes appears in wills where the testator intended something less formal than a technical fee tail male — possibly a precatory or moral direction to keep property in the male line rather than a legally enforceable limitation. Courts in equity sometimes treated such language as creating a trust rather than a legal estate, depending on surrounding context. Do not assume the phrase always created an enforceable entail without examining the full instrument and the applicable jurisdiction's treatment of entails at the time of execution.
Corpus researchers should also watch for variant phrasings — "heirs male of his body," "heirs male lawfully begotten," "male heirs of his body lawfully issuing" — which carried functionally identical meaning and are treated interchangeably in most case law. The specific wording mattered less than whether the court found a clear intent to limit to male bodily heirs.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje and Lawrence's entry is sparse, citing only 1 Cro. 478 (Croke's Jacobean-era reports) without elaborating on the doctrinal content. The citation is genuine — Croke's reports cover King's Bench cases from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and are a natural reference for fee tail construction — but the entry as it survives in the source material is fragmentary, appearing in a string of brief cross-references rather than as a fully developed definition.
The absence of extended treatment in Rapalje and Lawrence likely reflects the fact that by the time the dictionary was compiled (late nineteenth century United States), fee tail estates were largely obsolete in American practice. Most of the live doctrinal work on this phrase appears in English authorities — Littleton's Tenures, Coke on Littleton, and the extensive case law on De Donis — rather than in American legal dictionaries, which had less occasion to develop the point.
What Rapalje and Lawrence does not address: the equity side of the problem, the treatment of posthumous sons, the effect of attainder on the male line, or the American statutory conversions. Researchers should not treat the dictionary entry as authoritative on these questions and should consult Blackstone's Commentaries (Book II, Chapter 7) and the relevant state's entail statutes for a complete picture.
Jurisdictional Note
England abolished the fee tail by the Law of Property Act 1925, converting existing entails into equitable interests. In the United States, most states abolished or converted entails by the early nineteenth century, though a handful of states retained modified forms longer. The precise effect of the phrase in any American jurisdiction depends entirely on the date of the instrument and the state's statutory history with respect to entails.