Definition
A provision in a settlement of a landed estate directing that specific sums of money be raised from the land for the benefit of younger children — that is, the brothers and sisters of the eldest son who inherits the estate. When real property is settled on the eldest son (typically through an entail or strict settlement), the land passes to him substantially intact, but the other children of the family receive no equivalent share. To compensate, the settlement imposes a charge or direction on the estate requiring that defined monetary sums be "raised" — that is, generated — from the land and paid over to those younger children. These sums are the portions; the mechanism for generating them is the raising.
In practice, the portions were usually raised by the eldest son mortgaging or charging the estate, or by trustees exercising powers granted in the settlement to raise the required funds. The direction to raise portions thus created an equitable charge on the land in favor of the younger children, enforceable in equity even though those children took no legal interest in the land itself.
Common Confusion
The word "portions" in this context means a monetary inheritance or financial provision, not a share of land. Younger children received money charged against the estate, not any fractional ownership of the land itself. Researchers encountering "portions" in settlement documents should not conflate it with a devise or bequest of realty, nor assume that the children receiving portions had any possessory interest in the land.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively encountered in English property law sources predating the twentieth century, particularly in materials dealing with strict settlements, family settlements, and the law of entail. It is largely a creature of equity jurisdiction and trust law: the power to raise portions was routinely built into the standard strict settlement form that dominated English landed estate planning from roughly the seventeenth century through the enactment of the Settled Land Act 1882.
Researchers working in pre-modern English probate records, equity pleadings in Chancery, or treatises on real property settlements will encounter this term frequently. Several navigational traps exist:
First, "raising" is an active word of art. A direction to raise portions means the trustees or the tenant for life are empowered — often obligated — to generate the funds by charging, mortgaging, or otherwise burdening the land. It does not mean the portions are simply declared; the mechanism of extraction matters and generated substantial Chancery litigation over when and how portions could be raised.
Second, portions for younger children must be distinguished from the portion or advancement a child might receive during a parent's lifetime, though both concepts appear in equity and both can affect the doctrine of satisfaction and the presumption against double portions.
Third, the amounts and conditions attached to raising portions varied enormously across individual settlements, and disputes about whether conditions precedent had been met — a younger child attaining a certain age, a daughter marrying with consent — were the source of extensive equity litigation.
Fourth, American researchers should note that while strict settlements of the English variety were rare in the United States due to different inheritance customs and statutory environments, the term does appear in American legal dictionaries and treatises of the nineteenth century that imported English equity doctrine wholesale. Its practical significance in American case law is minimal, but it may appear in scholarly commentary or in cases involving the construction of older deeds and wills drafted by practitioners trained in English forms.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary's entry is characteristically compressed but accurate in substance: it identifies a landed estate settled on the eldest son, describes the charge imposed in favor of brothers and sisters, and uses the operative phrase "raising portions for younger children." The entry connects the term to the standard machinery of the English family settlement.
What Black's does not elaborate is the equitable dimension — that the direction created an equitable charge enforceable in Chancery, that trustees typically held powers to sell or mortgage for the purpose, and that the doctrine of satisfaction in equity governed situations where a parent had already provided for a child during their lifetime. Treatises such as Sugden on Powers and Sanders on Uses and Trusts engage these mechanics in depth. Kent's Commentaries, cited in the partial adjacent Black's entry visible in the source material, provides the American framing of related doctrines.
Historical dictionaries generally treat this term as self-evident to practitioners of the era and therefore underexplain it. The term presupposes familiarity with the strict settlement structure, the role of trustees to preserve contingent remainders, and the standard powers inserted into settlement deeds — context that modern researchers must reconstruct from secondary sources on English land law history.
Jurisdictional Note
This term belongs principally to English law and equity jurisdiction. It has negligible independent significance in American law, where strict settlements of the English pattern did not take hold. Researchers working in Scottish, Irish, or Commonwealth jurisdictions should note that analogous concepts existed under different local forms of settlement, though the terminology and equitable rules could differ.