Definition
A tailzie (also written tailzee) is a Scottish legal instrument for entailing heritable property — that is, a deed or settlement by which an owner restricts the ordinary course of succession and substitutes a specified line of heirs in place of those who would otherwise inherit by law. The owner exercises a proprietary right to direct how the estate descends through a defined sequence of heirs, preventing each successive holder from freely alienating or encumbering the property.
A tailzied fee is the estate that results from such a settlement: heritable property held under the conditions and restrictions imposed by the tailzie deed, as distinguished from a fee simple held without such fetters.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "An entailment or deed whereby the legal course of succession is cut off, and an arbitrary one substituted."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "An entailment or deed whereby the legal course of succession is cut off, and an arbitrary one substituted." [Also written tailzee.]
The common definitions here are accurate as far as they go, but the word "arbitrary" can mislead. In legal usage, the substituted line of succession is not capricious — it is deliberately and formally specified in the deed and enforced under Scots law with precision. The common-language gloss obscures the instrument's structural character as a binding legal deed with enforceable conditions attached to the fee.
Common Confusion
Tailzie is frequently treated as a simple synonym for entail (English law) or fee tail, but the equivalence is imprecise. Scots law developed its own tailzie framework under distinct statutory and common law rules, most significantly the Entail Act 1685 (the "Act of Tailzie"), which governed the conditions a tailzie deed had to satisfy to be valid and effectual against creditors and singular successors. English fee tail and Scots tailzie share the general objective of controlling succession but differ in their technical requirements, modes of disentailment, and legal effects. A researcher applying English entail doctrine to a Scots tailzie document without adjustment risks fundamental error.
Why It Matters in Research
Tailzie is almost exclusively a Scots law term, appearing in documents generated under the pre-Union Scottish legal system and continuing in Scots law sources well into the nineteenth century. Researchers working with Scottish estate records, title deeds, or succession disputes before and after the Acts of Union (1707) will encounter tailzie as a live operative term, not merely an antiquarian curiosity.
The practical research trap is jurisdictional bleed. Because English-language legal dictionaries — including Black's — treat tailzie as equivalent to entail, researchers may import English common law assumptions about how entails work, how they are barred, and what remedies attach. Scots tailzie operated under the Act of Tailzie 1685 and subsequent legislation, including reform statutes in the nineteenth century that progressively weakened the fetters. The Entail Amendment Act 1848 and later acts significantly changed what a tailzie heir could and could not do with the property. A document that appears to create an ironclad tailzie may have been effectively dissolved by statute by the time a later dispute arose.
The spelling variation (tailzie, tailzee, tailye) is a further hazard in historical indexes and manuscript sources. Search strategies should account for all variants.
Bouvier draws a useful distinction between heirs under a tailzie proper — a long series of substituted successors in a land settlement — and "heirs of provision" named in marriage contracts or bonds of substitution. These are related but not identical instruments, and the distinction matters when tracing the legal basis for a particular heir's claim to a Scottish estate.
Burrill's cross-reference to Bell's Appeal Cases signals that tailzie disputes reached the House of Lords on appeal from the Court of Session, making English appellate records a secondary but genuine source for Scots tailzie law in the nineteenth century.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries converge on the same core definition: tailzie is the Scots law equivalent of entail, and a tailzied fee is property settled on a substituted line of heirs. Black's (both editions) and Burrill cite Forbes's Institutes (1 Forb. Inst. pt. 2, p. 101) as authority for the definition of a tailzied fee. Bouvier adds Erskine's Principles (III, 8, 8) and the distinction between heirs under a tailzie and heirs of provision — a nuance the other dictionaries omit.
No source dictionary provides meaningful guidance on the Act of Tailzie 1685 or the nineteenth-century reform legislation, which are essential to understanding how tailzie actually operated in practice. The historical dictionaries treat the term definitionally rather than operationally, leaving the researcher without the statutory framework needed to assess the validity or effect of a specific tailzie deed. This is a significant gap. Researchers should supplement the dictionary sources with Erskine's Institutes and Bell's Principles for the doctrinal architecture, and with the relevant Scottish statutes for the reform history.
Jurisdictional Note
Tailzie is a term of Scots law and has no direct equivalent in English, Irish, or American legal traditions. After the Union of 1707, Scots property law — including tailzie — remained largely intact and distinct from English real property law. Researchers encountering the term in any non-Scottish legal context should treat it as a borrowing or analogy rather than an operative domestic concept.