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Also known as: fee tail
Written and fact-checked by
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
entail, in feudal English law, an interest in land bound up inalienably in the grantee and then forever to his direct descendants. A basic condition of entail was that if the grantee died without direct descendants the land reverted to the grantor. The concept, feudal in origin, supported a landed aristocracy because it served to prevent the disintegration of large estates through divisible inheritance or the lack of heirs. Statutory reforms in England now permit the owner to convey the entailed land by a simple deed and even by will.
There were entailed estates in the American colonies, principally in the Middle and Southern colonies, but almost all the states emulated Thomas Jefferson’s statute of 1776 for Virginia and abolished entails.
