Septuagesima and in Lent’. These chapters and the many strengthening
legal process in Westminster II are of a similar sort to the orders of the
parlementof Paris. But the second statute goes further in creating new
grounds of action.^214
The first chapter of Westminster II, De donis conditionalibus, pro-
vided writs of ‘formedon’ in addition to that already ‘in common use in
the chancery’ to enforce the terms of an entail: that is, a gift to a couple
(typically, to the donor’s daughter and her husband when they married)
and the heirs of their bodies, so that the donees might not alienate the
property. If they had no heirs or (as it came to be interpreted) their line
died out in a subsequent generation, the statute decreed that the land
should revert to the donor or his heirs.^215 So were laid the foundations
of the mass of law allowing conveyancers to create and to ‘bar’ (or
break) entails on which depended both the preservation and exploita-
tion of blocks of landed power, and therefore the status of English land-
owners, for centuries to come. The fact was registered in new meanings
of ‘estate’ itself. It was a person’s ‘standing’ in terms of landed property
which was becoming definitive. Bracton has the demandant in an assize
of mort d’ancestor pleading that the ancestor ‘never withdrew from
seisin or changed his statusin any way’, but ‘died seised as of fee’, and
asserts that ‘the status of a minor ought not to be changed, either with
regard to tenements or services and customs’.^216 This use of status, or
rather e(s)tatin its law-French form, was appropriated by the lawyers
who compiled the reports of legal arguments in the king’s courts
surviving from the later years of Edward I’s reign, because they needed
a word to cover the various interests in land which multiplied with the
development of a law of entail. Beside the ‘estate in fee simple’, and the
temporary enjoyment of property as a lessee, doweress, or tenant at
will, there came to be recognized the estates in fee tail or ‘cut-down’ fees
(from Fr. tailler, to cut) of those whose right was conditional on the
birth of heirs, and the ‘future estates’ or ‘estates in expectancy’ of those
to whom the settlement gave a right to the ‘remainder’ or the ‘reversion’
of the land according to the settlement.^217 A report of the case of 1312
in the Court of Common Pleas in which Chief Justice Bereford first
interpreted the De donisprohibition of the alienation of the gift as
extending beyond the original donees has the judges and pleaders argu-
ing about the nature of the estate that was passed on; in 1347 the
Commons maintained that it was an estate for life only and that the
Estates of people 235(^214) SRi. 26–39, 71–95: tr. in EHDiii. 397–410, 428–57.
(^215) EHDiii. 428–9.
(^216) Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England, tr. Thorne, iii. 39, 90, 282, 290 (fos.
170, 192b, 266b, 270), iv. 316–17 (fo. 423b); W. S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law,
3rd edn. (London, 1923), ii. 350–2, iii. 101 ff.
(^217) T. F. T. Plucknett, ‘Words’, Cornell Law Quarterly, 14 (1929).