The following is an edited version of a post to AUSTEN-L:

    Date: Sun, 22 Sep 1996 14:23:53 -0400

    From: John Hopfner

    Let me start with the disclaimer that I'm neither a lawyer nor a legal historian. The following is my best understanding of the facts from British history, but I almost certainly am overgeneralizing is some cases.

    In order to understand entails, the first thing to consider is the importance that ownership of land had both in the England of Jane Austen's time and in England for centuries previous to her day. Ownership of land wasn't just an ornament to the family (in the way that a collection of paintings or a library might be considered an ornament). Land was what made a family part of the aristocracy or gentry. Ownership of land produced an income that was steadying, predictable, and recurring. That income was what freed the family from the necessity to earn their living by daily effort. It freed them to secure and enjoy an education, to --as they chose-- dabble in the arts and sciences, become involved in politics, or lead a life of idleness and refinement. This gave ownership of land a cachet that went beyond ownership of cash or movable goods. A landed estate was the Patrimony --it conferred status in society, not just on one person for one generation, but on the family so long as it lasted.

    This fact wasn't lost on members of the gentry and aristocracy. Nor were they blind to two real dangers that threaten a landed estate: dissipation by sale, if the head of the family at any point in time (a wastrel, say, or a foolish speculator) were to sell his land to raise funds, and then fritter away the sales proceeds; and subdivision (if an estate were divided equally between all sons or children over several generations, then a single Patrimony, sufficient to make its holder a gentleman and member of the gentry, becomes a multitude of smaller patrimonies that, individually, don't qualify his descendants for the same social status).

    The result is that the whole family sinks into obscurity, which was held to be a bad thing. The answer to this problem is primogeniture among male heirs, which keeps The Patrimony itself intact and under the control of the head of the family in each generation --though at the cost of unfairness to other surviving children of the family head.

    If the family head dies without sons, then by operation of common law, all the man's daughters would inherit the estate equally. If there were several daughters, they each would inherit an equal share, and the subdivision problem occurs. But even if the head of the family died leaving only one daughter, the daughter almost surely will marry --and at her death her heirs would be, presumably, the children she had with her husband. Which means that the "Bennet" patrimony ceases to exist, and becomes part of the Darcy or Bingley estates (for example). Nobody in the Bennet line would consider the prospect of this to be a good thing, and so the answer was to make provision to extend primogeniture to the entire male line, not just to the male sons of a given holder of a landed estate.
 
 
 
 

* Accomplishments / * Feminism in Jane Austen / * Marriage and the alternatives: the status of women / * Legalities of marriage / * Money and marriage / * "Settlements" / * Entail and inheritance / * Male Progeniture succession / * Legal aspects of entails / * Attitudes to the entail in Pride and Prejudice / * "Sister" and "Brother"; "Alliance" / * Return