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believed that this ideal has practically been attained in more than half the parishes of England and Wales, in the sense that all land and houses within them substantially belong in each to a single owner."—"Agrarian Tenures," Right Hon. G. Shaw-Lefevre, M.P. (1893).

WE have seen how great estates grew. The law of entail, coupled with the custom of primogeniture, has kept them together. The word "entail" is derived from the French "tailler," to cut. Entail means the cutting off of some heirs-at-law in favour of others. Some form of this existed in Greece and Rome; the nearest approach to modern entail was the practice under the later emperors of settling land on a series of heirs by means of a fideicommissa, or trust, and this law, in its latest form, was even more stringent than our own, for it restricted the right of mortgage. The old Common Law of England forbade what were called "perpetuities"—the tying up of property for a time longer than the lives of certain persons still living, and twenty-one years longer. The decision in the famous case of Taltarum turned on this; that decision, in accordance with the Common Law, allowed the heir, on attaining his majority, to disentail the estate if he desired. Since then, it has been impossible to tie up property of any kind for longer than twenty-one years beyond the lives of persons in existence. This is to give time for the latest-born heir to attain his majority.^[1]

Long before Taltarum, the Statute of Westminster II.—called the Statute De Donis Conditionalibus—of Edward I. had introduced the principle of entails, but there were many means of what was called "barring an entail," and entail as we know it dates from the seventeenth century.

In the early part of that century there was great freedom of sale and bequest, and it again became the boast of England that she had so many more substantial yeomen than were to be found in France. Cromwell's "New Model" armies were recruited chiefly from this class. But

1. About the year 1800, a Mr Thellusson tried to create an immense fortune by a will directing all his property to accumulate during the lives of his children, and great-grandchildren, and then to go to certain of his descendants. The property would then have amounted to £19,000,000. Although the existing law seemed to be enough, the Thellusson Act was passed, forbidding the accumulation of income for longer than twenty-one years after the death of a testator.