Landholding in Tudor England

A tenant in possession of land, after having done homage for it to his lord, was said to be ‘seized of the land’.  Because land was not actually owned, except by the Crown, the tenant could not convey it by means of his will. When the tenant died, his heir had to be ‘re-enfeoffed’ that is, the land had to be re-granted, and a new oath sworn between the heir and his overlord. In return for this, the heir had to pay a sum known as a ‘relief’. This was generally a year’s profit, or, if he could not take full possession because some-one else had a life interest in the land, half a year’s profit. A life-interest, usually granted to a widow, or perhaps to a brother or other dependent, allowed the individual to either live on the land or receive its annual value for the term of his or her life, before the next heir could take possession. The new lord could not enter into his land (take seizin) until he had sworn his oath.

If the heir were under-age, he could not be seized of the land, and his overlord could appoint a guardian to manage the land and the heir until he (or, more rarely, she) reached majority. For a female heir, the lord had the right to arrange her marriage. If there were no heir, the land ‘escheated’ to the overlord – that is, it returned to the overlord who could grant it elsewhere. There were other feudal ‘incidents’ that the lord could levy from his tenants – payment for the knighting of his eldest son, the marriage of his eldest daughter, or the payment of his ransom if he were captured in battle.

As time passed, a system grew up to avoid payment of these feudal incidents. The most popular was the ‘enfeoffment to uses’. Before his death, the landholder, known as the feoffor, would convey his land to ‘feoffees’ who would be contracted to use it for specific purposes, to be specified in the feoffor’s will.  Examples might be to maintain a widow, daughters or younger sons, or, most frequently, to reconvey it to the heir. Enfeoffment to use was particularly popular as a way to benefit religious establishments that could not directly hold land. The beneficiary, that is the person whom the feoffor wanted to have the benefit of the land, was the ‘cestui qui use’. 

By enfeoffing his land the feoffor was no longer seized of it at his death, and so the payment of the inheritance relief could not be demanded by the overlord. It was common to have numerous feoffees who held as joint tenants (that is, they all held all of the land, rather than tenants-in-common who each held a proportion of the land). The benefit of having numerous feoffees meant that if any of them died, the land was still held by the remaining feoffees.

There were, however, problems in law. Under English common law, only those ‘seized’ of the land were recognised as having an interest in it which the law would protect. This meant that a dishonest feoffee might effectively steal the land. Recognition of this problem led to development of the principles of equity, and the Court of Chancery, which recognised the rights of cestui que use began to take control of these cases, rather than the Court of Common Law.

While all this may seem rather arcane, the concrete result was that the Crown was losing huge amounts of money, as it was no longer receiving the inheritance reliefs. This, together with the withering of the requirement to do military service, without any commensurate replacement with a realistic monetary sum, meant that Crown revenues had shrunk. Whilst on the face of it, the modern reader might not perceive that as a problem, in the mediaeval and Tudor period, the Crown was supposed to fund all government expenditure except in time of war or other emergencies when additional taxes might be granted by Parliament. With falling feudal revenues and rampant inflation, it was becoming harder for Kings to pay for government.

Edward IV had attempted to prevent enfeoffment within the Duchy of Lancaster, but this was an unpopular move and was reversed by Richard III.

Henry VII instituted a vigorous hunt for every opportunity possible to claim his feudal rights, including levying a relief for the knighting of Prince Arthur, after the boy’s death. Escheat, rather than being to the overlord, was taken by the Crown, as was the right to control an underage heir, or to control the marriage of an heiress. Through these and other fiscal measures (which contributed to the dislike of Henry by many nobles, although he was popular with a populace that avoided constant demands for taxation) Henry VII raised Crown revenues by over 40%.