Common recovery

This meant that land in fee tail could not simply be sold, transferred, or mortgaged as, whatever the current owner did with it, ownership would automatically pass on their death to those specified by the entail.

[2] Social and economic conditions meant that landowners were more concerned with being able to freely sell, convey or mortgage their land.

C could either be a trustee of the estate (if the aim was simply to break the entail) or the purchaser (if the land was being sold).

Indeed, it was this theoretical right which enabled the judges to make the judgment against B final (rather than common), as it meant that the interests of all the parties, including the heirs to the entail, were protected.

Being held in fee simple, the land could now be freely sold or transferred or a new settlement made, thus defeating De donis conditionalibus.

Unless there was a whole manor or an advowson involved, the description of the land (which may be exaggerated) merely stated the improvements: number of houses etc.

[1] In the earliest recoveries, different people took the role of D. Some of the defaults may have occurred naturally, e.g. by death or incapacity of the warrantor to attend court.

In this context common means "belonging to the community", i.e. everyone who wanted to bring an entail to an end could pay Dennis Guyer four pence[4] to be their vouchee.

In England and Wales, common recoveries were abolished in 1833; instead a disentailing deed (a successor to that creating the tenant in præcipe) was enrolled in Chancery.

[1] Since 1926, entails can no longer exist as legal estates, only as equitable interests, and enrollment has become unnecessary.

[5] Like Fines (or Final Concords), common recoveries were proceedings based upon a legal fiction in order to produce a genuine change, but without truly adverse parties.

[1] Legal documentation of the common recovery of a manor in East Sussex in 1633 is held at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham.