Editing Fee tail (section)

==Purpose==
The fee tail allowed a patriarch to perpetuate his blood-line, family-name, honour and armorials<ref>Frequently in default of a son and heir to the tenant-in-possession, the entail required the next male heir, if via a female line, to adopt the surname and arms of the patriarch, see for example [[Mark Rolle]]</ref> in the persons of a series of powerful and wealthy male descendants. By keeping his estate intact in the hands of one heir alone, in an ideally indefinite and pre-ordained chain of succession, his own wealth, power and family honour would not be dissipated amongst several male lines, as became the case for example in Napoleonic France by operation of the [[Napoleonic Code]] which gave each child the legal right to inherit an equal share of the patrimony, where a formerly great landowning family could be reduced in a few generations to a series of small-holders or peasant farmers. It therefore approaches the true [[corporation]] which is a legal body or person which does not die and continues in existence and can hold wealth indefinitely. 

Indeed, as a form of trust, whilst the individual trustees may die, replacements are appointed and the trust itself continues, ideally indefinitely. In England almost seamless successions were made from patriarch to patriarch, the smoothness of which were often enhanced by baptising the eldest son and heir with his father's Christian name for several generations, for example the [[Baron FitzWarin|FitzWarin family]], all named Fulk. Such indefinite inalienable land-holdings were soon seen as restrictive on the optimum productive ability of land, which was often converted to deer-parks or pleasure grounds by the wealthy tenant-in-possession, which was damaging to the nation as a whole, and thus laws against perpetuities were enacted, which restricted entails to a maximum number of lives.{{citation needed|date=November 2016}}

An entail also had the effect of disallowing [[illegitimate child]]ren from inheriting. It created complications for many propertied families, especially from about the late 17th to the early 19th century, leaving many individuals wealthy in land but heavily in [[debt]], often due to annuities chargeable on the estate payable to the patriarch's widow and younger children, where the patriarch was swayed by sentiment not to establish a strict concentration of all his wealth in his heir leaving his other beloved relatives destitute. Frequently in such cases the generosity of the settlor left the entailed estate as an uneconomical enterprise, especially during times when the estate's fluctuating agricultural income had to provide for fixed sum annuities. Such impoverished tenants-in-possession were unable to realise in cash any part of their land or even to offer the property as security for a loan, to pay such annuities, unless sanctioned by private Act of Parliament  allowing such sale, which expensive and time-consuming mechanism was frequently resorted to. The ''beneficial owner'' (or tenant-in-possession) of the property in fact had only a [[life interest]] in it, albeit an absolute right to the income it generated, the ''legal owners'' being the trustees of the settlement, with the [[Remainder (law)|remainder]] passing intact to the next [[Inheritance|successor]] or [[heir]] in law; any purported bequest of the land by the tenant-in-possession was ineffective.{{citation needed|date=November 2016}}