Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/159

Rh the long series of excellent minor reforms on which the King had set his heart, unless he first consented to the solemn promulgation of the legality of entails. It is impossible to look at the famous Statute of Westminster the Second with a trained eye, and not to see the inconsistency of its first chapter (the so-called Statute De Donis) with all its subsequent forty-nine clauses. The latter are the work of skilled officials, guided by a King of great ability and honesty, and aim at the minute reform of the machinery of an antiquated system. The former is a bold and defiant assertion of conservative prejudice, veiled by the King's advisers in specious language, which barely conceals the chagrin of the legislator in whose name it is produced. Broadly speaking, it authorised the creation of estates which should descend in unbroken succession down the line of inheritance prescribed in the original gift, so long as that line should last. The successive occupants of the land might pose as the owners, might draw the rents, and even cut down the timber; but instantly on the death of each, his heir would take possession of an unencumbered interest, unfettered by any liability for the debts of his ancestor, or by any disposition made by him during his lifetime. Even an attainder for treason or felony was not to work a forfeiture of the estate; for, immediately upon the attainder, the culprit became dead in law, if not in fact, and his heir succeeded, in defiance both of the Crown and the creditors of the deceased. As, by the rule of primogeniture, the great bulk of such inheritances would go to the eldest sons, another obvious result (in the days in which wills of land were not recognised) would be, to starve the younger members of a landowner's family for the benefit of the eldest. By a refinement of perversity, the estate, on failure of the issue of the first acquirer, was to revert, not to his collaterals or his creditors, but to the original donor, who thus reaped an unexpected windfall from the misfortunes of the purchaser's family. The whole chapter is a monument of colossal family pride and feudal arrogance. Left to its natural results, it would have converted the English aristocracy into a close corporation of stupid and unprogressive grandees, filled with the pride of pedigree, starving