Page:William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (3rd ed, 1768, vol II).djvu/122

 110 end. This etate is a fee, becaue by poibility it may endure for ever in a man and his heirs; yet as that duration depends upon the concurrence of collateral circumtances, which qualify and debae the purity of the donation, it is therefore a qualified or bae fee.

2. fee, at the common law, was a fee retrained to ome particular heirs, excluive of others: "donatio tricta et coarctata ; icut certis haeredibus, quibudam a ucceione excluis:" as, to the heirs of a man's body, by which only his lineal decendants were admitted, in excluion of collateral heirs; or, to the heirs male of his body, in excluion both of collaterals, and lineal females alo. It was called a conditional fee, by reaon of the condition expreed or implied in the donation of it, that if the donee died without uch particular heirs, the land hould revert to the donor. For this was a condition annexed by law to all grants whatoever; that on failure of the heirs pecified in the grant, the grant hould be at an end, and the land return to it's antient proprietor. Such conditional fees were trictly agreeable to the nature of feuds, when they firt ceaed to be mere etates for life, and were not yet arrived to be abolute etates in fee-imple. And we find trong traces of thee limited, conditional fees, which could not be alienated from the lineage of the firt purchaor, in our earliet Saxon laws. , with regard to the condition annexed to thee fees by the common law, our ancetors held, that uch a gift (to a man and the heirs of his body) was a gift upon condition, that it hould revert to the donor, if the donee had no heirs of his body; but, if he had, it hould then remain to the donee. They therefore called it a fee-imple, on condition that he had iue. Now we mut oberve, that, when any condition is performed, it is thenceforth intirely gone; and the thing, to which it was before Rh