Language In Clarissa, Evelina And Pride And Prejudice

placed on the estate. Those restrictions usually would
not allow any part of the estate to be sold during his
lifetime. Secondly, the settlement empowered the life
tenant to charge the estate with a jointure, or annual
income, for a wife if she should survive her husband,
with a provision for younger children. Once an eldest
male resettled his estate, his father and he could do
nothing with the estate; it had rigid conditions of
succession called, "in tail," which eventually became
"entail." The line of inheritors was legally bound to
continue to settle or resettle entailed estates. Fee
simple, or "tail," referred to an estate with no
conditions place on the line of succession (Habbakuk 2).
The land was entailed, charged with a strict and
unchangeable line of succession. Originally, Spring
tells us, an entail was a gift of land to a younger child
at majority or marriage (Law, Land and Family 28). A
daughter could receive an entail, as common law was not
originally gender specific. Eventually, in order to keep
estates in the hands of male successors, the effort to
exclude women from inheriting land succeeded. To
preserve large estates through patrilineal means, entails
became perpetual. According to Spring, "The entail had
thus come to embody the concept of land descending