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Landed property was a key element of feudalism, and freed the owner for other tasks, such as government administration, military service, the practice of law, or religious practices. In later times, the dominant role of landed estates as a basis of public service faded.
It was not until the Norman conquest, when William the Conqueror declared himself to be the sole allodial owner of the entire realm, that land tenures changed drastically. [2] In William's kingdom the common exchange and sale of land became restricted and all landholders were made to provide a service to their lord ("no land without a lord"). [3]
These medieval land terms include the following: a burgage, a plot of land rented from a lord or king; a hide: the hide, from the Anglo-Saxon word meaning "family", was, in the early medieval period, a land-holding that was considered sufficient to support a family. This was equivalent to 60 to 120 acres depending on the quality of the land ...
Landed Gentry used to limit itself to owners of domains that could properly be called "stately" (i.e. more than 500 acres or 200 hectares). Now it has lowered the property qualification to 200 acres (0.81 km 2) for all British families whose pedigrees have been "notable" for three generations. Even so, almost half of the 5,000 families listed ...
The fees were often lands, land revenue or revenue-producing real property, typically known as fiefs or fiefdoms. [4] Over the ages and depending on the region a broad variety of customs did develop based on the same legal principle. [5] [6] The famous Magna Carta for instance was a legal contract based on the medieval system of land tenure.
In English common law, fee tail or entail is a form of trust, established by deed or settlement, that restricts the sale or inheritance of an estate in real property and prevents that property from being sold, devised by will, or otherwise alienated by the tenant-in-possession, and instead causes it to pass automatically, by operation of law, to an heir determined by the settlement deed.
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Today, estate maps can be used to investigate land usage and changes in river channels, as well as in historic garden conservation and other historical interest in English country houses. An estate map is often useful in determining the history of field systems , as it can be the earliest written evidence of the field system in use in a locality.