This book began as a study of the common recovery, a feigned action in the Court of Common Pleas. A holder of land in fee tail could transfer land free of the entail by means of a common recovery. The aim of the study was threefold: to discover when lawyers invented the device, to trace subsequent refinements and elaborations, which made the device at once more powerful and more efficient, and to determine the kinds of transactions in which landholders used the device in its first decades of existence. Research on that initial project revealed that lawyers invented the device in the 1440s and that by 1502 they had developed the common recovery into pretty much its final form. By 1502 common recoveries were used in over 200 transactions annually. By reconstructing the contexts of the recoveries gleaned from the plea rolls between 1440 and 1502 one could determine the kinds of transactions in which landholders used the common recovery.

That initial study grew backwards into the present book. Because the common recovery was a device for barring fee tails, I became curious about other methods lawyers had developed for conveying land free of entails. But then it seemed inadequate to speak of various devices for the barring of entails without speaking of fee tails themselves. Where did they come from? When and how did grants in fee tail come to be perpetual? And under what circumstances and for what purposes did landholders put their land in fee tail?