In English law, feoffment was a transfer of land or property that gave the new holder the right to sell it as well as the right to pass it on to his heirs as an inheritance. It was total relinquishment and transfer of all rights of ownership of an
estate in land from one individual to another. In feudal England a feoffment could only be made of a
fee (or "fief"), which is an
estate in land, that is to say an ownership of rights over land, rather than ownership of the land itself, the only true owner of which was the monarch under his
allodial title. Enfeoffment could be made of fees of various
feudal tenures, such as
fee-tail or
fee-simple. The term
feoffment derives from a conflation of
fee with
off (meaning
away), i.e. it expresses the concept of alienation of the
fee, in the sense of a complete
giving away of the ownership. The medieval English law of property was based on the concept of transferring ownership by delivery: easy to do with a horse, but impossible with land, i.e. with immoveable property. Thus the
conveyance (i.e. delivery) of land to the new tenant, known as the
delivery of seisin, was generally effected on the land itself in a symbolic ceremony termed "feoffment with [de]livery of seisin." In the ceremony, the parties would go to the land with witnesses "and the transferor would then hand to the transferee a lump of soil or a twig from a tree – all the while intoning the appropriate words of grant, together with the magical words 'and his heirs' if the interest transferred was to be a potentially infinite one." A written deed (traditionally a document impressed with the signature and seal of the transferor and the signatures of the witnesses), confirming the symbolic delivery, was customary—and became mandatory after 1677. Gradually the delivery of this deed to the new owner replaced the symbolic act of delivering an object representing the land, such as a piece of the soil. The feoffee (transferee) was henceforth said to hold his property "of" or "from" the feoffor, in return for a specified service (money payments were not used until much later). What service was given depended on the exact form of
feudal land tenure involved. Thus, for every parcel of land, during the
feudal era there existed a historical unbroken chain of feoffees, in the form of
overlords, ultimately springing from feoffments made by
William the Conqueror himself in 1066 as the highest overlord of all. This pattern of land-holding was the natural product of William the Conqueror claiming an allodial title to all the land of England following the
Norman Conquest of 1066, and parcelling it out as large
fees in the form of
feudal baronies to his followers, who then in turn subinfeudated (i.e. sub-divided) the lands comprising their baronies into
manors to be held from them by their own followers and knights (in return, originally, for military service). When the feoffee
sub-enfeoffed his holding, for example when he created a new
manor, he would become overlord to the person so enfeoffed, and a
mesne lord (i.e. intermediate lord) within the longer historical chain of title. In modern English land law, the theory of such long historical chains of title still exists for every holding in
fee simple, although for practical purposes it is not necessary at the time of conveyance to recite the descent of the fee from its creation. By the early 20th century it had become traditional to show the chain of former owners for a minimum period of 15 years only, as occupation for 12 years now barred all prior claims. And the establishment, in 1925, of a national
Land Registry (a voluntary public record of land ownership) obviated the need for recitals of descent for registered parcels. Subinfeudation of estates in fee simple was abolished in England in 1290 with the statute . Thereafter, land could be alienated only by
substitution, in which the seller gave up all interest in the land and the buyer owed any feudal duties to the overlord. ==Asia==