AL'IENA'TION (Lat. alienatio, the trans ferring of the possession of a thing to another, from alien us, another's, foreign). A legal term to describe the transfer of title to land, or of any interest therein. The modes in which alienation is effected are numerous, ranging in our legal system from the feoffment (q.v.), or livery of seisin (q.v.), of old English law, to the modern transfer by deed (q.v.) or will (q.v.). (See CONVEYANCE.) The right of alienation is one of the two great incidents of the ownership of prop erty, as now understood (the other being the right of inheritance) ; hut this is a distinctly modern notion, and ownership may well exist, and has often existed, without the right to alien ate the property owned. In English law the right of a freehold tenant to alienate his lands was long restricted by rules derived from the feudal system. Most of these restrictions were swept away by the third statute of West minster ( IS Edw. 1., 1290), known as the Statute Quia Emptores (q.v.), which declared that from thenceforth "it should be lawful to every free man to sell at his own pleasure his land4: and tenements, or part of them," and the few that re mained. by the statute of Military Tenures, passed in 1660 (12 Car. II., c. 24), which de prived the crown of the right to exact of its ten ants in capite the obnoxious fines on alienation.
But it was not until the thirty-second year of Henry VIII. (1527), that the right to alienate lands by will was finally conceded by Parliament. Now, however, the principle of the alienability of real property has become so firmly established, that we cannot conceive of absolute ownership `without that quality, and it has long been a rule of our law, that a condition attached to the grant of a fee, forbidding or restraining its alienation, i; void, as being repugnant to the estate granted. It should be said, however, that such conditions annexed to life estates and leaseholds are per feetly good and of frequent oecurrenee.
Alienation may be either voluntary or invol untary. The former eomprehends the usual modes of conveyance, ineluding transfers by will. The latter refers to the acquisition of title by judgment, execution, bankruptcy, and the other modes in which creditors have at different times and in different jurisdictions been permitted to satisfy their claims by legal process out of the real property of the debtor. See the authorities referred to under the title REAL PROPERTY.