COMMON RECOVERY. At common law, a .mode of alienation, or process for conveying land, through the medium of a fictitious snit in the superior courts of law-. There is no reason to doubt the tradition, to which Blackstone has given the weight of his authority. that this method of conveyance was "invented by the eccle siastics to elude the statutes of mortmain." Be ing incapable of taking land by feoffment or deed, there was nothing to prevent them from bringing a suit for the reeove•y of the land of a eollusive donor, alleging that the title was in them, and if he, the•enpon, made default, the judgment of the court in their favor operated to vest the title conclusively in them. In form it was a judicial determination that they were the owners of the land as against the defendant. In effect it was a device for enabling the defendant to transfer his interest in the land to them. Blackstone says, further, that after the inven tion of common recoveries they "were encour aged by the finesse of the courts of law in 12 Edward IV. in order to put an end to all fet tered inheritances, and bar not only estates tail, but also all remainders and reversions expectant thereon." Tlds refers to the famous struggle between the great landowners, seeking to tie up their estates in their families by entailing them on their issue and making them inalienable, and the lawyers and law courts, who aimed, in the interests of piddle policy, to defeat the attempt. The statute De Donis Conditionalibus (known also as the Statute of Westminster II.), enacted by Parliament in 13 Edward I. (1285), provided that. lands given to a man and the heirs of his body, known as conditional gifts, should not be alienable so as to defeat the inheritance of the issue therein nor so as to cut off the interests of those to whom the estate was to go upon the fail ure of such issue.
Several devices were tried to avoid the statute and break entails, but none of them was entirely successful until the year mentioned by Black stone, 12 Edward IV. (1473), when, in the famous `Taltarum's Case,' a common recovery wad employed for the pin-pose. This proved to
be entirely successful in barring the claims of the heir upon whom the lands were entailed, and, by a subsequent development of the action, all remainders and reversions dependent upon the fee tail were also cut off.
The process was too difficult and technical to be set forth at length here, but it may be briefly described as a collusive and fictitious suit, insti tuted by the person to whom the fee was to be conveyed (called the demandant) against the one who desired to liar the entail and convey the land (known as the tenant ), by suing out a writ called a prweipe quod rcddat, in which the de mandant alleged that the tenant had no legal title to the land and that he. the demandant, had been turned out of it. The tenant defended the suit, but at a subsequent stage of the proeeed hugs—which were in part. conducted in open court—disappeared and had judgment rendered against him by default, and the lands were thus 'reeovered' by the demandant. This recovery, being a supposed adjudication of the rights of the parties, bound all persons and vested a free and absolute fee simple in the reeoveror. The process was known as 'suffering a common recov ery.' A similar but less difficult and somewhat less efficacious proceeding was known as 'levying a fine.' The fine was by statute, in the reign of 'Henry 'ITT.. substituted for the more cumbrous and expensive common recovery as a awaits of barring entails, and both have now been super seded by simpler and more modern conveyances. Recoveries were occasionally employed in the early history of some of the United States, but are now everywhere obsolete, and in some States expressly abolished by statute. See PINE: COMMON ASSURANCE: CONVEYANCE: TITLE. The common recovery is fully described by Black stone, Commentaries on the Lairs of Enghtod, bk. ii., chap. 21. See also Pignt. Treatise of Common Recoveries, Their Vat lire and Use (Dub lin, 1792) : Digby, introduction to the his tory of the Lair of Rea( Property (5th ed.. Ox ford, Eng., 1900) ; Leake. Elementary Digest of the Law of Property in Land (London. 1874).