Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: means universal.1 Perhaps this may help to explain its infre- quency in the later period, for where retained, its military character raised it above the villein heriot to the feudal relief, while this very military nature made it inapplicable to the larger commercial boroughs.2 Escheat This incident will be dealt with here in its accurate meaning — the lapse or reversion of an estate to the next lord on the failure of heirs, the term heir being used in the strict feudal sense.3 Borough charters and customals rarely mention the matter, but the Calendars of Inquisitions post mortem, the Hundred Rolls, records of transfer and descent of tenements, and sources of like nature contain abundant evidence to show that escheat was the lord's due; that a tenement which lacked an heir did not fall to the community, as was the custom in many German cities; and that his right to escheat was seldom disputed openly. They also show that the lord, if he were not a burgess, had to be watchful that he got his due. In dealing with the subject we shall treat in order: recognition of the lord's right; his claims where he fears that he is losing escheats; his actual loss; and his giving the right to take escheats to a person or to a community. At Ipswich the customal recognized the chief lord's right to escheat " when it is due by law," 4 and at Berwick, after its recon- quest by Edward III, many tenements escheated to the king, not it would seem on account of the townsmen's resistance, which could be called treason, but because death or expulsion of the holders had left their messuages tenantless.6 Burgages 1 Ballard, Domesday Boroughs, p. 49. 2 At Launceston there is casual reference to heriot. In the 16th century there are two tenements which owe " heriotes whan itt fallith " but they s...