Downton Abbey -- Property Law can be fun
In my tweeter feed I came upon “3 retirement lessons from ‘Downton Abbey" http://blogs.marketwatch.com/encore/2013/03/04/3-retirement-lessons-from-downton-abbey/I was a little disappointed in it because I expected a discourse on how and why Matthew, a middle class lawyer from Manchester, is the heir to the estate and would, eventually, be the 6th Earl of Grantham.
The facts
So back in Series 1, we learned that Cora, an American heiress, had married Robert, a titled but likely impoverished British aristocrat. Cora came with a huge dowry (this was, after all, back in the 1800’s in England). We also learned that the property is “entailed” and that Robert’s father had, somehow, managed to tie up the dowry funds so that they pass along with the title and the estate only to male heirs.The law
Back in the day, an entail or fee tail was a pretty common way to make certain that the land stayed "in the family". A property held in fee tail cannot be sold, given by Will or in any way passed to others except to the heir. So it was impossible for the family to lose the land. However it left many individuals wealthy in land but still heavily in debt. It also meant that if there was a “failure of issue”, the property could pass to a far distant relative."Good facts make bad law" but great TV
As is the case in Downton Abbey where there is, of course, a huge dearth of males on the family tree; Robert and Cora only have daughters. So with the deaths of a couple of male relations on the Titanic, a third cousin, Matthew Crawley, is destined to be the next Earl and owner of Downton Abbey. Fortunately, he’s a handsome young man so marrying the eldest daughter to him is not a terribly disagreeable way to keep it all in the family (as opposed to poor Elizabeth’s predicament in Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice). Cue years of troubled on again off again romance between the two.Want to totally control your heirs? Do it right, ask a lawyer for help.
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