Fee
a reward, compensation, or return for services rendered. It is especially applied to the money paid to professional men for their services; as, a lawyer's fees, marriage fees, etc.
In feudal law, fee applied to all lands and tenements which were held by any acknowledgment of superiority to a higher lord; land held by the benefit of another, and in name whereof the grantee owed services or paid rent, or both, to a superior lord.
In American and English law, a freehold estate of inheritance, descendable to heirs general, and liable to alienation at the pleasure of the proprietor. (1) A tenant in fee-simple (also called feeabsolute) is one who has lands, tenements, or hereditaments, to hold to him and his heirs forever; generally absolutely and simply; without mentioning what heirs, but referring that to his own pleasure or to the disposition of the law.
This is property in its highest degree. (2) Limited fees, or such estates of inheritance as are clogged with conditions, are of two sorts: qualified, or base fees; and fees conditional, so called at the common law; and afterward fees-tail, in conof the statute de donis (concerning gifts). (a) A base, or qualified, fee is such a one as has a qualification subjoined thereto, and which must be determined whenever the qualification annexed to it is at an end. (b) A conditional fee, at the common law, was a fee restrained to some particular heirs, exclusive of others; as to the heirs of a man's body, by which only his lineal descendants were admitted in exclusion of collateral heirs; or to the heirs male of his body, in exclusion both of collaterals, and lineal females also.