Fee
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
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 consequence of 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.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The everyday sense Collier's gave in 1921 -- "money paid to professional men for their services" -- is unchanged, and fee simple is still the standard form of land ownership in England and the United States. The feudal scaffolding around it has largely been dismantled: England's Law of Property Act 1925 cut the recognised legal estates in land down to the fee simple absolute in possession and the term of years, and the Trusts of Land and Appointment of Trustees Act 1996 stopped anyone creating a new entailed interest of the kind Collier's describes under the statute De Donis. Scotland went further, abolishing feudal tenure outright by an Act of 2000 that took effect in 2004, so land is no longer held of any superior lord. Most American states had already abolished or converted the fee tail, leaving it a curiosity of law school rather than a live conveyancing category.
Written for this edition, 2026.