How did Sirius get the Grimmauld Place? Common Law Ref.

[a_svirn]

No: HPFGUIDX 131743


> 
> bboyminn:
> 
> I'm sure I posted this before, but I haven't been able to track 
down
> the link, so here it is again - English Common Law of Inheritance -
> 
> "Addressing the Duke and Inheriting his Loot"
> http://it.uwp.edu/lansdowne/als.html
> <snip> 


a_svirn:

You did indeed post it before. However, it is only a site, not a 
legal handbook. (It also worth mentioning that the information the 
site in question imparts concerns the regency period – that is more 
than a hundred years after the Statute of Secrecy). Besides, there 
is great difference between common law, entails, patents etc. 
Entails, for instance, have nothing to do whatsoever with common 
law; you yourself quote that they carry the "force of civil law" 
which is quite another cup of tea. Another site (encyclopedia.com 
says that, "The subsequent development of the entail reflects a 
continuing struggle between the effort to preserve large estates and 
the need for free alienation". The struggle resulted in number of 
legal procedures that enable entail-holders to break an entail and 
alienate the property. For example on 
http://www.redrice.com/listowel/CHAP3.html: "This had been made 
possible, by an agreement between my father and
grandfather while I was still a child, to break the entail on the 
family property, whereby the
family fortune had passed for several generations, undivided, since 
the time of the first
Richard Hare, the merchant from Cork, with the family honours 
passing from father to eldest
son.  The entail was broken by my father and grandfather to benefit 
the family by reducing tax
on my father's death".

Moreover, if by "strict guidelines" that rule "Black estate" you 
mean entail, with the death of Sirius they are no longer applied: 
for instance on http://www.genfiles.com/legal/entail.htm: "Apart 
from taking legal action to break an entail (discussed below), or a 
conditional conveyance whose condition was not met, the land would 
remain in fee tail until the original recipient had no living 
issue.  It's worth mentioning that in this context "dies without 
issue" has a counterintuitive meaning.  If a man dies with living 
children, it would seem that he died leaving issue.  However, in 
this context he is said to have died without issue when his last 
living descendant dies (perhaps several generations after his own 
death).  At that moment, the land reverts, in fee simple, to the 
original conveyor.  Since the original conveyor was certainly dead, 
his own heir as defined in the original conveyance (or by law 
otherwise) takes possession".  
This means in effect, that with the last Black dead, the ownership 
of the estate is no longer defined by the original "civil contract" 
or entail and must be established by whatever laws that are 
customary in the WW.

As for widows and younger children rights see for instance:  
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Pointe/3829/amite_thesis_intro.htm
l
"Common law, the basis of both English and American law, (1) was the 
result of centuries of amalgamation and precedent. Most of the laws 
relating to property were made by men who, having achieved their 
wealth, were interested in maintaining their investments." 
<snip> "If the husband predeceased the wife, anything she might 
later bequeath came only from that portion that her husband had 
willed her. While property laws dating to the middle ages stipulated 
that a widow and her children had rights to their share of the 
husband's personal property, by the mid-fourteenth century it became 
possible for a man to leave nothing at all to his children or widow--
even property which she had brought into the marriage. The old rule 
of "reasonable parts" that automatically gave the widow one-third 
and the children two-thirds of an estate applied only when the 
husband died intestate. (3)"