Common recovery

Obsolete proceedings in English land law

A common recovery was a legal proceeding in England that enabled lawyers to convert an entailed estate (a form of land ownership also called a fee tail) into absolute ownership, fee simple. This was accomplished through the use of a series of collusive legal procedures, some parts of which were fictional and others unenforceable (and therefore null). It was devised and perfected by lawyers in the second half of the fifteenth century. A 1472 case, known as Taltarum's Case, increased its popularity.

Entails were originally designed to keep ownership of land within a family. Thanks to the effects of the statute De donis conditionalibus, the intent of the entail could not be broken. This meant that land in fee tail could not simply be sold, transferred, or mortgaged as, whatever the current owner did with it, ownership would automatically pass on their death to those specified by the entail. to be their vouchee. In later centuries the common vouchee was often the court crier and could appear under a fictitious name.

In England and Wales, common recoveries were abolished in 1833; instead a disentailing deed (a successor to that creating the tenant in præcipe) was enrolled in Chancery. Like Fines (or Final Concords), common recoveries were proceedings based upon a legal fiction in order to produce a genuine change, but without truly adverse parties. In this they differ from the use of a legal fiction in ejectment cases, where there was a genuine dispute, but one that required a legal fiction to make it justiciable.