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Traditionally, a fee tail was created by words of grant in the deed: "to N., and the heirs of his body." The crucial difference between thse words of conveyance and the words that created a fee simple, "to N., and his heirs," is that the heirs "in tail" must be the children begotten by the landowner. It was also possible to have "fee tail male," which only sons could inherit, and "fee tail female," which only daughters could inherit; and "fee tail special," which had a further condition of inheritance, such as that only the owner's children by a particular spouse could inherit it. Land subject to these conditions was said to be entailed or in tail. The restrictions themselves were entailments.

Fee tail was formerly used during feudal times in order to create family settlements and make certain that the land stayed in the family. From the foregoing, attempting to mortgage land in fee tail would be risky and uncertain, since at the death of the owner the land passed by operation of law to children who had no obligation to the mortgage lender and whose interest was prior in right over the mortgage. Similarly, the largest estate an owner in fee tail could convey to someone else was a life estate pur autre vie, since the grantee's interest again terminates automatically when the original owner died. If all went as planned, it was impossible for the family to lose the land; which was the idea.

Things do not always go as planned, however. Owners of land in tail occasionally had "failure of issue" --- that is, they had no children surviving them at the time of their own deaths. In this situation, theoretically the entailed land went back up and through the family tree to descendants of former owners who were entitled to inherit; or to the last owner in fee simple. This situation was productive of litigation.

Fee tail was a device tuned to the needs of family settlements in feudal times. In more mercantile eras, however, fee tail became an anachronism. Eighteenth century lawyers devised elaborate transactions involving collaborative lawsuits and legal fictions whose goal was to remove the conditions of fee tail from land and enable its free conveyance in fee simple. Fee tail has been abolished by statuteA statute is a formal, written law of a country or state, written and enacted by its legislative authority, perhaps to then be ratified by the highest executive in the government, and finally published. It is sometimes informally referred to as "black let in EnglandEngland is the largest, the most populous, and the most densely populated of the four " Home Nations" which make up the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK). Occupying the south-eastern portion of the island of Great Britain, England. Most of the land in the United States of AmericaThe United States of America also referred to as the United States U. America ¹ or the States is a federal republic in central North America, stretching from the Atlantic in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west. It shares land borders with Canada in is allodialAllodial land, or allodium is literally land which has no lord. The holder of allodial land would owe no obligations, as owner of the land, to anyone else. Some sytems of law, for example English law, do not permit any land to be allodial, all land ultima. In LouisianaLouisiana is a southern state of the United States of America. It uses the U. postal abbreviation LA . The state is bordered to the west by the state of Texas, to the north by Arkansas, to the east by the state of Mississippi, and to the south by the Gulf the civil lawCivil law has at least three meanings. It may connote an entire legal system, or either of two different bodies of law within a legal system: # a legal system # the set of rules governing relations between persons (either humans or legal personalities suc doctrine of legitimeIn civil and Roman law, the legitime or forced share of a decedent's estate is that portion of the estate from which he cannot disinherit his children, or his parents, without sufficient legal cause. At common law, there is no legitime; the Statute of Wil already restricts owners from willing property out of their family when they die with children.

Fee tail appears in the plotPlot in literature, theater, movies According to Aristotle's Poetics a plot in literature is "the arrangement of incidents" that (ideally) each follow plausibly from the other. The plot is like the chalk outline that guides the painter's brush. An example of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and in other novels by nineteenth century writers of fiction.