Recoveries were already some two hundred years old in his time, and, to judge from the tone of the passage, people must even then have held them in derision. But they were to last full two hundred years more; for not till 1833 did they vanish from the scene. Recoveries were methods of disentailing an estate by means of a complicated series of fictions. They arose in this way:--Before 1285, when land was given to a man and the heirs of his body, the judges ruled that, the moment a son was born, the father held the estate as a simple freehold, which he could sell or make away with very much as he chose. The great landowners were ill-content at this; they meant their tenants to enjoy their estates only as long as they rendered useful service in return, and if issue failed a man, they thought the land should revert to his lord on his death. Hence in that year an act procured by their influence, called _De Donis Conditionalibus_, or the Statute of Westminster the Second (13 Ed. I., c. 1), created the Estate Tail (_i.e._ _Taillé_, or restricted). It provided that land given to a man and his heirs as above, reverted to the original donor on failure of the donee's issue. Blackstone waxes eloquent over the evils that ensued. Children declined obedience to a father who could not disinherit; farmers lost their leases, which had no force against the heir; and creditors were defrauded of their debts, which constituted no charge on the land, nay, treasons were fostered, insomuch as the traitor's interest lapsing at his death, nothing was left for the king to seize. Yet it was not till the reign of Edward IV. that a device was found to evade the Statute. _Taltarum's Case_ was decided in 1472. It is loosely said that this established the validity of recoveries, but they were in use some time before, and Sir Frederick Pollock will have it that it was the oddity of the name which made a landmark of the decision. A Recovery was a sort of friendly or fictitious action, whereby the estate was adjudged to an outsider, whose claim, though baseless--if one did not look beyond the four corners of the action--was acquiesced in by the nominal defendant. The mediæval lawyer was usually a priest, and he had found those entails grievous obstacles in the way of the Church's aggrandisement. Perhaps, too, as the country grew in wealth, so rigid a law of settlement bore hard on an ever-waxing commercial class. To repeal the Statute seemed impossible, but the great landowners, while proof against force and impermeable to argument, were not hard to outwit. A legal complication passed their understanding; and this one, however brazen, had the patronage of many powerful interests. Thus, and thus only, may the fact of their acquiescence be explained.