ESTATE, in English law, has many meanings, the common element of which is property. A man’s entire belongings constitute his estate: so much of it as consists of land and certain other interests associated therewith is his Real Estate; the rest is his Personal Estate. The legal incidents which distinguish the one from the other may be ascertained by reference to these headings. The word is more particularly applied to interests in land, and in popular and general use an estate means the land itself. The strict technical meaning of an estate is an interest in lands, and this conception lies at the root of the English theory of property inland. “The first thing that the student has to do,” says Mr Joshua Williams (Law of Peal Property, p. 17), “is to get rid of the idea of absolute ownership. Such an idea is quite unknown to the English law. No man is in law the absolute owner of lands. He can only hold an estate in them.” Thus he may hold an estate in fee simple, which is the largest estate a man can hold in English law, and comes close to the idea of absolute ownership, repudiated by Mr Williams; or he may hold an estate tail, in which the land is limited to himself and the heirs of his body; or he may hold an estate for life, which lasts just so long as the life in question lasts. In all these cases the notion of tenure, of holding by a tenant from a lord, prevails. The last lord of all from whom all land is ultimately held is the king. Persons holding directly from the king and granting to others are the king’s tenants in capite, and are the mesne lords of their tenants. Even in the case of a fee simple estate, which a man can alienate as he pleases during his life or by his will, and which goes to his heirs if he does not alienate it, the reversionary ...

ESTATES OF THE REALM. The proper meaning of this phrase, as applied to the English constitution, has been the subject of some dispute. Of its original meaning there can be no doubt. It indicated a division of society into classes or orders, and in England these orders were the nobles, the clergy, and the commons. The same kind of division is found in Continental states. In England there are, as Professor Stubbs has pointed out (Constitutional History of England, vol. ii. p. 189), indications of a tendency on the part of other orders of men to assume the character of estates. For example, the king used to treat with the merchants for grants of money to be raised by taxation from the general body of merchants throughout the country. In this sense the lawyers may be said to have been at one time an incipient estate of the realm. The organization of Parliament checked all such tendencies, and the technical “three estates” were those we have mentioned. In the lapse of time the original meaning of the phrase has been gradually lost sight of. The clergy have ceased to be a separate order so far as the political organization of the country is concerned. The “three estates” came to be identified with the three great divisions of the legislative authority,—kings, lords, and commons. The phrase seems to have beeu used in this sense in the reign of Henry IV., and Hallam says it was a current doctrine among the popular lawyers of the 17th century. According to another view, the three estates of the realm were “the lords spiritual, the lords temporal, and the commons.” (See p. 314 of the present volume.)