Abstract
The first part of this chapter tracks the decline of the strict settlement, the device used by wealthy landed families to tie the hands of each generation so that the patrimony would be preserved. It lasted in something like its historic shape until the Settled Land Act 1882 reconciled the continuing desire to preserve family wealth; on the one hand, with the market freedom of individual ownership; on the other, by investing all limited owners with a set of management powers that included the power of sale. The second part of the chapter burrows beneath the rules of substantive law, which the commissioners saw as obstacles, to consider the workaday process of conveyancing. Individualism manifested itself here through the increasing use of contractual terms to shil obligations away from sellers. In due course the general law caught up with that, and was at least partly recast to accord with what had become usual practice.