Feudal land tenure in the context of "Property law"

Feudalism as practised in the Kingdom of England during the medieval period was a system of political, military, and socio-economic organisation based on land tenure. Designed to consolidate power and direct the wealth of the land to the king while providing military service to his causes, feudal society was structured around hierarchical relationships involving land ownership and obligations. These landholdings were known as fiefs, fiefdoms, or fees.

Knight-service was a form of feudal land tenure under which a knight held a fief or estate of land termed a knight's fee (fee being synonymous with fief) from an overlord conditional on him as a tenant performing military service for his overlord.

In medieval and early modern Europe, a tenant-in-chief (or vassal-in-chief) was a person who held his lands under various forms of feudal land tenure directly from the king or territorial prince to whom he did homage, as opposed to holding them from another nobleman or senior member of the clergy. The tenure was one which denoted great honour, but also carried heavy responsibilities. The tenants-in-chief were originally responsible for providing knights and soldiers for the king's feudal army.

Livery of seisin (/ˈsiːzɪn/) is an archaic legal conveyancing ceremony, formerly practised in feudal England and in other countries following English common law, used to convey holdings in property. The term livery is closely related to if not synonymous with delivery used in some jurisdictions in contract law or the related law of deeds. The oldest forms of common law provided that a valid conveyance of a feudal tenure in land required physical transfer by the transferor to the transferee in the presence of witnesses of a piece of the ground itself, in the literal sense of a hand-to-hand passing of an amount of soil, a twig, key to a building on that land, or other token.

A tenement (from the Latin tenere to hold), in law, is anything that is held, rather than owned. This usage is a holdover from feudalism, which still forms the basis of property law in many common law jurisdictions, in which the monarch alone owned the allodial title to all the land within his kingdom.

Under feudalism, land itself was never privately "owned" but rather was "held" by a tenant (from Latin teneo "to hold") as a fee, being merely a legal right over land known in modern law as an estate in land. This was held from a superior overlord, (a mesne lord), or from the crown itself in which case the holder was termed a tenant-in-chief, upon some manner of service under one of a variety of feudal land tenures. The thing held is called a tenement, the holder is called a tenant, the manner of his holding is called a tenure, and the superior is called the landlord, or lord of the fee. These forms are still preserved in law, even though feudalism itself is extinct, because all real estate law has developed from them over centuries.

Frank almoin, frankalmoign or frankalmoigne (/ˈfræŋkælmɔɪn, fræŋˈkælmɔɪn, ˌfræŋkælˈmɔɪn/) was one of the feudal land tenures in feudal England whereby an ecclesiastical body held land free of military service such as knight service or other secular or religious service (but sometimes in return for the religious service of saying prayers and masses for the soul of the grantor). Secular service not due, and in the 12th and 13th centuries, jurisdiction over land so held belonged to the ecclesiastical courts and was thus immune from royal jurisdiction.

In English law, frankalmoign(e) was also known as "tenure in free alms". Gifts to religious institutions in free alms were defined first as gifts to God, then to the patron saint of the religious house and finally to those religious serving God in the specific house.