An
overlord in the English
feudal system was a
lord of a manor who had
subinfeudated a particular
manor,
estate or
fee, to a
tenant. The tenant thenceforth owed to the overlord one of a variety of services, usually
military service or
serjeanty, depending on which form of
tenure (i.e. feudal tenancy contract) the estate was
held under. The highest overlord of all, or
paramount lord, was the
monarch, who due to his ancestor
William the Conqueror's personal conquest of the
Kingdom of England,
owned by inheritance from him all the land in England under
allodial title and had no superior overlord, "holding from God and his sword", although certain monarchs, notably King John (1199-1216) purported to grant the
Kingdom of England to the
Pope, who would thus have become overlord to English monarchs. A paramount lord may thus be seen to occupy the of the feudal
pyramid, or the root of the feudal tree, and such allodial title is also termed "radical title" (from Latin
radix, root), "ultimate title" and "final title". William the Conqueror immediately set about granting tenancies on his newly won lands, in accordance with feudal principles. The monarch's immediate tenants were the
tenants-in-chief, usually military magnates, who held the highest status in feudal society below the monarch. The tenants-in-chief usually held multiple
manors or other
estates from the monarch, often as
feudal barons (or "barons by tenure") who owed their royal overlord an enhanced and onerous form of military service, and subinfeudated most to tenants, generally their own
knights or military followers, keeping only a few in
demesne. This created a
mesne lord - tenant relationship. The knights in turn subinfeudated to their own tenants, creating a further subsidiary mesne lord - tenant relationship. Over the centuries for any single estate the process was in practice repeated numerous times. In early times following the
Norman Conquest of 1066 and the establishment of feudalism, land was usually transferred by subinfeudation, rarely by
alienation (i.e. sale), which latter in the case of tenants-in-chief required royal licence, and the holder of an estate at any particular time, in order to gain secure
tenure, and if challenged by another claimant, needed to prove "devolution of title" evidenced by legal deeds or
muniments back up the chain of subinfeudations to a holder whose title was beyond doubt, for example one who had received the estate as a grant by royal charter witnessed and sealed by substantial persons. Although
feudal land tenure in England was abolished by the
Tenures Abolition Act 1660, in modern English
conveyancing law the need to prove devolution of title persisted until recent times, due to a "legal fiction" (grounded in reality) that all land titles were held by the monarch's subjects as a result of a royal grant. Proving devolution of title is no longer necessary since the creation of the
land registry and the requirement to compulsorily register all land transactions on this governmental record, which registration provides a virtually unchallengeable and perfectly secure title of ownership.
