Quia Emptores

Quia Emptores

Long title	A Statute of our Lord The King, concerning the Selling and Buying of Land.
Citation	18 Edw 1 c 1
Other legislation
Repealed by	Charities Act 1960
Status: Amended
Revised text of statute as amended

Quia Emptores is a statute passed in the reign of Edward I of England in 1290 that prevented tenants from alienating their lands to others by subinfeudation, instead requiring all tenants who wished to alienate their land to do so by substitution. The statute, along with its companion statute of Quo Warranto, was intended to remedy land ownership disputes and consequent financial difficulties that had resulted from the decline of the traditional feudal system during the High Middle Ages.

The statute takes its name Quia Emptores from the first two words of the statute in its original medieval Latin, and can be translated as "because the buyers".

By effectively ending the practice of subinfeudation, Quia Emptores hastened the end of feudalism in England, which had already been on the decline for quite some time. Direct feudal obligations were increasingly being replaced by cash rents and outright sales of land which gave rise to the practice of livery and maintenance or bastard feudalism, the retention and control by the nobility of land, money, soldiers and servants via direct salaries, land sales and rent payments. This would later develop into one of the underlying causes of the Wars of the Roses, the English civil wars fought by the House of York and House of Lancaster for control of the English Crown from 1455 to 1485. By the mid-fifteenth century the major nobility, particularly the Houses of York and Lancaster, were able to assemble vast estates, considerable sums of money and large private armies on retainer through post-Quia Emptores land management practices and direct sales of land. The two noble Houses thus grew more powerful than the Crown itself, with the consequent wars between them for control of the realm.