Tenures Abolition Act 1660

The Tenures Abolition Act 1660 (12 Cha. 2. c. 24), sometimes known as the Statute of Tenures, was an act of the Parliament of England which changed the nature of several types of feudal land tenure in England. The long title of the act was An Act takeing away the Court of Wards and Liveries, and Tenures in Capite, and by Knights-service, and Purveyance, and for settling a Revenue upon his Majesty in Lieu thereof.

Passed by the Convention Parliament in 1660, shortly after the English Restoration, the act replaced various types of military and religious service that tenants owed to the Crown with socage, and compensated the monarch with an annual fixed payment of £100,000 to be raised by means of a new tax on alcohol. (Frankalmoin, copyhold, and certain aspects of grand serjeanty were excluded.) It completed a process that had begun in 1610 during the reign of James I with the proposal of the Great Contract.

The act made constitutional gestures to reduce feudalism and removed the monarch's right to demand participation of certain subjects in the Army. By abolishing feudal obligations of those holding those feudal tenures other than by socage, such as by a knight's fee, it standardized most feudal tenancies of the aristocracy and gentry. The act converted more of their tenures into ones which demanded nil or negligible impositions to the Crown. While socage usually implied rent to be payable to the monarch, no rent was paid in the form of free and common socage as interpreted by the courts. Instead the act introduced and appointed collection offices and courts to administer a new form of taxation, called excise. Excise duty imposed taxation on the general public to provide an income for the monarch, its ministers and civil servants, to replace these relatively common feudal tenures among the landed classes.