The Origins of ‘Alien Status’ in the English Common Law

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn his 2001 monograph on Aliens in Medieval Law: The Origins of Modern Citizenship, Dr Keechang Kim suggested that there was no evidence before the late fourteenth century that birth beyond the sea made a person an alien. This article discusses a series of cases heard from the mid-thirteenth century onwards in which tenants pleaded the claimant's birth overseas by way of bar to hereditary claims to land and in which it seems to have been treated as a bar in itself, though one to which the king might grant special exemption. This seems to have remained the position until legislation of 1351 (triggered by doubts about the eligibility of two sons of Edward III born overseas to succeed to the throne) which not only confirmed their eligibility but also made the first general extension of the right to inherit to children born overseas to parents in the king's allegiance.