Product Code Database
A lord paramount is a term of art in feudal law describing an overlord who holds his own fief from no superior lord. It thus describes a person who holds allodial title, owing no socage or feudal obligations such as knight-service. This was distinguished from a mesne lord who held his own fief from a superior.
Nonetheless, the term does appear in some other contexts. The marquess of Exeter holds the title of hereditary Lord Paramount of Peterborough. The peculiar way in which the feudal baron holding the Lordship of Bowland oversaw himselfsome of his estates notionally owing service to othershas also been described in terms of paramouncy and obligation. (The situation was rendered still more academic when it was subsumed first into the Earldom of Lancaster in 1311 and then into the Duchy of Lancaster as an estate held by the British Crown in 1351, which gave rise to the title of "Lord King of Bowland".). The title is also sometimes broadly applied to any overlord.
The concept continued to be invoked in other common law jurisdictions, including New York in the 1852 case of De Peyster v. Michael6 NY 467, quoted in 28 Am. Jur. 2nd, Estates, §§ 3 & 4. and Australia in the 1992 case of Mabo v Queensland. In the latter case, the High Court affirmed that Elizabeth II was lord paramount over all formal land tenure in Australia while simultaneously establishing the concept of a native title over areas not explicitly legally held by others and continuously occupied by aboriginal people. per Gerard Brennan para.51., pp. 5–7, 402.
|
|
