Conquest

[L. Lat. eonquastus, conqut Mtio.l In feudal and Scotch law. Purchase or acquisition; any means of acquiring an estate out of the common course of inheritance. Craig de Jur, Feod. lib. 1, tit 10, § 18. Dalrymple, Feuds, 210. 1- Eames' Equity, 210. Ersk. Inst b. 3, tit. 8, § 14. 2 BL Com. 242. Id. 48. An estate itself, so purchased or acquired. Otherwise termed acquest. 1 JReever Mist. Sng. Law, 29. In Scotch law, property acquired by a man during marriage was cidled conqueH, in contradistinction to property which he succeeded to as heir to an ancestor, or executor to a person deceased. Ersk. Inst. b. 8, tit 8, § 43. According to Sir W. Blackstone, (who is followed by Mr. Stephen,) the term conqueror was originally applied to William I., and conquest to his mode of acquiring the crown of England, in the proper feudal sense of those terms, (as already explained, supra,) rather than with reference to the success of his arms. 2 BL Com. ub. sup. 1 Steph. Com. 355. This interpretation has been construed by some later writers into an unwillinflrness on the part of the commentator to acknowledge that the Englii^ or Saxons were actually conquered, in fthe modem and ordinary acceptation of the word; and some pains have been taken to prove this to have been the fact. 1 Chitt. BL Com. 48, note. Mr. Wharton, in his recently published Law Lexicon, speaks of " the attempt to give to the word conquest the meaning of acquisition in a feudal sense," as a '' mere idle ingenuity," and goes into a historical argument to show that " as applied to the Norman establishment/' it " means, and literally was warlike subjugation by force of superior military tactics." Wharton's Lex. voc. Tenure. But, whatever may be said of the historical fact, the etymology of the term itself, and its acknowledged use in feudal, Norman, and early English law, demonstrate its original meaning to have been acquisition, without reference to the exercise of superior military force. This appears strikingly from the signification of the Lat. conquirere, its ultimate root, — to get together by diligent search; the idea of subjugation having no place in its composition. From what cause, and by what process the term conquest came to lose its original, and acquire its modem sense, or, in other words, how and when it came to be disused in law, and exclusively adopted as a word in ordinary language, cannot now be easily explamed. The change seems to have taken place before the time of Edward I.; purchase (Fr.purchas) being the word employed by Britton to express the same idea. BritL cc. 83, 85, 86, 88. That conquereur continued to be used after the Norman invasion in its technical sense, appears from the passage already quoted under that word, from the Monasticon Anglicanum. In the Scotch law, on the other hand, no such change occurred, and the word has consequently come down to modem times in its full original sense as a term of jurisprudence. See supra. An '' heir of conquest" is said to be so called '< because his right of succession is confined to the subjects which the ancestor himself had acquired or conquished by some singular title." Ersk. Inst. b. Z, tit. 8, § 14.

See Heir of conquest.