In law, a moiety title is the ownership of part of a property. The word derives from

Old French Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intel ...

''moitié'', "half" (the word has the same meaning in modern French), from Latin ''medietas'' ("middle"), from ''medius''. In

English law English law is the common law legal system of England and Wales, comprising mainly criminal law and civil law, each branch having its own courts and procedures. Principal elements of English law Although the common law has, historically, b ...

, it relates to parsing aspects of ownership and liability in all forms of property. In the Australian system of land title, it typically applies to

maisonettes An apartment (American English), or flat (British English, Indian English, South African English), is a self-contained housing unit (a type of residential real estate) that occupies part of a building, generally on a single story. There are man ...

or attached

cottage A cottage, during Feudalism in England, England's feudal period, was the holding by a cottager (known as a cotter or ''bordar'') of a small house with enough garden to feed a family and in return for the cottage, the cottager had to provide ...

s whereby the owner owns a share of the total land on the title and leases a certain portion of the land back for themselves from the other owner(s). Some finance institutions do not offer loans for properties on moiety titles as security.

Real estate

Moiety is a Middle English word for one of two equal parts under the

feudal system Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was the combination of the legal, economic, military, cultural and political customs that flourished in medieval Europe between the 9th and 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a way of structu ...

. Thus on the death of a

feudal baron A feudal baron is a vassal holding a heritable fief called a ''barony'', comprising a specific portion of land, granted by an overlord in return for allegiance and service. Following the end of European feudalism, feudal baronies have largely been ...

lord of the manor Lord of the Manor is a title that, in Anglo-Saxon England, referred to the landholder of a rural estate. The lord enjoyed manorial rights (the rights to establish and occupy a residence, known as the manor house and demesne) as well as seig ...

without a male heir (the eldest of whom would inherit all his estates by the custom of male primogeniture) but with daughters as heiresses, a ''moiety'' of his

fief A fief (; la, feudum) was a central element in medieval contracts based on feudal law. It consisted of a form of property holding or other rights granted by an overlord to a vassal, who held it in fealty or "in fee" in return for a form ...

dom would generally pass to each daughter, to be held by her husband. This would involve the division of the barony, generally consisting of several manors, into two or more groups of manors, which division would presumably be effected by negotiation between the parties concerned. Such was the case in the barony of Newmarch, the ''

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