— Also termed jus albanagii; jus albinatus.
“Under the French rule of law, known as the droit d’aubaine…, the whole property of an alien dying in France without leaving children born in that country escheated to the crown. The royal right was not universally exacted, and at a very early period special exceptions were introduced in favour of certain classes. Thus Louis XI exempted merchants of Brabant, Flanders, Holland, and Zealand from the operation of the law, and a similar privilege was extended by Henri II to merchants of the Hanse towns, and from Scotland.” 1 R.H. Inglis Palgrave, Palgrave’s Dictionary of Political Economy 68 (Henry Higgs ed., 2d ed. 1925).
“In France by the fourteenth century it was accepted that a stranger might acquire and possess but not inherit or transmit by will or on intestacy. In 1386 the French king assumed the seigneurial droit d’aubaine or right to inherit. In treaties in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the right was frequently renounced. Louis XVI in 1787 abolished the right as against subjects of Great Britain without reciprocity. The constituent Assembly abolished the right in 1790 and it was commonly abolished elsewhere in the early nineteenth century.” David M. Walker, The Oxford Companion to Law 378 (1980).
