Subject_1 ALIMENT. Subject_2 Of the act 1491, cap. 25. anent alimenting of Heirs. Subject_3 Import of the Act:
It is ordained, that where any lands happen to fall in ward to the King, or any baron of the realm, spiritual or temporal, or lands given in conjunct fee or liferent, as well as to burgh as to land, that the sheriff of the shire or bailies shall take surety of the person or persons, that gets or has such wards, that they shall not waste or destroy their biggings, orchards, woods, stanks, parks, meadows, or dovecots, but that they hold them in such kind as they are in the time that they receive the same; they taking their reasonable sustentation, or using, in needful things, without destruction or wasting thereof. “And an reasonable living to be given to the sustentation of the air, after the quantitie of the heritage, gif the said air has na blanche ferme, nor feu ferme land, to susteine him on, alsweil of the ward lands, that fallis to our Soveraine Lordis hands, as onie uther barronne, spiritual or temporal.”
Scots Acts, v. 1. p. 158.
Sandiland v. his Mother
Date: 27 January 1700 Case No. No 4.
A fiar has no longer title to aliment, upon the act of Parliament, after he has sold the lands.
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Sandiland of Cowston pursues his mother for an aliment, as liferenting his whole estate. Alleged, The lands came by myself, which I disponed to your father in our contract: I educated you a writer; but you deserting that, I bought you an ensign's place in the army, where you were likewise turned out, and married unworthily, and have sold the fee of the lands worth 2000 merks per annum, whereof I only liferent the half; and so an aliment being only due to an apparent heir, or a fiar you are neither, but are denuded; and what rests to me is no more than a competency.—Answered, He can be in no worse case than an heir left with an overburdened estate by adjudications, and other diligences and rights, whether legal or conventional; and though they have renounced to be heirs, yet they have been allowed to crave an aliment off liferenters, 16th July 1667, Hamilton contra Symington, No 2. supra; ergo a pari a fiar who has sold his heritage for his father's debt may pursue his mother for an aliment, though he be major.——The Lords found this defence relevant to assoilzie from an aliment, that he was denuded of the fee of the whole by an irredeemable disposition made by himself; and granted diligence to the defender to prove it, seeing he was no more fiar.
