Daily AncestorSeparate estate
A separate estate was property held for a married woman's own use, apart from her husband's control and his creditors, usually through a trust or marriage settlement.
Under coverture a wife's property normally passed to her husband's control. From the 1600s English courts of equity allowed a way around this: propertied families set up a trust before the marriage so that the bride's property was held as her separate estate. The trustees, not the husband, managed it.
Married Women's Property Acts of the later 1800s weakened coverture and let wives hold property more directly. Today separate property simply means property owned by one spouse and not the other.
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Daily Ancestor. "Separate estate." Dictionary of Old Record Words. https://dailyancestor.com/dictionary/legal-land/separate-estate. Last checked 2026-10-12.