Primogeniture - oldest or first-born child.
Used in wills and estate common law to refer to a dated and antique inheritance law which usually required that a deceased person's property go to his oldest living son to the total exclusion of the spouse or female descendants, sometimes in the event of intestacy.
The system is an old relic of ancient Greek Law. Sparta implemented this system as a response to too many men, not enough land. It continued on through history to become a vestige of common law.
Commenting in the British public affairs journal, Quarterly Review, 1848, on the comparison between England and France, then experimenting with an elimination of primogeniture, a lawyer of the epoch wrote:
"Notwithstanding the attempts which have been made, under various guises, to inoculate us with hostility to the law of primogeniture, the great bulk of our community remain firm to the old and true faith. And no wonder:—not only can we distinctly trace much of our own prosperity and the stability of our institutions to the principle of primogeniture, but we have only to cast our eyes across the Channel to perceive the vast importance, both politically and socially, of maintaining it inviolate. To the abandonment of it France principally owes her never-ending troubles; and as she perseveres in her present course, in the minute subdivision of her soil, so will her future be more and more overshadowed."