What if they didn't tell the heir about the entail?

The estate is entailed upon the male line! But the current master of the estate only has daughters! When he dies, the estate will be inherited by some distant cousin nobody has ever met! And the heir would be perfectly entitled to throw the widow and daughters out of their home! What do???

This is a common trope in fiction - well-known examples include Pride and Prejudice and Downton Abbey - as well as, I'm sure, being something that happened from time to time in real life.

But I wonder, what would happen if they just...didn't tell the heir that he's the heir?

It seems like it would be reasonably easy to conceal that information in an era before computerization and mass communication - it's just sitting in a file in some office somewhere, no one can look it up on a database or anything. It probably wouldn't even be too difficult to destroy the records if needed. (Maybe the lawyer whose office they're in is bribable?)

In Downton they have the additional complication that Lord Grantham is an earl with a seat in the House of Lords so his empty seat would be conspicuous, but Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice has no such distinction (and doesn't even share the Bennet surname!)  If they just didn't tell people the estate was entailed, people probably wouldn't even notice if they just kept living there after Mr. Bennet died.

Even if people did know the estate was entailed, what if they just told the neighbours that the heir was kind enough to let them continue living there?  Matthew Crawley legit would have let the Crawleys continue living at Downton, and it's perfectly plausible to stranger that Mr. Collins, being a man of the cloth, would have done the same. Or they could tell their neighbours that their lawyer discovered that the heir had died, thereby breaking the entail.

Or, if the heir did know he was the heir, what if they just didn't tell him when the master of the estate died? Under normal circumstances (in the absence of the Darcy-de Bourgh connection), Mr. Collins would have no way of knowing anything that happened at Longbourn. 
It also occurs to me that an imposter absentee heir could be brought in.  Get some guy that one of the daughters is enthusiastic about marrying, tell everyone that he's the heir, and ultimately the children of the daughter who marries him will inherit the estate.  If the actual heir turns up and the imposter heir has already done the work of ingratiating himself to the neighbours, it should be fairly straightforward to accuse the actual heir of being the imposter - it's not like they have photo ID!

Was there some kind of central authority enforcing these entails and communicating to these distant heirs the fact that they were the heir?  Because if there wasn't, it seems like they would be one lawyer bribe away from it not being a problem.