Aug. 25. 1855.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



149 



sesscd a greater power of alienation than a tenant 

 who held by descent ; but even he could not en- 

 tirely disinherit the heir of his own body, and 

 could only disappoint his collateral heirs. A gift 

 to his daughter on her marriage, or a gift to reli- 

 gious uses, was allowed as against the heir of the 

 body. Another far different mode of alienation, 

 wiiich at this time began to be used, was that of 

 subinfeudation : the lands were given to th& 

 grantee and his heirs to hold of the grantor and j 

 his heirs, at certain rents or services ; the benefit ■ 

 therefore of these rents and services would de- 

 scend to the heir of the grantor in lieu of the • 

 land. This no doubt eased the way to the fact I 

 that the power of the ancestor to oust all heirs 

 soon became absolute ; for we find Bracton laying j 

 down, in the reign of Henry III., that " Nihil 

 acquirit ex donatione facta antecessor!, quia cum 

 donatorio non est feoffatus." In this reign farther 

 power was acquired, for it appears that a tenant 

 could, if there was an expectant heir, alienate not 

 only as against him, but against his lord. To 

 remedy this, which acted very disadvantageously 

 to the landlords, the famous statute " De Donis 

 Conditionalibus" was passed in the reign of Edw.I. 

 This statute was eluded, and the claim of the issue 

 defeated by the process of fines ; but this was 

 again taken away in Edw. III.'s time, and restored 

 by statutes of Richard III. and Henry VII. Hal- 

 lam (Const. Hist., vol. i. pp. 14. 17.) and Reeves 

 (Hist, Eng. Law, vol. iv. pp. 135. 138.) show that 

 the motives assigned to Henry VII. by Blackstone, 

 in the sentence quoted by your correspondent, had 

 no existence ; and that it was a judicial construc- 

 tion of the statute that gave it the effect of bar- 

 ring the claim of the issue, and which construction 

 was confirmed by statute of Henry VIII. There 

 was also passed in the reign of Edw. I. the famous 

 statute of " Quia Emptores," by which it was 

 made lawful for every freeman to sell his lands ; 

 so that the feoffee should hold them of the chief 

 lord of the fee by the same services and customs 

 as his feoffor held them before. 



The alienation of lands by will was not allowed 

 until many years after this time, except in the 

 city of London, and one or two other places. In 

 time, however, a method of devising lands by will 

 was adopted by means of conveyances to other 

 parties to such uses as the person conveying 

 might appoint by his will. This was restrained 

 by the " Statute of Uses," passed in the reign of 

 Henry VIII. ; but five years afterwards, power 

 was expressly given to devise lands (32 & 34 

 Hen. VilL). These, however, only had a partial 

 action ; and it was not till the restoration of 

 Charles II., when feudal tenures were abolished, 

 that the right of devising lands by will became 

 complete. (See Williams on the Law of Real Pro- 

 perty.') 



The passage which your correspondent gives 



No. 304.] 



from Blackstone, as to devising lands by will being 

 allowed by the Saxons, does not appear in the 

 three different editions which I possess. 



Russell Gole. 



PRIESTS HIDING-PLACES. 



(Vol. xi., p. 437. ; Vo\ xii., p. 14.) 



Dr. Johnson's Visit to Heale House. — 'A priest's 

 hiding-bole may, by a turn in fortune's wheel, 

 become a king's hiding-hole ; and perhaps Heale 

 House, near Amesbury in Wilts, served both pur- 

 poses. It is certain that for several days it formed 

 the retreat of Charles II. after the battle of Wor- 

 cester; and it was from the transactions at the 

 supper-table there, when the fugitive prince ar- 

 rived in disguise (as related by himself), that Sir 

 Walter Scott has gathered the scenes which he 

 has transferred to Woodstock. 



But there is another circumstance investing the 

 spot with interest, viz. a conversation held in the 

 same parlour, some one hundred and thirty years 

 after, between Dr. Johnson and his hosts, at which 

 Boswell unfortunately was not present, but which 

 is worth an effort of the imagination to recall. It 

 was in 1783 that the Doctor, " broken" as he says 

 "with disease, and without the alleviation of 

 familiar friendship or domestic society," deter- 

 mined to try the effect of the air of the Wiltshire 

 Downs and the society of his friend William 

 Bowles, Esq., of Heale ; whose companionship he 

 ever valued " for the exemplary religious order 

 which Mr. Bowles maintained in his family." An 

 instance, by the way (as in the case of his other 

 fi-iend Mr. Wyndham of Norfolk), how easily he 

 could overlook the Whiggery of the man he loved ; 

 for the name of this Mr. Bowles is always found 

 in conjunction with those of Radnor, Shelburne, 

 Charles James Fox, Abingdon, Wyndham (of 

 Wilts), Awdry, and others of their party, who, in 

 the county meetings held from time to time in 

 Devizes, denounced the extravagance of the public 

 expenditure, the American war, and the increas- 

 ing pension list. Moreover, Mr. Bowles had mar- 

 ried a descendant of Oliver Cromwell, viz. Dinah, 

 the fourth daughter of Sir Thomas Frankland, 

 and highly valued himself upon this connexion 

 with the Protector. Who can doubt that, on the 

 Doctor's arrival, the conversation ran upon the 

 great civil war and the eventful story of the hiding- 

 hole ; of Charles' wiling away one of the tedious 

 days of his captivity by escaping to the neigh- 

 bouring plain, and counting the stones in Stone- 

 henge ; and, lastly, on the career of the great man 

 who was the ancestor of the lady of the house ? 

 That such was really the case may be legitimately 

 inferred from the fact that, just at this point in his 

 biography, Boswell says : " I shall here insert a 

 few particulars with which I have been favoured 



