CHAPTER Y. 



UNSATISFACTORY CONDITION OF THE LAND LAWS AFTER THE 

 ABOLITION OF FEUDALISM. 



The abolition of feudal tenures had not apparently altered 

 the power of alienation, yet it was by no means in the same 

 condition as it had been originally. The transfer of land, 

 comparatively simple when, as in Anglo-Saxon times, it had 

 been performed by the instrumentality of a public registry, 

 had gradually become more and more intricate. The pro- 

 cesses of seisin and enfeoffment, introduced under the system 

 of feudal tenures, had more or less involved it in obscurity, 

 but not to such a degree as the practice of secret conveyances, 

 which had crept in later still. The late Lord Cairns once 

 divided the history of real property in England into two 

 periods. The first, ending with the Commonwealth, was coin- 

 cident with the efforts of the State lawyers to make, by means 

 of legal fictions, " the severe and simple forms of feudal law 

 bend themselves to the advancing interests of commerce and 

 to the wants of the people." The last, hardly completed yet, 

 coincides with the efforts of the same experts to get rid of 

 those complex systems which had been once useful in lessening 

 the severity of feudal tenures.^ Thus from 1660 we read of 

 " constant attempts to establish land registers '' and other 

 means of simplifying transfer. In fact, we have now reached 

 a period when the question of title to lands and the variety of 

 estates upon which realty was held, were calculated to baffle 

 the wits of the astutest lawyers. " The mere epitome," says 

 Mr. Wren Hoskyus,^ " of all the various doctrines of legal and 



' Vide Speech of Sir Hugh Cairns in introducing the Titles to Landed 

 Estates Bill, 1859. 

 * Systems of Land Tenure, sub voc. "England." CoLden Club Essays. 



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