Further Land Legislation Examined. 253 



deed, to the tenant to the prcecipe against whom the action was 

 to be brought. Then a second person, called the demandant, 

 issued the writ against the tenant to the praecipe. The latter 

 forthwith called upon the tenant in tail to warrant his title. 

 The tenant in tail, who in the legal phraseology of the age 

 was said to have been vouched to warranty, performed the 

 same process on another. This last vouchee was smuggled 

 out of court by the demandant under the pretence of a private 

 interview. Not returning, the court had no other resource but 

 to pronounce judgment in favour of the demandant. 



That the judges were favourably disposed to the proceedings 

 may be inferred from the circumstance that later on the court 

 crier often acted as the vouchee. Such recoveries then were 

 governed by the strict rules of common law, and tenants in 

 dower, courtesy, for life only, and in tail after possibility of issue 

 extinct, as well as those who had made leases for life, or whose 

 wives were entitled to dower, often cut off the reversioner's or 

 remainder man's rights by selling their lands and allowing the 

 purchasers to recover by this fiction. Although the judgment 

 of the suit known as Taltarum in the reign of Edward IV. 

 was adverse to the champions of this ingenious device, on the 

 ground that in this particular case it was a recovery improperly 

 suffered, it was for ever after recognised as admitting that a 

 like recovery properly suffered would bar the issue in tail,^ 



As in the custom just explained, so now in that of Uses, the 

 clever brains of the divine were the source of this cunnino: 

 invention. At the close of Edward III.'s reign shrewd ecclesi- 

 astics took to driving that proverbial "coach and four" through 

 the obnoxious statutes of Mortmain, by obtaining grants of 

 land, not to their religious houses, but to the use ^ of their reli- 

 gious houses; and later on, Yorkist and Lancastrian land mag- 

 nates went into battle with lighter hearts, because by imitation 



^ Eeeves, Hist, of Eng. Law, iii. 331, 



^ A Use was a trust or confidence reposed in a man for the holding of 

 the land. He to whom the use had been entrusted was intended to have 

 the profits and the tenant of the land (technically termed the terre 

 tenant) was expected to make an estate as the holder of the use (techni- 

 cally termed cestui que use) should direct. 



