-0 



6 History of the English La7idecl Interest. 



of their profits from wardsliip, marriage, or relief. The Statute 

 of Uses in the twenty-seventh year of Henry VIII. c. 10 was the 

 natural result of such widespread spoliation. The reader has 

 only to peruse the preamble of this Act to learn how wide- 

 spread was the demand for redress. Lands which by Common 

 Law could only be transferred by livery of seisin, had been 

 conveyed by fraudulent feoffments, fines, recoveries, and other 

 assurances, also by wills and testaments, whereby heirs had 

 been unjustly disinherited, lords had lost their wards, mar- 

 riages, reliefs, heriots, escheats, aids, and other profits incident 

 on feudalism, married men their tenancies by the curtesy, 

 widows their dowers, and many perjuries had been committed. 

 The statute converted equitable into legal estates, by making 

 the feoffees to uses a mere conduit pipe for transferring the 

 estate from them to the cesitid que use — in other words, it 

 transformed the use into possession, so that such lands ceased 

 to be devisable by will. Even after the enactment of this 

 statute it was found that lands could still be transferred by 

 secret transaction without formality or lasting document, a 

 state of affairs Avhich necessitated the further statute of 27 

 Henry VIII. c. 16, whereby no lands, etc., could pass, alter, 

 or change from one to another by reason only of any bargain 

 and sale thereof except by written and sealed indenture enrolled 

 either in one of the Record Courts at "Westminster or laid be- 

 fore certain public authorities within the county or counties 

 in which the lands, etc, were situate. The intention of this 

 Act was to abolish Uses altogether ; but the ingenuity of man 

 soon found various methods whereby the statute could be 

 evaded ; and the doctrine of Uses, scotched, not killed by recent 

 legislation, revived under the denomination of Trusts, as well 

 as in other ways.^ 



By statute 32 Hen. VIII. c. 1, usually called the Statute of 

 Wills, it was enacted that every person having manors, lands, 

 etc., shall have power to give, dispose, will, and devise by will 

 in writing or otherwise, by act executed in his lifetime, all his 



* See Cruise, Digest, Tit. xi.,ch iii.; Barton, Law of Real Property ; 

 and Blackstone, Comm. Craig and Macfarlane, If/'.st. of England, Bk. VI., 

 ch. iii., furnisli all the prominent allusions in the above. 



