No. 4.] BURAL LAW. 169 



if a tenant or a vendor claims the right to remove articles 

 as fixtures, he should always be careful to make the removal 

 before his tenancy expires, or while he is in possession ; 

 otherwise, he may lose the right of removal altogether. 

 Another suggestion is, that, in view of the difficult and com- 

 plicated nature of the law of fixtures, great care should be 

 exercised in connection with the transfer of property, by 

 specifying in the written instrument just what the parties 

 have agreed to convey, and in some cases also by enumer- 

 ating the articles not conveyed. 



Purchase and Sale of Farms. 



The original methods of transferring title to land in Eng- 

 land, from which country we derive the great body of our 

 real estate law, grew out of the practices of the feudal sys- 

 tem. Under the feudal laws, all the lands in the country 

 were vested in the sovereign, who parcelled them out to the 

 great men of the nation, who were bound to render the king 

 military service. These great lords in turn parcelled out 

 their respective lands to vassals, who held them, and the 

 land so held was called a feud, njiefov a fee. Originally 

 these vassals took only temporary ownership, and the land 

 reverted to the lord paramount upon the vassals' death ; 

 but gradually there grew up the right of transmission of the 

 title from a vassal to his son or heir, and thus estates of 

 inheritance arose, so that the modern use of the word fee 

 implies absolute ownership. Under the feudal system, the 

 lord took his vassal upon the land, and, by the symbolic 

 method of handing him a twig or a tuft of soil, invested him 

 with possession. He had no other title to it except that 

 given him by the solemn act of the lord paramount, which 

 created a contract between the two parties, — that of pro- 

 tection on the one side and service on the other. 



In the progress of civilization, written instruments of con- 

 veyance or deeds supplanted the original method of convey- 

 ance, "livery of seisin," as it was called; but the practice 

 oi recording deeds, which is universal in the United States, 

 did not obtain in P^ngland until a comparatively recent time. 

 In this country the recording of deeds, though universal in 

 all the States and Territories, presents no uniformity as to 



