Willis: Anglo-American Law 
109 
of clergy, was liable to forfeiture and attainder as well as 
capital punishment, and this feature of the criminal law was 
not remedied at all until 1813 and then not as to prisoners 
convicted of treason or murder. 
Real Property. The law of real property, developed in the 
Archaic Period and made more strict and certain in the Strict 
Period, finally became almost unbearable. The burdens of 
tenure in chivalry were severely felt, and the plight of the 
king’s wards was especially unfortunate. We have already 
explained how equity undertook to modify the law of real 
property by the introduction of uses and new forms of con- 
veyance and how the attempt by the common law lawyers to 
defeat this undertaking by the Statute of Uses was defeated 
by their own holding that the statute did not apply to a use 
on a use. This was the opportunity for the Court of Chan- 
cery, and within one hundred years after the passage of the 
Statute of Uses it was enforcing uses as extensively as it had 
before the statute, only now the uses enforced by equity were 
known as trusts to distinguish them from the first use exe- 
cuted by the statute. A great many other reforms of real 
property law were introduced in this period, most of them 
by means of legislation. One of the most important things 
done in the first year of the restoration of Charles II was the 
destruction of feudal land law by a statute passed in 1660 
abolishing all military tenures except grand sergeantry, and 
making the king’s revenue thereafter come from taxation. 
By this reform the only incidents of tenure left were rents, 
reliefs, and escheats, and if there was no rent there was no 
relief. Homage had become obsolete. Aids had been abol- 
ished. Fines went with quia emptores. Wardship and mar- 
riage never applied to socage tenure. The Court of Wards 
and Liveries was also abolished. The celebrated Statute 
of Frauds, passed in 1677, had provisions requiring all wills 
of land to be in writing, signed by the testator and witnessed 
by witnesses in his presence; conveyances of freeholds by 
delivery of seisin to be evidenced by a document, signed by the 
feoff er or an agent authorized in writing; and all leases to 
be in writing except those not exceeding three years. In the 
time of Queen Anne registries of title were established in 
Yorkshire and Middlesex, not of actual ownership but of 
transactions affecting title. Something of this sort seemed 
