Digby is visible on every page, and I have derived great assistance from the study of Mr Pollock's little book, as exhaustive in matter as it is admirable in exposition. But I have always endeavoured to go straight to the original authorities, and I trust that when Parliament is again at liberty to devote itself to the consideration of English matters, and when the whole question of the Reform of the English land laws is under consideration, this little work will be found of some use, as containing a short but accurate account of the history of those laws. T. E. S. 1, ESSEX COURT, Temple, INTRODUCTION. THE history of the English Land Law is a history of intentions of Parliament frustrated by the ingenuity of lawyers, of national legislation perverted and thwarted in the interests of a class. The conservative tendencies of the English people have clung to the forms of a by-gone day, though they have served but to fetter the modern spirit. The object of the old technicalities has been defeated by fictions of the most cumbrous and artificial character, which in turn have lingered on in the sanctity of their antiquity long after their original purpose has been answered, while their continued existence has only given rise to expense and uncertainty of title. In the law of England, relics of the feudal ages, when the land was held by tenures whose main object was in turbulent times to provide for its safe culture and for the defence of the nation, have survived, long after the reason for their existence was dead. In this "Herculaneum of feudalism," as it has been called, the legal explorer must still resort to the early centuries of our history to find the original justification of institutions and rules which have no longer any but a historical excuse for their survival. The legislation of this century has patched in to the edifice which the posthumous ambition of landowners has employed the ingenuity of lawyers to erect, and which the evasiveness of lawyers has prevented Parliaments, however earnest in the work, from destroying, modern rules and a modern organization. The Lord Protector Cromwell's words are still true that the "Law of England is a tortuous and ungodly jumble." A law which has developed by fiction and by accident, rather |