But then a daring evasion by a leading conveyancer, known as the Lease and Release, received judicial sanction; and commenced a successful career of more than 200 years. The Lease and Release, attributed to Serjeant Moore, was based on the fact that the Statute of Inrolments did not apply to terms of years.

The thegn who deems an unjust doom is to lose his thegnship. It is a principle which can be widely applied

First in point of time and interest comes the mortgage debt, i.e. the claim for the return of money lent on the security of some tangible object. Such claims are among the earliest fruits of a commercial civilization, and are nearly always affected the same way, viz. by the deposit or pledge of the security with the creditor, to be redeemed or returned on the payment of the debt.

It was not long before English Law took the one step needed to produce the modern scheme of legal remedies. And when it did, it used the Writ of Trespass as the starting point.

But we remember that it was just precisely in the reign of Richard II that the Peasants' War, following upon the changes wrought by the visitations of the Great Plague, virtually destroyed serfdom as a personal status.

Is it surprising that modern English land law should resemble a chaos rather than a system?

The process of specialization tends, almost inevitably, to narrow the sources from which the rules of any science are drawn; and English law is no exception from this rule.