DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.22140#0223
THE THE OR Y OF ECONOMIC RENT.
207
■ever, that in theory the largest rights of the private owner of
land were very limited and qualified. The doctrine that no sub-
ject has the " absolutum et directum dominium " of land, that the
Crown was the paramount owrner, with the consequences of escheat
and forfeiture, positions asfirmed when the power of alienation was
scanty and indirect, are not the mere verbiage of lawyers, borrowed
from the formularies of mediaeval logic. Nor are they principles
intended to serve the police of government, by being a deterrent
to osfenders against the King's peace and dignity. They must, I
think, be taken to mean that when the principles of the common
law wyere asfirmed, the ownership of land was qualified and limited,
that the King's Council, and later on the King's Parliament,
•could alter and perhaps extinguish it, and that however unpopular
and dangerous it might be to strain the rights of the Crown in
Council or in Parliament, the existence of those rights could not
be gainsaid. Perhaps one of the most striking illustrations of acts
of Parliament enshrining this principle is to be seen in the disso-
lution of the monasteries, where the rights of founders to the
reversion of their grants, implied, if not expressed, in the charters
of foundation, and held to be real less than a century before, were
■entirely ignored in the concession to Henry VIII.
I have in an earlier lecture pointed out how entirely dissatisfied
the public was when the official estate of the Crown was diminished
by large or unwise alienations, and how important a part was
played in the politics of countries by the doctrine of resumptions,
even up to the middle of the eighteenth century, and the passage
of the Nullum Tempus Act in 1768. But the doctrine that
private ownership could, and should, be superseded, with or with-
out compensation in real or reputed public interests, could be
illustrated by a thousand examples in our social history. The
largest instance in comparatively modern times of such parlia-
mentary action is that contained in the first clause of the Statute
of Frauds, under which occupiers who had no documentary
evidence on which to support their interests, even though those
interests were freehold, wTere declared to be tenants at will. I
know that my position has been disputed by men who will look
at the seventeenth century and its action with the eyes of
the nineteenth, but I have discovered abundant proof in the
207
■ever, that in theory the largest rights of the private owner of
land were very limited and qualified. The doctrine that no sub-
ject has the " absolutum et directum dominium " of land, that the
Crown was the paramount owrner, with the consequences of escheat
and forfeiture, positions asfirmed when the power of alienation was
scanty and indirect, are not the mere verbiage of lawyers, borrowed
from the formularies of mediaeval logic. Nor are they principles
intended to serve the police of government, by being a deterrent
to osfenders against the King's peace and dignity. They must, I
think, be taken to mean that when the principles of the common
law wyere asfirmed, the ownership of land was qualified and limited,
that the King's Council, and later on the King's Parliament,
•could alter and perhaps extinguish it, and that however unpopular
and dangerous it might be to strain the rights of the Crown in
Council or in Parliament, the existence of those rights could not
be gainsaid. Perhaps one of the most striking illustrations of acts
of Parliament enshrining this principle is to be seen in the disso-
lution of the monasteries, where the rights of founders to the
reversion of their grants, implied, if not expressed, in the charters
of foundation, and held to be real less than a century before, were
■entirely ignored in the concession to Henry VIII.
I have in an earlier lecture pointed out how entirely dissatisfied
the public was when the official estate of the Crown was diminished
by large or unwise alienations, and how important a part was
played in the politics of countries by the doctrine of resumptions,
even up to the middle of the eighteenth century, and the passage
of the Nullum Tempus Act in 1768. But the doctrine that
private ownership could, and should, be superseded, with or with-
out compensation in real or reputed public interests, could be
illustrated by a thousand examples in our social history. The
largest instance in comparatively modern times of such parlia-
mentary action is that contained in the first clause of the Statute
of Frauds, under which occupiers who had no documentary
evidence on which to support their interests, even though those
interests were freehold, wTere declared to be tenants at will. I
know that my position has been disputed by men who will look
at the seventeenth century and its action with the eyes of
the nineteenth, but I have discovered abundant proof in the