UNDERSTANDING LAND LAW Third Edition CP Cavendish Publishing Limited London • Sydney UNDERSTANDING LAND LAW Third Edition Bryn Perrins MA, PhD, Solicitor Senior Lecturer in Law University of Birmingham CP Cavendish Publishing Limited London • Sydney Third edition first published in Great Britain 2000 by Cavendish Publishing Limited, The Glass House, Wharton Street, London WC1X 9PX, United Kingdom Telephone: +44 (0) 20 7278 8000 Facsimile: +44 (0) 20 7278 8080 E-mail:
[email protected] Visit our Home Page on http://www.cavendishpublishing.com © Perrins, B First edition Second edition Third edition 2000 1995 1997 2000 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE, UK, without the permission in writing of the publisher. Perrins, Bryn Understanding land law – 3rd ed 1 Real property – England 2 Real property – Wales I Title 346.4'2'043 ISBN 1 85941 538 5 Printed and bound in Great Britain Preface Albert Einstein claimed that his complex theory of relativity, reducing universal chaos to the elegant simplicity of E=mc2, was in fact constructed from a series of elementary concepts, each of which was completely familiar to him before he reached the age of five. Believe it if you will, but, according to Lord Macnaghten, not even Albert Einstein could understand an English mortgage of real estate without a little help from his friends (Samuel v Jarrah Timber and Wood Paving Corporation Ltd [1904] AC 323, p 326). Most students seem to find property law more difficult than other subjects. They find its concepts not only unfamiliar, but also abstruse and even arcane. They are, understandably, disconcerted to discover that the first principle of land law is that the landowner does not, in fact, own the land. The explanation of this apparent paradox leaves confusion worse confounded: the landowner actually owns a bundle of rights called a fee simple estate … and a fee simple estate is apparently an inheritable estate which can never be inherited! No wonder they find difficulty in relating realty to reality. A closely associated problem is that of language. Property lawyers, like all specialists, have their own jargon, designed to define and explain their ideas with absolute precision. It is struggle enough for the novice to try to cope with the curious concepts of property, without having them explained in a seemingly foreign language. Privity of estate has nothing to do with hedging; and socage, even less to do with football hooligans or lager louts. There is really nothing for it, except to learn the lingo. But property jargon is doubly deceitful, in that some expressions have ordinary, everyday meanings which differ significantl