Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from On the Nature and Evidence of Title to Realty: A Historical Sketch, Being the Yorke Prize Essay (1898), University of Cambridge
This essay makes no pretensions to satisfy the requirements of such a history, being at best but a rough sketch as a first approximation to the truth. The essay was written in 1898 for the Yorke Prize in the University of Cambridge, and, fearing that no good thing could come out of a prize essay, the author had intended to recast the whole before publication. However, before anything could be done, he had to undertake the duties of a professor in New Zealand, and whatever the advantages of living in a land that is "loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart" it cannot be said that facility for writing the history of English law is one of them. In fact, after much delay, the idea of reconstruction has been abandoned for the present, and the essay is published in its original form.
The value of some historical knowledge to the ordinary legal practitioner is more widely recognised to-day than formerly, and the change is reflected in modern text-books of the better class. However it is not solely for its bearing on actual practice that a conveyancer should know something of the history of title. Perhaps a better reason for the study is that the knowledge so acquired will give a human interest to an otherwise dull and lifeless profession. The law on the subject of title is a purely human structure whose foundations were laid centuries ago, and in its different parts we can see traces of the ideas and ways of life of the men of all the intervening ages. We begin with a number of semi-barbarous tribes whose needs are few and laws correspondingly simple, and watch a slow development until we see before us the highly complex system that suits the requirements of the modern man.
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This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
