LAND, in its most restricted legal signification, is confined to arable ground. In this:Awns° the term is used in formal pleadings.
By the statute of Wills (1 Viet. a 28), a devise of the lend of the testator is to be construed to include customary, copyhold, and lease hold estates to which the description will extend, as well as freehold estates, unless a contrary intention appear. In its more wide legal signification land extends also to meadow, pasture, woods, moors, waters, &c.; but in this wider sense the word generally used is lands : the term land or lands is taken in this Larger sense in conveyances and contracts.
In conveying the land, houses and other buildings erected thereon, aa well as mines, ke., under it, will peas with it, unless specially excepted. A grant of the venture of certain land is more restricted, and transfers merely a particular or limited right in such land, and the houses, timber, trees, mines, and other real things, which are con sidered as part or parcel of the inheritance, are not conveyed, but only corn, grass, underwood, &a, the produce of the land. Other limited or particular rights, as fishing, cutting turf, &c., may be granted, which confer no interest in the Land itself, or, as it is called, the realty, but only the benefit of such particular privileges. But a grant of the fruits and profits of the Land conveys also the land itself. Absolute ownership of land carries with it the right to the possession downwards of the minerals, waters, &c., and also upwartla, agreeably to the maxim,
" cujus est whim, ejter eat usque ad atrium." Ownership of land is expressed in the English law by the term real property, in contradistinction to personal property, which consists in money, goods, and other moveables.
Land is legally considered as enclosed from neighbouring land, though it lie in the middle of an open field, and may therefore be called a close; and the owner may subdivide this ideal close into as many ideal parcels as he pleases, and may, in legal proceedings, describe each of these parcels, however minute, as his close. An illegal entry into the land of another is therefore called, in law, breaking and entering his close, and the remedy is by the action of trespass, "Quare elauuum f regit." Land derelict, or left dry by the sudden receding of the sea, or of the water of a navigable river, belongs to the king by his prerogative; but land formed by alluvion, that is, by gradual imperceptible receding of any water, or by a gradual deposit on tho shore, accrues to the owner of the adjoining land.
The word lend is, by the interpretation clause of many statutes, as well public as private, made to include every species of real property and every denomination of right and interest therein.
(Doctor and Student; Co. Litt. • Comyn's ,Dig.)