ENGLISII AND AMERICAN LAW. The common law of property has departed widely from the conceptions of time civil law, owing mainly to the independent development of the law of land un der the influence of the feudal system. That sys tem was late in establishing itself on English soil, but once established it impressed itself rapidly and permanently on the law of property. The fundamental distinction between movables and disappeared, and we have, in their place, real and personal property, based on the distinction between real and personal forms of action. The real action was available to recover the very thing (res) of which the person institut ing it had been deprived—primarily land and its fixtures. The personal action was instituted to recover damages from the person whose detention o• destruction of a chattel bad rendered him amen able to legal proceess. The two categories thus formed were swelled by circumstances, by anal ogy, by considerations of eonvenienee, resulting in a curious composite. To real property were added all the so-called incorporeal interests, whether they had to do with land or not—as easements, profits a prendre, rents, tithes, offices. So, too, as real property passed by descent to the heir of a decedent, everything which by local or general custom passed to an heir and not to an executor came to he included in the description of real prope•ty—sueh as the crown. jewels. heirlooms, titles of honor. On the other hand, certain inter ests in land, as leaseholds, creditors' estates, mortgages, and shares in landholding co•pora tions, came into the classification of personal property, for the contrary reason that upon the death of the holder they pa---md not to his heir, but to a personal representative.
But this grouping of property relations was only indirectly and somewhat obscurely deter mined by the feudal system'. Its direct effect was to create a wide and permanent separation be tween the two systems. This it did by its trans formation of real property through the doctrine of tenures. Personal property was left. as in other legal systems, subject to ownership in the full sense of that term. But real property could only be 'held' of some one else and in subordination to the rights of a superior holder. We have. there fore, land-holders, not land-owners. The distinc
tion is of fundamental and far-reaching impor tance. The only owner of land is the king. the State. The subject can have at most an estate in it, i.e. a status with reference to it. The greatest estate possible—the pure fee simple ab solute—is less than complete ownership, being a derivative and subordinate right, subject to the superior claims of him—whether a private person or the State—of whom the land is held. Property in land. therefore. is not the land itself, but an estate of longer or shorter duration in the land, together with certain rights of use and enjoyment. These rights depend upon the nature of the es tate, whether for life. in fee tail. or in fee sim ple, and are originally curiously limited, even in such vital matters as alienation and inheritance, by the claims of the superior lord. These feudal restrictions have disappeared with the system which gave them birth, and in recent year- the principle of estates has, in a limited form, been extended to personal property. but land is still held of the State, while personal property owes no duty to any one hut the owner. See ESTATE; FEE; FEUDAL TENURE.
There is a further refinement in the common law conception of property to be noticed iu order to make our understanding of it complete. There may be rights not amounting to full ownership and yet recognized as property rights and legally protected as such. Just as. in the law of real property. several persons may have estates in the same parcel of land—one for year:, another for life, another in fee, and so on—so also may a chattel he subject to a divided ownership. The faint line which divides a rightful possession from ownership has been traced in the article on PossEssmx. It appears most plainly in our law in the doctrine of pledge. The pledger of a chat tel does not lose his property therein : but the pledgee gains something more than a mere right of detainer. He also has a 'property' in the article pledged, distinguished as a 'special' property. the pledger or owner (if we may still call him so) having the 'general' property therein. Property is thus, like ownership in Itlaekstone's famous passage, a complex of rights. all of which may be united in one and the same indivklual, or which may he divided up among several per-on:.