Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/500

 486 IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY the market was full of powerful capitalists. Never had registration been in greater request. As long as landed property was transferred by physical delivery, so long its transfer was notorious to those to whom it was likely to pass.^ And though that form, like mancipatio in Rome, was aban- doned on account of its awkwardness, there was a custom of selling " book-land " at the sheriff's county court, and of recording the sale at the nearest monastery in a cartulary or in a m. s. of the Gospels or in a " land-book," and these were sometimes placed on the Altar. Such a register, but of the house's own title, is the Liber Evidentiarum of S. Augustin's at Canterbury.^ Analogous to these records, dating from the earliest English times, were the court rolls of manors, as those of the manor of Taunton and Taunton Deane. But now monasteries had been swept away ; the Statute of Inrol- ments did not apply to counties palatine and to many cor- porate towns, and was not regarded in one case out of an hundred.^ How many law suits were due to the want of a land registry we know from Hobbes * and we might guess from the establishment of such institutions for soldiers' debentures, and for the sale of Church, Crown, and Royalist property.^ There were even proposals for county regis- teries: sales not recorded in them within a certain time were to be void; land, the sale of which was so recorded, was not 4; app. 6; Rep. of the Registration of Title Comm. (1857), p. 2; Steph. "Comm." 2, 1, 17, 20: Williams, 1 Jur. Soc. Pap. 45; 2, 589; Ludlow, ib. 2, 140. Arundel Mss. 310. The inventories or " stars," perhaps the same as thetarim, which Richard I. made the Hebrews keep of their debts, mort- gages, lands, houses, revenues and possessions, were rather part of an apparatus for extortion than registers of title. See Roger of Hoveden, " Annales," pars post., Riv. prim., capitula de Judaeis; Selden, "Of the Jews sometimes living in Engl. : " Du Cange," sv. " starrum : " Steph. " Comm." 6, 14, 3, n. etc. (c. 1660). "Was he the Protector's friend (as to whom see Carlyle, "Cromwell")? Laws of Engl.", (of Courts): "Exam. legg. Angl." c. 14, § 35: Cock, "Christian Govt." p. 171: Grey on 3 " Hudibras," 1, 1519, 1520. » Stt. 1646, c. 66; 1647, c. 75; 1648, c. 113; 1649, cc. 24, 42, 76; 1650, CO. 29, 30, 47; 1651, c. 10; 1652, cc. 6, 16, 23, 31; 1653, c. 10.
 * 1st Rep. of the Registration and Conveyancing Comm. (1850) pp. 3,
 * Hickes to Shower, " Dissertatio epistolaris," -p. 9 (1703) Brit. Mus.
 * Sanders, 2 Uses, 66 : Pierrepoint, " A treatise concerning registers,"
 * " A dialogue between a philosopher and a student of the Common