have for their subject things personal or movable. Speaking generally, though not with entire accuracy, the former class of rights constitutes the matter of the law of "real property," the latter the matter of the law of "personal property." There is, however, one important class of rights. over land,1 which belongs to the category of per

sonal property.

There is further a miscellaneous class of rights in rem which cannot be said to be rights over land, or indeed to have any subjects at all, but which possess some characteristics common to rights over land. For instance, such of them as are descendible, devolve not, as is the case with personal property, to executors or administrators, but to heirs. These rights therefore are usually treated along with rights over land. Among the principal of this class of rights are advowsons-advocationes, or the right of presentation to an ecclesiastical benefice; and franchises—where

a royal privilege or branch of the king's prerogative is subsisting in the hands of a subject." For example, the rights to have "waifs, wrecks, estrays, treasure-trove, royal fish, forfeitures, and deodands" are franchises, which must rest on royal grant, or prescription which presupposes a grant. To this class, too, belong dignities, such as a peerage, which is the subject of grant by patent conferring the title with limitations similar to the limitations in an ordinary conveyance of land. Peerages may also be created by writ or royal summons to attend the house of peers; this, if acted upon, invests the person summoned with a dignity descendible to his heirs. Another instance of the class of rights in question is found in offices which are now seldom hereditary. An office tenable for life, such as a college fellowship, is considered a freehold interest. The class of rights under consideration is by Blackstone and others included under the class of incorporeal hereditaments. . .

Rights over things movable, and rights which, though not over things movable or indeed over things at all, are yet 'The reference is to leasehold interests. See below, pp. 12-16.-ED.

classed with such rights, inasmuch as they are rights in rem, and, where they are descendible, devolve on executors or administrators (for example, patent rights, copyrights), lie beyond the scope of the present treatise.

MAINE, ANCIENT LAW, 273-277. The only natural classification of the objects of enjoyment, the only classification which corresponds with an essential difference in the subject-matter, is that which divides them into Movables and Immovables. Familiar as is this classification to jurisprudence, it was very slowly developed by Roman law, from which we inherit it, and was only finally adopted by it in its latest stage. The classifications of ancient law have sometimes a superficial resemblance to this. They occasionally divide property into categories, and place immovables in one of them; but then it is found that they either class along with immovables a number of objects which have no sort of relation with them, or else divorce them from various rights to which they have a close affinity. Thus, the Res Mancipi of Roman law included not only land but slaves, horses, and oxen. Scottish law ranks with land a certain class of securities, and Hindoo law associates it with slaves. English law, on the other hand, parts leases of land for years from other interests in the soil, and joins them to personalty under the name of chattels real. Moreover, the classifications of ancient law are classifications implying superiority and inferiority; while the distinction between movables and immovables, so long at least as it was confined to Roman jurisprudence, carried with it no suggestion whatever of a difference in dignity. The Res Mancipi, however, did certainly at first enjoy a precedence over the Res Nec Mancipi, as did heritable property in Scotland, and realty in England, over the personalty to which they were opposed. The lawyers of all systems have spared no pains in striving to refer these classifications to some intelligible principle; but the reasons of the severance must ever be vainly sought for in the philosophy of

law; they belong not to its philosophy, but to its history. The explanation which appears to cover the greatest number of instances is, that the objects of enjoyment honored above the rest were the forms of property known first and earliest to each particular community, and dignified therefore emphatically with the designation of property. On the other hand, the articles not enumerated among the favored objects seem to have been placed on a lower standing, because the knowledge of their value was posterior to the epoch at which the catalogue of superior property was settled. They were at first unknown, rare, limited in their uses, or else regarded as mere appendages to the privileged objects. Thus, though the Roman Res Mancipi included a number of movable articles of great value, still the most costly jewels were never allowed to take rank as Res Mancipi, because they were unknown to the early Romans. In the same way chattels real in England are said to have been degraded to the footing of personalty, from the infrequency and valuelessness of such estates under the feudal land-law. But the grand point of interest is the continued degradation of these commodities when their importance had increased and their number had multiplied. Why were they not successively included among the favored objects of enjoyment? One reason is found in the stubbornness with which ancient law adheres to its classifications. It is a characteristic both of uneducated minds and of early societies, that they are little able to conceive a general rule apart from the particular applications of it with which they are practically familiar. They cannot dissociate a general term or maxim from the special examples which meet them in daily experience; and in this way the designation covering the best-known forms of property is denied to articles which exactly resemble them in being objects of enjoyment and subjects of right. But to these influences, which exert peculiar force in a subjectmatter so stable as that of law, are afterward added others more consistent with progress in enlightenment and in the conceptions of general expediency. Courts and lawyers be

come at last alive to the inconvenience of the embarrassing formalities required for the transfer, recovery, or devolution of the favored commodities, and grow unwilling to fetter the newer descriptions of property with the technical trammels which characterized the infancy of law. Hence arises a disposition to keep these last on a lower grade in the arrangements of jurisprudence, and to permit their transfer by simpler processes than those which, in archaic conveyances, serve as stumbling-blocks to good faith and steppingstones to fraud. We are perhaps in some danger of underrating the inconveniences of the ancient modes of transfer. Our instruments of conveyance are written, so that their language, well pondered by the professional draftsman, is rarely defective in accuracy. But an ancient conveyance was not written, but acted. Gestures and words took the place of written technical phraseology, and any formula mispronounced, or symbolical act omitted, would have vitiated the proceeding as fatally as a material mistake in stating the uses or setting out the remainders would, two hundred years ago, have vitiated an English deed. Indeed, the mischiefs of the archaic ceremonial are even thus only half stated. So long as elaborate conveyances, written or acted, are required for the alienation of land alone, the chances of mistake are not considerable in the transfer of a description of property which is seldom got rid of with much precipitation. But the higher class of property in the ancient world comprised not only land, but several of the commonest and several of the most valuable movables. When once the wheels of society had begun to move quickly, there must have been immense. inconvenience in demanding a highly intricate form of transfer for a horse or an ox, or for the most costly chattel of the Old World-the Slave. Such commodities must have been constantly and even ordinarily conveyed with incomplete forms, and held, therefore, under imperfect titles.

ID., 282-284. As I before explained, the allodial form of property was entirely lost in the feudal, and when the consolidation of feudalism was once completed, there was practically

but one distinction left standing of all those which had been known to the western world-the distinction between land and goods, immovables and movables. Externally this distinction was the same with that which Roman law had finally accepted, but the law of the middle ages differed from that of Rome in distinctly considering immovable property to be more dignified than movable. Yet this one sample is enough to show the importance of the class of expedients to which it belongs. In all the countries governed by systems based on the French codes, that is, through much the greatest part of the Continent of Europe, the law of movables, which was always Roman law, has superseded and annulled the feudal law of land. England is the only country of importance in which this transmutation, though it has gone some way, is not nearly accomplished. Our own, too, it may be added, is the only considerable European country in which the separation of movables from immovables has been somewhat disturbed by the same influences which caused the ancient classifications to depart from the only one which is countenanced by nature. In the main, the English distinction has been between land and goods; but a certain class of goods have gone as heirlooms with the land, and a certain description of interests in land have from historical causes been ranked with personalty. This is not the only instance in which English jurisprudence, standing apart from the main current of legal modification, has reproduced phenomena of archaic law.

(b) The Common Law Classification.

BRACTON, IOI, 102. It has been said above what is an action and in what ways it arises out of obligations: now we must see in what way it is divided. And it is to be known that of all actions or pleas (to use these terms as equivalent) this is the first division, that some are real and others personal, and some are mixed.

But actions for a thing are those which are allowed against