Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/105

A BRIEF SURVEY OF EQUITY JURISDICTION, 79 or in fee, reserving to himself a rent out of the same, the estate in the rent reserved being generally of the same duration as that granted in the land. A rent is created by grant when the owner of land grants a rent out of the same to another person for years, for life, in tail, or in fee. At common law, there was a sharp line of demarcation between a rent reserved and a rent granted, i. Every ordinary grant of land at common law created between the grantor and the grantee the feudal relation of lord and tenant, the latter holding the land from the former, and the former having a reversion, or at least a feudal seigniory, in the land ; and hence every rent reserved upon such a grant was a rent payable by a feudal tenant to his feudal lord. 2. Though the parties to that relation were liable at any time to change, yet the relation itself was permanent, i, e.^ as permanent as the estate granted in the land. 3. *The rent was in the nature of a feudal service, to be rendered by the tenant as such to the lord as such ; and hence it was necessary, not only that the obligation to pay the rent should follow the land into the hands of any new tenant (which it of course would do, the land being the debtor), but that the right to receive the rent should follow the reversion or seigniory into the hands of any new lord ; and this latter object the law accomplished by annexing the right to receive the rent to the reversion or seigniory as an incident or accessory. In short, as the obligation to pay a rent reserved always followed the land out of which it issued, so the right to receive it always followed the rever- sion or seigniory to which it was annexed. It is true that the lord might at any time sever the rent from the reversion or seigniory by granting away either and retaining the other, or by granting away each to a different person ; but by so doing he changed the nature of the rent from that of a rent reserved to that of a rent granted. 4. A right to distrain was a legal incident of every feu- dal service, and therefore of every rent which was in the nature of a feudal service. 5. As land could be conveyed at common law, even in fee, without a deed {i. e.y by livery of seisin), so, on a con- veyance of land, a rent could be reserved, even in fee, without a deed. A grant of a rent, on the other hand, neither created nor accom- panied any relation between the grantor and the grantee ; it simply created the relation of obligor and obligee between the land out of which the rent was to issue and the grantee of the rent. The rela- tion of the latter to the land was simply that of a creditor, holding