SEVERAL DEMISES - The Law Mind Legal Dictionary

SEVERAL DEMISESAuthored

The Law Mind • 791 words

Definition

Several demises refers to a procedural device used in the English common law action of ejectment, by which a plaintiff's declaration included multiple fictional leases — demises — from two or more different persons, each potentially having a claim to the legal estate in the disputed land. Because the fictitious ejectment action required the plaintiff to allege a valid demise (a lease) from someone holding the legal estate, uncertainty about who actually held that estate led practitioners to plead multiple demises in the alternative. If one demise failed, another might succeed. The device was a workaround for the technical rigidity of ejectment pleading, not a substantive claim of multiple landlords.

The practice became unnecessary in England after the Common Law Procedure Acts of 1852 and 1860 simplified and reformed ejectment procedure, eliminating the need for the fictitious lease framework altogether.

Common Confusion

Several demises is easily confused with two related but distinct concepts. First, "several" here does not mean a few in the colloquial sense — it carries the older legal meaning of separate or distinct, as in severally liable or held in severalty. Second, this term has no connection to the doctrine of severalty in property law (holding land individually rather than jointly), even though both terms share the same root. Third, a single demise in ejectment was already a fictional construct; several demises simply multiplied that fiction. Researchers encountering "several demises" in older pleading materials should not read it as evidence of multiple genuine leasing transactions.

Why It Matters in Research

This term is essentially a historical artifact of English common law ejectment procedure and has no operative significance in modern practice. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in pre-1852 English case law, treatises on real property procedure, and American sources that followed the English fictitious ejectment model before procedural reform reached the states.

American courts borrowed the fictitious ejectment form wholesale, and several American jurisdictions retained variants of it well into the nineteenth century. Pre-reform American pleading materials may therefore also reference several demises, even when the English source of the practice is not explicitly acknowledged. Researchers working on American title disputes or ejectment records from roughly 1780 to 1870 should watch for this device.

The deeper trap is anachronism: reading a declaration containing several demises as evidence of a genuine multi-party landlord dispute. It was not. The multiple demises were entirely procedural fictions — typically from persons with the same or similar names as the real claimant — inserted to hedge against a technical defect in the plaintiff's chain of title. The substance of the dispute was over possession of real property between the actual parties, not between the fictional lessors.

Corpus researchers should also note that the practice of several demises connects to the broader procedural history of ejectment, which itself underwent a long transformation from a real action to a fictional personal action and then to a reformed direct proceeding. Placing a reference to several demises on that timeline is essential to understanding what any given historical source is actually describing.

Historical Dictionary Support

Black's Law Dictionary and Rapalje & Lawrence are in agreement on the core point: several demises was a precautionary pleading technique used when doubt existed about who held the legal estate, and it was rendered obsolete by the Common Law Procedure Acts. Neither source treats the term as having any residual modern application.

Rapalje & Lawrence's entry is fragmentary in the provided text, trailing off into a note about severalty as applied to adjoining meadows in England — a reminder that nineteenth-century dictionaries sometimes bundled loosely related terms. That note is unrelated to several demises proper and should not be read as part of the definition.

What the historical dictionaries do not supply is any account of how American courts adapted or modified the practice, or when specific American jurisdictions abandoned it. For that, researchers must consult treatises on common law pleading and the procedural reform histories of individual states. Stephen's Treatise on the Principles of Pleading and the various editions of Blackstone's Commentaries remain the most useful background sources for understanding the ejectment fiction from which several demises arose.

Jurisdictional Note

The practice originated in English common law and was formally abolished in England by the Common Law Procedure Acts of 1852 and 1860. American states that modeled their procedure on English common law ejectment used the device as well, but adoption of Field Code reforms and subsequent procedural modernization eliminated it at varying dates across jurisdictions. No contemporary American jurisdiction retains the practice.

SEVERAL DEMISESmain

Rapalje & Lawrence • 1883

- Prior to the Common Law Procedure Acts, 1852-1860, it was necessary, in England, that the plaintiff in ejectment should make a demise, and 3. The term "severalty" is especially that he should have the legal estate in him applied, in England, to the case of adjoinfor that purpose. Wherefore, in case of any ing meadows undivided from each other, doubt whether the legal estate was in A., but belonging, either permanently or in or in B., or in C., it was usual in framing what are called "shifting severalties" (inthe declaration to insert a demise by each, fra, & 4), to separate owners, and held in and the declaration was then said to conseveralty until the crops have been carried, tain several demises. But now no demise at all is necessary to an action of ejectment. See EJECTMENT. when the whole is thrown open as pasture for the cattle of all the owners, and in some cases for the cattle of other persons as well: each owner is called a "severalty owner," SEVERAL FISHERY.-See FISHERY, and his rights of pasture are called "severalty rights," as opposed to the rights of SEVERAL FISHERY, (defined). 2 Bl. Com. 39, persons not owners. Cooke Incl. 47, 163 40; 1 Steph. Com. 671 n. 4. n. See COMMON, 22 4,7; СоммONABLE, § 2; DOLE; LAMMAS LANDS; OPEN FIELDS; (what is). 3 Burr. 2817. (owner of, is presumed to own the soil). SHACK. 2 Chit. 658. SEVERAL INHERITANCE.-An inheritance conveyed so as to descend to two persons severally, by moieties, &c. See INHERITANCE, § 5. SEVERAL TAIL.-An entail severally to two; as, if land is given to two men and their wives and to the heirs of their bodies begotten; here the donees have a joint estate for their two lives, and yet they have a several inheritance, because the issue of the one shall have his moiety, and the issue of the other the other moiety. Cowell. SEVERAL TENANCY.-A tenancy which is separate, and not held jointly with another person. SEVERALLY AND RESPECTIVELY, (in a grant). 5 Mod. 28. SEVERALLY BE AND APPEAR TO SHOW CAUSE, THAT THEY, (in a scire facias). 3 Anstr. 811. SEVERALLY DIE, AS THEY, (in a will). 2 Atk. 441.