Catalogue description License fr. feoffees (DR429/237) and chw. (1b) to Tho. Wing, alderman, for 12d. to lay a...

License fr. feoffees (DR429/237) and chw. (1b) to Tho. Wing, alderman, for 12d. to lay a pipe of lead in Barr's Close, and another close adjoining, and in the stripe, for the purpose of bringing water from Radford to Coventry from 1693 for 481 years.

Sign. and seal of Tho. King. Witn., Tho. Rogers and others.

These deeds show the custom of conveying church property from one set of feoffees to the other, a wordy and lengthy process. The allusion to the "Statute for transferring uses into possession" (DR429/243) recalls the famous Statute of Uses passed in 1535, designed to simplify the system of land tenure, and check the process of alienating property by means of trusts or "uses," which made it difficult to ascertain who was its actual possessor. To prevent confusion between the nominal owner - or trustee - and the beneficial owner, to whose "use" the profits of the land accrued, the framers of the Statute laid down that the beneficial owner should be in effect the legal owner even without the actual delivery of seizing or possession by the trustee. A "leye" or "lea" of land (DR429/239) is an old dialect word for a strip of grass. "A 'ley' is to pasture what a 'Land' is to arable," says a Leicestershire correspondent of the "Dialect Dictionary," and most Warwickshire persons are familiar with the word "land" as applied to a furrow.