The basis of the legal theories relating to the holding of Jamaican land in England is the feudal system and therefore in order to understand the modern law of real Jamaica property it will be necessary to consider shortly the details of feudal land holding.
Outline Of Jamaica Real Estate Doctrines
Under the feudal system, as extended and modified by William the Conqueror, all land in the country belongs to the King. William considered that all the land in England belonged to him by right of conquest, but he distributed parts of the land to his nobles in return for their services to him. The land was not, however, given to these nobles outright. It should be remembered that at the time of the Norman Conquest money was little used and land and the produce of land were the sole means of wealth as well as the sole indications of it.
If a rich man wanted anything done, at any rate if it was anything of a recurrent nature, the easiest way of getting it done was to give out a piece of land to some person who would undertake to perform the service for him throughout the year. So when the King himself distributed land among the nobles he extracted from them a promise to perform certain services in return and the performance of these services was the condition upon which the nobles held their land.
Examples of the kind of services which might be promised are the provision of, say, two hundred men-at-arms for the King's army for forty days in the year or service as the Royal Standard-bearer or Steward.
The manner in which these various persons held their land was called 'tenure" from the Latin teneo, "I hold". The person holding the land was called the tenant and the person from whom he held it and to whom he owed the services in return was called the lord. It was not only the King who could grant land to a tenant to be held in return for services.
Each of the tenants themselves had a household to look after and required services to be performed. In consequence they, too, parceled out the land they received from the King to other lesser beings in return for the requisite services. These lesser beings again might give out pieces of the land to others in return for the services which they themselves required, and so on. This process was known as subinfeudation and theoretically there was no limit to the extent to which it might be stretched. Subinfeudation was stopped in 1920 by the Statue "Quia Emptores".
Alienation
It is such a commonplace thing today to transfer land from one person to another, a process known in law as alienation, that it is perhaps hard to realize that there was a time when it was impossible to do so. There are two distinct ways of transferring land; it may be done during the lifetime of the tenant, transfer inter vivos ("between living people") as it is called or it may happen on his death, either because he leaves a will giving it to someone else, or, if he dies without making a will ("intestate") then it will pass to the person entitled on an intestacy according to the rule governing such matters.
Originally, however, it was impossible for a feudal tenant to transfer his land to anyone else either during his lifetime or on his death, except by the process know as subinfeudation already mentioned. The land a tenant held was bound to remain his and to pass on his death to the next tenant, his heir, and nothing could be done to alter the position. This negated the attempts at buying Jamaican land.
Let us consider the process of subinfeudation again and an example of the way it worked:
Suppose A held the manor of Blackacre from his Lord X in return for supplying X with ten men-at-arms for forty days in the year; A might then grant a part of Blackacre to B in return for which B had to supply A with four men-at-arms for forty days in the year. In this way A, who was a tenant of X, became further and further away from the person who was actually responsible for producing the men-at-arms.
In consequence the Statute known as "Quia Emptores" was passed in 1290. It forbade the alienation of land by subinfeudation, but permitted alienation by another method as used today, known as substitution.
Under this method if A, in the example above, wanted to alienate to B, the only way in which he could do it was by putting B in his place, so that B would now have to provide X with all the ten men-at-arms and A would drop out of the picture altogether. The Statue Quia Emptores may be regarded as one of the corner stones of our method of transferring land today.
After 1290 it became possible to transfer land by substitution, but this was only possible inter vivos; it was still legally impossible to transfer land by Will, though ingenious ways were discovered by which approximately the same result could be obtained. This was done by transferring the land to a friend to hold as a trustee and pass it after the tenant's death to the persons whom he named to the trustee. This trust was not, however recognized as legally valid and binding. It was not until the Statue of Wills that land could be legally transferred by Will.
The process of purchasing land for sale in Jamaica has changed dramatically since then and the process has become simplified.
Colin Scott is a real estate marketing expert. For more great tips on land for sale in Jamaica and buying Jamaican land visit any one of the links in this Author Bio.
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