Lease And Release

Lease and release, a mode of conveyance which derived its effect from the Statute of Uses, compounded of a lease for a year at Common Law, or a bargain and sale for a year under the Statute of Uses, and a Common Law Release. This compound conveyance originated thus: The Statute of Enrolments (27 Hen. 8, c. 16) seemed to be confined to cases where an estate of inheritance or freehold, or the use thereof, was to be made or take effect by reason only of a bargain and sale; it was therefore concluded that if a bargain and sale were first made for an estate less than freehold, as for one year, and then the inheritance or freehold were superadded by a separate deed of release, the transaction could not be affected by the statute;and that such release to the bargainee would be valid, without his entry upon the lands, as a consequence of the strong words in the Statute of Uses which converts all vested uses at once into legal estates. The convenience and general applicability of the lease ad release recommended and established it as a common assurance. For it was preferable to a bargain and sale, and to a covenant to stand seised to uses because it effected a transfer of the legal estate under the rules of the Common Law, and therefore the declarations of uses upon it needed not to be confined to persons from whom a consideration moved. It was also preferable to a bargain and sale, and still more to a feoffment, because no additional ceremony was necessary to its operation; but the transfer of property in land might have been effected by it in any part of the world, as instantaneously as the payment of money. And where the subject of conveyance was land in reversion or remainder, it was also preferable to a mere deed of grant, as it made it unnecessary for the grantee, if his title were called in question, to prove that there was a particular estate in existence at the time of the grant. See 2 Sand. Uses and Trusts, 73; 4 Reeves, 355.

By 4 & 5 Vict. c. 21 (repealed by the (English) Statute Law Revision Act, 1874, No. 2) conveyance by release without a lease was made effectual; and by the Real Property Act, 1845, s. 2 (see now L.P. Act, 1925, s. 51), the immediate freehold of corporeal tenements is deemed to lie in grant as well as in livery, and the conveyance by lease and release has thus become obsolete.