ABSTRACT

The law of landlord and tenant governs the relationship between lessor and lessee (otherwise called landlord and tenant respectively), defines the rights and obligations of the parties to leases and tenancies, and lays down the formalities for the creation and the termination of the lessor/lessee relationship. Leaseholds, also known as ‘demises’ or ‘terms of years’, have a long history. In early medieval times, leaseholds were regarded merely as contractual rights to occupy land. A lessee could be evicted at any time. He had no estate in the land, and his only remedy for wrongful dispossession was an action for damages against the dispossessor. Later, with the development of the action of ejectment, by the end of the 15th century, it became possible for a dispossessed tenant to recover possession of the land, and at that point the leasehold may be said to have acquired the status of a proprietary interest and an estate in the land. Leaseholds, in fact, always remained outside the feudal system of landholding, to which the freehold estates belonged, but when leaseholds ‘became a new type of estate, it was impossible to deny that they were also a new type of tenure; for every tenant must hold by tenure of some sort if he is to hold an estate at all’.1 Ironically, the leasehold, originally conceived outside the doctrine of tenures, is today the only form of ‘tenure’ which has any practical significance. The nature of this tenure, signified by the words ‘landlord’ and ‘tenant’, is that the tenant pays ‘rent service’ (now known simply as ‘rent’) to the landlord in return for his right to occupy the land, and the landlord retains a right to levy distress against the tenant’s goods in the event of non-payment of rent and, more importantly, in some circumstances, a right to forfeit the lease if the tenant is in breach of his obligations.