Lease and Release

Contents

1. Description
2. Purpose
3. History
4. Bibliography
5. Footnotes

Description

Lease and release was a popular way of transferring the ownership of property for a monetary consideration from the seventeenth century until 1845. It was also used for the purposes of mortgages and settlements. It is a contrived sequence of events.
The ‘lease’ and the ‘release’ are two separate documents. Although the two often become separated, Deopham is fortunate in having a number of documents where both ‘lease’ and ‘release’ are extant.
The key features are:-

• There were two separate documents,
  • one small (lease):
    the Deopham leases were:
    • for a period of one year;
    • a lease value of five shillings;
    • an annual rental of one peppercorn “if the same shall be lawfully demanded”;
    • reference to the “Statute made for the transferring Uses into possession”;
    • the seller is said to have “bargained and sold” the premises to the buyer;
  • one large (release):
    the Deopham releases were characterised by:
    • the release was dated the day after the lease;
    • reference to the preceding lease;
    • the seller is said to have “Granted, Bargained, Sold, Remised, Released, Aliened and Confirmed” the premises to the buyer;
    • This is the point at which the consideration money was handed over, which was generally receipted on the reverse of the release indenture;
    • they were written in English, even prior to 1733 when it became obligatory to use English;
• the Deopham leases and releases were folded separately, although elsewhere they were sometimes sewn together;
• both lease and release documents were written on parchment;
• the agreements were in the form of indentures which are identified by a wavy edge at the top or bottom where the different copies had been separated from one another;
• the Deopham indentures carried red wax seals at the end, following “In witness whereof the said parties to these presents have hereunto set and put their Hands and Seals the Day and Year first above written”. Some of the agreements carry several seals.

Purpose

The lease and release allow the transfer of ownership to take place without involving the process of “enrollment” which would make the details of the transaction public: it allowed for a secret but legally valid method of selling property. Enrollment, which goes back to 1535, required that a contract conveying land had to be documented and then “enrolled” in a public registry.¹
By keeping the transaction secret, liability (both feared and actual) for taxation was evaded.

History

By 1843, the release document had become discredited to the extent that Lord Campbell told the House of Lords that it “enumerated the parcels (or premises, the land and houses conveyed) with the most inconceivable verbosity, and contained such a vast number of covenants, that the deed was sometimes of that enormous extent, that the parchments were sufficient to cover the whole of the property conveyed.”²

Bibliography

• University of Nottingham: Manuscripts and Special Collections: see here.

Footnotes

1. Deddington History: https://www.deddingtonhistory.uk/buildings/privatehouses/winmourcottage/leaseandrelease ↩︎
2. Hansard March 24^th 1843: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1843/mar/24/conveyance-of-property ↩︎

Date	Change
8/9/24	Published