Star.
London, England, 1821-11-05 00:00:00

LAW. IVITtLIGENti •

COURT OF CHANCERY, NOVEMBER 3.
Mr. HEALD moved to- commit M'Dougal to
the Fleet, for refusing to pay the rent of his premises,
in the parish of St. Giles, to J. Dodd, Esq. the Re-
ceiver appointed by the Court. There were, he said,
a number of houses in St. Giles's, which were the
property of an infant. His
father had left him the
principal part of his estates by will ; but wth re-
spect to these houses he had omitted to do so, and he
took them by descent as his heir. The tenants ima-
' gined that this infant was not legitimate, and them-
selves acquired the character of owners. This notion
had, some time since, made it necessary to move to
commit M'Dougal, who, however, submitted to pay
his rent on receiving a sum of money he had ex-
pended for repairs, an account of which repairs he
was to deliver to the Receiver. Subsequent to this,
a similar application had been made against another
tenant, named Perry, and he was ordered by the
Vice-Chancellor to stand committed ; but it being
the practice that the warrant for his commitment'
should be signed by the Lord Chancellor, the order I
for issuing it had been left at his Lordship's house
previous to his leaving town ; his Lordship consider-
ing that the order required some explanation, had
returned the warrant without 'signing it. The con-
sequence of this has been, that all the tenants, who
unquestionably would have submitted if Perry had
been sent. to the Fleet, were now convinced they
could set the Court xt defiance, and become their
own landlords. Among the rest, M'Dongal refused,
to obey the order he had before consented to ; he
would neither pay his rent nor give in the account'
of his repairs; the Receiver had, therefore, been
obliged to apply to his Lordship, to request, that by
committing Mr. M'llougal to prison, he would con-
vince him, that he was not, by his own mere aft of
authority, to convert himself from the tenant of his

house into its owner.
The LORD CltA NCFLLOR observed, that the tenants
were extremely rniAaken in the notion they had
formed of their own rights. It was far from the wish
of the Court by commitment to compel them to pay
their rent, but it would be necessar y to enforce the
payment if they persevered in their resistance. His
Lordship said, he had felt some difficulty with re-
gard to the language of the former order. He
thought it had gone rather further than it should
have done : if the order was handed to him he would

set the matter right.
Mr. HEAl.D.—These tenants all think they are
now quite safe.
COURT OF KING'S BENCH, NOVEMBER 5.
MURRAY V. ELLISTON.
In this case, which was struck out of the paper
yesterday in consequence of the absence of the
Counsel, the plaintiff's Solicitor applied this morning
to have the cause resto: ed to the paper, on a suggest:on
that the Learned Counsel was out of town. The case
involved the right of the defendant to represent one
of Lord Byron 's Tragedies on the boards of Drury-
lane Theatre. The Court said, that the cause having
been called on in its turn, and no person appearing in
behalf of the plaintiff, it had been struck out of the
paper. 1f the plaintiff wished it to be restored, it
must be the subject of a special application in Term.
DQE, ON TILE DEMISE OF 111 E EARL CF SIIIIEWiBURY,
v. PATTEN.
This was an action of ei,,ettnent to recover the pos-
session of certain land in tl:e parish of Aittm, in the
county of StalforO, demised to the defendant upon
leise. At the trial before Mr. Justice Best, at the
Staffordshire Spring Assizes, is a verdict was
found fur the lessor of the plah:tiff ; subject to the
opinion of this Court upoa a special cave. The case
involved a question of considerable importance as to
the construction of the leasing powers granted to
'Lord Talbot, the ancestor of the lessor of the plain-
under an Act of Parliament passed in the 6th
Geo. L for settling the family estates of the Talbot
family. In point of pecuniary value, there was an
income of several thousands of ',funds per annum,
depending upon the decision. The object of this
ejectment was to make void one of a great number
of leases, granted to the tenants of the Earl of Shrews-
bury, on the ground that it was in contravention of
the leasing powers vested by the Statute abovemen-
Coned. It was said to be the policy of that Statute
to provide suitable means for maintaining the dignity
of the Shrewsbury peerage and the Talbot family in
perpetuity. One of the points taken, therefore, was,
that by the legal operation of the lease in question
this object would be defeated by the manner in which
the rent was reserved, for it might so happen that
during part of the term demised, the persons in re-
mainder enjoying the title of Earl of Shrewsbury,
'would have no means of supporting the dignity of
his station in consequence of the improvident terms
in which the lease was granted. The lease in question
was granted to Thomas Patten for 99 years. or three
lives, at a rent of £5O per annum, pavahle in half-
yearly payments, at Lady-day and Michaelmas-day,
the first payment to be made on the 25th of March
next after the date of the.lease, which date was the
6th of January. By this stipulation the tenant would
have to pay the first quarter's rent for an occupation
of only two months and nineteen days, and during
'the last year of the lease, which would expire on the
6th of January in that year, there would be a period
of four months and seven days during whiclyno rent
whatever would be payable. This, it was contended,
was such an exercise of the leasing powers, as was in
contravention of the policy of the Act of Settlement
referred to, for during that interval the then Earl of
Shrewsbury would be totally destitute of means to
support his dignity. The objection, therefore, in point
of law, was, that there was rent reserved during the
continuance of the lease. The power given in the
Act of Settlement was " to reserve the usual and ac-
customed rents." There was nothing upon the face
of the present case to shew what the usual and accus-
tomed rents had been before the grant of this lease ;
and, therefore, after hearing Mr. Campbell at some
length upon this preliminary point,
The COURT interposed, and said, that in this re-
spect the case was defective, for in order to give a
proper construction to the leasing powers, as applied
to this particular case, it must be seen what the usual
and accustomed rents had been. The case, therefore,
must either go down to a new trial, in order to ascer-
tain what those rents had been, or if the parties chose
they might agree between themselves to supply this
defect in the case, by referring to the old leases in