are now.  Here we buy and sell houses and lands almost as we trade in corn and cotton; but in England the transfer of the title of a piece of real estate of any consequence is a serious and comparatively rare occurrence, that makes great work for attorneys and conveyancing counsel; and two hundred and fifty years ago the facilities in this respect were very much less than they are now.  Shakespeare could hardly have picked up his conveyancer’s jargon by hanging round the courts of law; and we find,—­to return to the first objection,—­that, in his early plays, written just after he arrived in London, he uses this peculiar phraseology just as freely and with as exact a knowledge as he displayed in after years, when (on the supposition in question) he must have become much more familiar with it.  Shakespeare’s earliest work that has reached us is, doubtless, to be found in “King Henry the Sixth,” “The Comedy of Errors,” and “Love’s Labor’s Lost.”  In the very earliest form of Part II. of the first-named play, ("The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two Houses of York and Lancaster,” to which Shakespeare was doubtless a contributor, the part of Cade being among his contributions,) we find him making Cade declare, (Act iv.  Sc. 7,) “Men shall hold of me in capite; and we charge and command that wives be as free as heart can wish or tongue can tell.”  Both the phrases that we have Italicized express tenures, and very uncommon tenures of land.  In the “Comedy of Errors,” when Dromio of Syracuse says, “There’s no time for a man to recover his hair that grows bald by nature,” [Hear, O Rowland! and give ear, O Phalon!] his master replies, “May he not do it by fine and recovery?” Fine and recovery was a process by which, through a fictitious suit, a transfer was made of the title in an entailed estate.  In “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” almost without a doubt the first comedy that Shakespeare wrote, on Boyet’s offering to kiss Maria, (Act ii.  Sc. 1,) she declines the salute, and says, “My lips are no common, though several they be.”  This passage—­an important one for his purpose—­Lord Campbell has passed by, as he has some others of nearly equal consequence.  Maria’s allusion is plainly to tenancy in common by several (i.e., divided, distinct) title.  (See Coke upon Littleton, Lib. iii.  Cap. iv.  Sec. 292.) She means, that her lips are several as being two, and (as she says in the next line) as belonging in common to her fortunes and herself,—­yet they were no common pasture.

[Footnote F:  Falstaff, for instance, speaks of “the wearing out of six fashions, which is four terms or two actions.”]