either by conscious fiction or as a result of primitive beliefs. 4 It could not sue or be sued, like a ship in the admiralty.  It is not supposed that its possessor could maintain an action for an interference with an easement before his time, as an heir could for an injury to property of the hereditas jacens.  If land had even been systematically treated as capable of acquiring rights, the time of a disseisee might have been added to that Of the wrongful occupant, on the ground that the land, and not this or that individual, was gaining the easement, and that long association between the enjoyment of the privilege and the land was sufficient, which has never been the law.

All that can be said is, that the metaphors and similes employed naturally led to the rule which has prevailed, [385] and that, as this rule was just as good as any other, or at least was unobjectionable, it was drawn from the figures of speech without attracting attention, and before any one had seen that they were only figures, which proved nothing and justified no conclusion.

As easements were said to belong to the dominant estate, it followed that whoever possessed the land had a right of the same degree over what was incidental to it.  If the true meaning had been that a way or other easement admits of possession, and is taken possession of with the land to which it runs, and that its enjoyment is protected on the same grounds as possession in other cases, the thought could have been understood.  But that was not the meaning of the Roman law, and, as has been shown, it is not the doctrine of ours.  We must take it that easements have become an incident of land by an unconscious and unreasoned assumption that a piece of land can have rights.  It need not be said that this is absurd, although the rules of law which are based upon it are not so.

Absurd or not, the similes as well as the principles of the Roman law reappear in Bracton.  He says, “The servitude by which land is subjected to [other] land, is made on the likeness of that by which man is made the slave of man.” 1 “For rights belong to a free tenement, as well as tangible things....  They may be called rights or liberties with regard to the tenements to which they are owed, but servitudes with regard to the tenements by which they are owed ....  One estate is free, the other subjected to slavery.” 2 “[A servitude] may be called an arrangement by which house is subjected to house, farm to [386] farm, holding to holding.” 1 No passage has met my eye in which Bracton expressly decides that an easement goes with the dominant estate upon a disseisin, but what he says leaves little doubt that he followed the Roman law in this as in other things.