[388] But although the test of rights going with the land may have been something of that nature, this will not help us to understand the cases without a good deal of explanation.  For such rights might exist to active services which had to be performed by the person who held the servient estate.  It strikes our ear strangely to hear a right to services from an individual called a right of property as distinguished from contract.  Still this will be found to have been the way in which such rights were regarded.  Bracton argues that it is no wrong to the lord for the tenant to alienate land held by free and perfect gift, on the ground that the land is bound and charged with the services into whose hands soever it may come.  The lord is said to have a fee in the homage and services; and therefore no entry upon the land which does not disturb them injures him. 1 It is the tenement which imposes the obligation of homage, 2 and the same thing is true of villein and other feudal services. 3

The law remained unchanged when feudal services took the form of rent. 4 Even in our modern terms for years rent is still treated as something issuing out of the leased premises, so that to this day, although, if you hire a whole house and it burns down, you have to pay without abatement, because you have the land out of which the rent issues, yet if you only hire a suite of rooms and they are burned, you pay rent no longer, because you no longer have the tenement out of which it comes. 5

[389] It is obvious that the foregoing reasoning leads to the conclusion that a disseisor of the tenant would be bound as much as the tenant himself, and this conclusion was adopted by the early law.  The lord could require the services, 1 or collect the rent 2 of any one who had the land, because, as was said in language very like Bracton’s, “the charge of the rent goes with the land.” 3

Then as to the right to the rent.  Rent was treated in early law as a real right, of which a disseisin was possible, and for which a possessory action could be brought.  If, as was very frequently the case, the leased land lay within a manor, the rent was parcel of the manor, 4 so that there was some ground for saying that one who was seised of the manor, that is, who possessed the lands occupied by the lord of the manor, and was recognized by the tenants as lord, had the rents as incident thereto.  Thus Brian, Chief Justice of England under Henry VII., says, “If I am disseised of a manor, and the tenants pay their rent to the disseisor, and then I re-enter, I shall not have the back rent of my tenants which they have paid to my disseisor, but the disseisor shall pay for all in trespass or assize.” 5 This opinion was evidently founded on the notion that the rent was attached to the chief land like an easement.  Sic fit ut debeantur rei a re. 6