Proudhon got it all wrong. Property is not theft—it is fraud. Few other legal notions operate such gross or systematic deception. Before long I will have sold you a piece of thin air and you will have called it property. But the ultimate fact about property is that it does not really exist: it is mere illusion. It is a vacant concept—oddly enough rather like thin air.

[W]hatsoever is the object of any man's appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good: and the object of his hate and aversion, evil; and of his contempt, vile and inconsiderable. For these words of good, evil, and contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common rule of good and evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves; but from the person of the man, where there is no commonwealth; or, in a commonwealth, from the person that representeth it; or from an arbitrator or judge, whom men disagreeing shall by consent set up, and make his sentence the rule thereof.

In recent discussion, gifts to the religious have been perceived as exercising a formative influence in the forging of some norms and customs of feudal tenure during the twelfth century. On the one hand, it has been suggested that gifts to the church assisted the clarification in the mind of lay feudal society of the concept of heritability—that is, the future enjoyment of inheritance—since donors could not alienate in perpetuity that which was not already heritable. This suggestion is extremely important in view of the different perceptions of political and legal historians concerning the development of heritability of tenures and tenant right during the twelfth century, which are seen variously to have existed as social or legal norms from varying times and from different causes. A related argument runs that, whilst the warranty clause in charters (but not warranty per se) was initially conceived within the framework of the personal relationship between lord and man, its more widespread diffusion in charters was stimulated largely through the auspices of these religious beneficiaries of gifts in frankalmoign. The introduction of warranty into charters at the instance of religious beneficiaries is thus related to their concern to secure their own perpetual rights in the land at a time of a nascent realisation of hereditary tenant right, and the religious were thus foremost in the insertion of warranty clauses in charters which they, as beneficiaries, wrote or influenced, to secure their own unbridled tenure in perpetuity.

In a previous article, the present writer considered the process whereby ladies were admitted into the House of Lords and concluded that the draftsman of the Life Peerages Act 1958 had, intentionally or otherwise, made a hereditary peeress of every life peeress who has taken her seat. In that article a cursory mention was made of the Irish peers and their unsuccessful attempt to revive their representation in the House of Lords; but more careful consideration of their position has suggested that their exclusion may not be as final as some writers on the subject have hitherto assumed.