In England under the feudal system, land was generally transferred by subinfeudation, and alienation required license from the overlord.
2 p. 201 of the University of Chicago Press 1979 facsimile edition In 1833, Justice Joseph Story in his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States linked landowners' jealous watchfulness of their rights and spirit of resistance in the American Revolutionary War with the system of American institutions which recorded and clarified land title and expanded landed markets.
[5]: 4 citing Book 1 section 173 and 174 Other early American legal commentators who praised the simple and relatively inexpensive conveyancing system in the new United States included Zaphaniah Swift, Daniel Webster and James Kent.
[5]: 6–7 Although Virginia repealed laws supporting primogeniture and the fee tail in 1776, it refused to extend the Debt Recovery Act 1732 after the American Revolution, and passed further legislation which protected real estate from creditors.
Nonetheless, by 1806, abolition pamphleteers in Britain continued to criticize as cruel the act's sanction of slave auctions to satisfy a slaveowner's secured as well as unsecured debts.