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Passive Devices that hold property

9 January, 2015 - 09:41
Available under Creative Commons-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/3d8499e9-08c0-47dd-9482-7e8131ce99bc@11.15

When the abbot of a medieval monastery died, public officials had difficulty determining to whom its property, wealth, and resources passed. While this is hard to conceptualize from a modern standpoint, during the Middle Ages, no legal distinction could be made between (1) managing property owned by others, (2) exercising stewardship over property owned by others, and (3) owning property. Moreover, the concept and practice of owning property is complex. "Property" in its modern sense has been spelled out as a bundle of distinct rights including "the right to possess, control, use, benefit from, dispose of and exclude others from the property." (DesJardins: 37) These distinct rights are not given as entailments of a natural concept of property but represent legally endowed capacities designed to respond to specific practical problems. So, to return to the problem created by the death of the abbot, a legal entity (called the church) was created and endowed with the one of the bundled rights accompanying the notion of property, namely, the right to possess and hold property (Stone 1974: 11)