Tenement (law) in the context of "Eviction"

In English law, subinfeudation is the practice by which tenants, holding land under the king or other superior lord, carved out new and distinct tenures in their turn by sub-letting or alienating a part of their lands.

The tenants were termed mesne lords, with regard to those holding from them, the immediate tenant being tenant in capite. The lowest tenant of all was the freeholder, or, as he was sometimes termed, tenant paravail. The Crown, who in theory owned all lands, was lord paramount.

A tenement is a type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access. Tenements are common in cities throughout Europe and North and South America, albeit called different names (e.g. conventillos in Spanish, Mietskaserne in German, vuokrakasarmi in Finnish, hyreskasern in Swedish or kamienica in Polish).

From medieval times, fixed property and land in Scotland was held under feudal tenement law as a fee rather than being owned, and under Scots law dwellings could be held individually in a multi-storey building, known as a tenement. In England, the expression "tenement house" was used to designate a building subdivided to provide cheap rental accommodation, which was initially a subdivision of a large house. Beginning in the 1850s, purpose-built tenements of up to six stories held several households on each floor. Various names were introduced for better dwellings, and eventually modern apartments predominated in North American urban living.

Quia Emptores is a statute passed by the Parliament of England in 1290 during the reign of Edward I that prevented tenants from alienating (transferring) their lands to others by subinfeudation, instead requiring all tenants who wished to alienate their land to do so by substitution. The statute, along with its companion statute Quo Warranto also passed in 1290, was intended to remedy land ownership disputes and consequent financial difficulties that had resulted from the decline of the traditional feudal system in England during the High Middle Ages. The name Quia Emptores derives from the first two words of the statute in its original mediaeval Latin, which can be translated as "because the buyers". Its long title is A Statute of our Lord The King, concerning the Selling and Buying of Land. It is also cited as the Statute of Westminster III, one of many English and British statutes with that title.

Prior to the passage of Quia Emptores, tenants could either subinfeudate their land to another, which would make the new tenant their vassal, or substitute it, which would sever the old tenant's ties to the land completely and substitute the new tenant for the old with regards to obligations to the immediate overlord concerned. Subinfeudation would prove problematic so was banned by the statute.

Brecqhou (or Brechou; French pronunciation: [bʁɛku]) is one of the Channel Islands, located off the west coast of Sark where they are now geographically detached from each other. Brecqhou is politically part of both Sark and the Bailiwick of Guernsey. It has been established in the courts that Brecqhou is a tenement of Sark. The Ministry of Justice, the department of the United Kingdom government with responsibility for the Channel Islands, considers Brecqhou part of Sark.