WARNER
V.
SAMPSON AND ANOTHER

[LORD DENNING. I have often wondered whether, in view of rule 17, the comprehensive denial was of any use; but it has been sanctioned by long practice.]

It is put in at the end to catch anything which may have slipped through the net on specific denials of specific allegations. Here the pleader caught what he never intended to catch; but this denial is not so strong as that in Kisch v. Hawes Brothers Ltd., 6 which set up a positive claim of possession.

The doctrine that denial of title leads to forfeiture originated in the medieval law and forms of pleading and tenure when a lord might have difficulty in proving his title to land, but there is no case, even in the old books, in which a denial per se without any setting up of an adverse title worked a forfeiture until the decision of Farwell J. in Kisch’s case.6

[ Scarman, for the landlord, referred the court to Dicksey v. Spencer. 7]

The fact that one has to go back to 1587 shows that this branch of the law of landlord and tenant is now a…